Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.
“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”
Tony Bennett, Jazzy Crooner of the American Songbook, Dead at 96 – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Daniel Arkin in NBC News:
In the 1950s, Tony Bennett watched with dismay as Black musicians like Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington were denied admission to concert hall dining rooms and hotels. The injustice he witnessed infuriated the young singer.
“I’d never been politically inclined, but these things went beyond politics,” Bennett wrote in “The Good Life,” his 1998 autobiography. “Nate and Duke were geniuses, brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music it’s ever heard, and yet they were treated like second-class citizens. The whole situation enraged me.”
That’s why, when the artist and activist Harry Belafonte called up Bennett and asked him to join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Bennett accepted without hesitation. He flew to Alabama and linked arms with his allies in the fight for justice.
Tony Bennett, enraged by racism, championed civil rights alongside MLK (nbcnews.com)
Donald Liebenson in Vanity Fair
In 2014, Cheek to Cheek, a collection of standards that paired Bennett and Lady Gaga, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 pop and rock chart. The subsequent PBS special was nominated for an Emmy. In his ninth decade, Bennett sold a reported 10 million albums.
Bennett, to paraphrase the title of his idol Frank Sinatra’s own signature song, did it his way. When he appeared on MTV Unplugged, guest artists such as k.d. lang and Elvis Costello dueted on songs from Bennett’s vast repertoire of standards, and not the other way around. He played intimate clubs and the finest concert halls rather than impersonal stadiums.
It was a testament to his cross-generational appeal that he appeared on American Idol, voiced himself on The Simpsons, made a self-deprecating cameo opposite a Bennett-impersonating Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live and guested on The Howard Stern Show and Late Night with David Letterman.
Tony Bennett Dead at 96 | Vanity Fair