The Year of Tony Bennett

The whole movie-making process, inspired me to make my next and all-time favorite record, The Movie Song Album.

So many of the songs being written for films were great and I thought it would be fantastic to record a whole collection of them—and even better if I could get all the original composers to conduct. I had a lot of old friends, composers, and orchestrators like Neal Hefti and Quincy Jones whose work I loved, and who were now breaking into movie writing. So I got ahold of them.

After hearing about the project, a music publisher contacted my producer Ernie Altschuler with a new song by Johnny Mandel called “The Shadow of Your Smile,” from a film called The Sandpiper. I loved “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and also “Emily” which Johnny had already written for a James Garner—Julie Andrews comedy called The Americanization of Emily, so I enlisted him as my overall musical director on the album.

Tony Bennett