The Year of Tony Bennett is off on a great adventure! We are off to Monterey, California for a week to enjoy the sights and to celebrate your opinionated author’s birthday, but most of all, to attend the 56th Monterey Jazz Festival.

We made our first trip to Monterey Jazz Festival last year because Tony Bennett was performing there. We fell in love with the festival and are going back this year for the pure love of the music. There’s a great lineup this year: Diana Krall, Joe Lovano, Wayne Shorter, Gregory Porter, and the Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club. And much, much more. Tony Bennett connection: You’ll be hearing Joe Lovano on Tony Bennett’s next album, Cheek To Cheek, with Lady Gaga.

So, there won’t be any new songs of the day for a week, but there are plenty of old ones to take a look at. You can use the search box to search for a song by title or songwriter or by album. Or you can take a few minutes and take a look at our sister site, The Interactive Tony Bennett Discography. We’ve made a lot of progress, though there’s still plenty of work left.

See you in a week! We’ll be tanned, rested and ready for more songs.

In order to provide you with better service, The Year of Tony Bennett blog and The Interactive Tony Bennett Discography have changed to a more robust hosting environment. Over the long term, this will mean faster page loads and fewer headaches for your friendly blogmistress.

In the meantime, though, we did experience an outage for the blog. Our apologies. Normal programming will resume tomorrow, July 17.

One year old, that is. It simultaneously feels both long and shorter than a year.

First a few statistics:

• New postings every single day for 365 days
• 564 posts written
• 249 comments
• 24, 495 page views

Wonderful things have happened since we started:

• We got to see Tony four times in concert
• Tony released two new albums: Viva Duets and Bennett/Brubeck The White House Sessions Live 1962
• Tony Bennett has made the albums contained in the Complete Collection available on iTunes.
• We attended the Monterey Jazz Festival for the first time.  And rebooked for this year as well.
•  Some of the greatest Tony Bennett fans in the world have found us and read us nearly every day.
• We have made some wonderful new friends.
• We have collected some of the greatest search strings in the history of browsing, including
  • i just want to  hear tony bennett and nobody else right now (I have days like that often)
  • bewiced bwildered
• Discovered that doing a song of the day and a quote of the day, each and every day, remains a true joy and not a chore at all

So, what’s next for The Year of Tony Bennett?

• It seems that every year is The Year of Tony Bennett, so look for us for another year
• We have made an excellent start on a new sister site The Interactive Tony Bennett Discography. Feel free to poke around, but it is still under construction

Tony says in his new book, Life is a Gift that

if you follow your passion, you’ll never work a day in your life.

It’s true; I’ve learned that first-hand this year.

So, we’re back for another year, starting tomorrow. My most sincere gratitude to each and every reader. And, of course, our continuous thanks to Mr. Tony Bennett, who has given us an unmatched body of work that we all love so much.

 

 

 

This Sunday, while I was peacefully reading a book, The Year Of Tony Bennett reached a bit of a milestone: 20,000 hits to our site since we began last June.

I can’t begin to tell you how much fun I’m having working on this blog. But to realize that so many people have found us — and quite a few come back for more visits — is an honor. Thank you very, very much for your support.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again now: Tony Bennett fans are the best.

I’m working on a special Year Of Tony Bennett  website that I think you’ll all be interested in, which will have a beta launch this summer.

If you’re interested in testing and critiquing the new site, please send me an email for your invitation to the preview.