Tony Bennett, Grammy-Winning Timeless Vocalist, Dies at 96

Recording artist Tony Bennett attends the 60th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Madison Square Garden in New York on Jan. 28, 2018. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for NARAS)

Tony Bennett, the timeless and illustrious crooner, whose career spanned eight decades, even garnering a number one album at age 85, died Friday morning. He was 96, just two weeks short of his birthday.

While his publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death to The Associated Press, noting he died in his hometown of New York, no specific cause of death was given. Bennett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016 but had continued to perform through 2021.

Perhaps best known for the 1962 classic “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” most of his recordings were made for Columbia Records, which signed him in 1950.

A Master Musical Interpreter

Bennett didn’t tell his own story when performing but rather interpreted a song and let the music speak for itself. He was known as a precise, talented, and accomplished interpreter of the Great American Songbook, having performed songs from the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern with vocal clarity and emotional tact.

“A tenor who sings like a baritone,” Bennett called himself. He was known as a master of interpreting ballads or lighting up an up-tempo number.

“I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems,” he told The Associated Press in 2006. “I think people … are touched if they hear something that’s sincere and honest and maybe has a little sense of humor. … I just like to make people feel good when I perform.”

He released more than 70 albums and garnered 19 competitive Grammys (with 36 total nominations) and was nominated for all of them but two after he reached his 60s. He was a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient in 2001, a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005, and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006. He also won two Emmy Awards.

While Bennet was often praised by his musical peers, it was Frank Sinatra who said in a 1965 Life magazine interview: “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. 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.”

Musical Influence Spanned Decades and Generations

Bennett continued to gain new fans and musical collaborators throughout his lifetime, crossing generational barriers. In his later years, he dueted on the standard “Body and Soul” with Amy Winehouse and released a full-length duet album with Diana Krall. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett had a number one album on the Billboard chart for “Cheek to Cheek” a duet he made with Lady Gaga. His last public appearance came with Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in August of 2021, two months before his last release with “Love for Sale.”

In “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” critic Will Friedwald spoke to Bennett’s longevity, “The idea that someone who sang the great show tunes of the Eisenhower era and earlier could compete with heavy metal and rap would have previously seemed fodder for one of those rapidly aging comics who opened for Sinatra.”

Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Astoria, Queens, New York on Aug. 3, 1926, to Italian immigrant parents, Bennett studied music and his other lifelong love, painting, at New York’s High School of Industrial Art. His vocal influences included Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, and later Frank Sinatra, as well as female singers Billie Holiday and Judy Garland.

He was drafted at 18 in 1944 and served in World War II’s European theater, doing combat infantry duty and liberating a German concentration camp. Later he would sing as a member of an Armed Forces band.

He is survived by his wife Susan Benedetto, his two sons, Danny and Dae Bennett, his daughters Johanna Bennett and Antonia Bennett, and nine grandchildren.