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The Year of Tony Bennett

An Appreciation of the Art and Music of Tony Bennett

November 1, 2017 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Musical Collaborator of the Month: k.d. lang

The Year of Tony Bennett is happy to announce the musical collaborator of the month as k.d. lang. Today is also her birthday, so please join me in wishing her a very happy birthday.

I became a Tony Bennett fan through being a k.d. lang fan. I had all of her great early albums: Angel With a Lariat, Absolute Torch and Twang, Ingenue and Drag to just name a few.

This is a fun song from her early days. I was lot younger then and could actually dance to this.

Then in 2002 came A Wonderful World with Tony Bennett and, well, you know what happened next.

But I knew in 1990 that she was a great jazz singer with the release of Red Hot + Blue, an album of Cole Porter songs with covers by artists from the The Neville Brothers to Tom Waits to Lisa Stansfield (whose “Down In The Depths” haunts me to this day) to U2 to k.d. lang who sang “So In Love,” all to raise money to fight AIDs. She made this memorable video of a woman caring for her lover who has AIDs.

And then in 1992 came “Constant Craving.”

So, yes, I’m a huge fan of hers. Her work with Tony Bennett has been breathtaking. I’ll be featuring the songs from their 2002 album A Wonderful World. But before that was her duet with Tony on Playin’ With My Friends in 2001. She has sung on both of Tony’s duets albums. We have a lot of great music to choose from this month.

Happy birthday, k.d. lang. And thanks for all the great music.

Filed Under: Collaborator of the Month Tagged With: Happy Birthday to k.d. lang, k d lang

September 30, 2017 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Musical Collaborator of the Month: Lady Gaga

The Year of Tony Bennett is proud to announce that Lady Gaga is the musical collaborator of the month: October 2017.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on March 28, 1986, in Manhattan, New York to a Catholic family with Italian and French Canadian roots. Her parents are Cynthia Louise (née Bissett) and internet entrepreneur Joseph Germanotta. Brought up in the affluent Upper West Side of Manhattan, she says that her parents came from lower-class families and worked hard for everything. From age 11, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private, all-girls Roman Catholic school.

Gaga began to play the piano at the age of four, wrote her first piano ballad at 13, and began playing at open mic nights a year later. At her high school, she played the lead roles of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; she also studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for ten years. In 2003, at age 17, Gaga gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21)—a music school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and lived in a NYU dorm. At NYU, she studied music and improved her songwriting skills by studying art, religion, social issues and politics. During her second semester of her sophomore year in 2005, she withdrew to focus on her music career.

She grew rapidly in the music industry and released a number of popular songs, all the while building her brand and learning the music business. This work culminated in the release in 2011 of her second album Born This Way, which sold over a million copies in its first week.

In 2011, she recorded her first song with Tony Bennett: “The Lady is a Tramp” from Duets II. The two enjoyed working together so much that they did an entire album together: Cheek to Cheek, released in 2014.

Lady Gaga is one of the best-selling musical artists of all time; she also continues to grow artistically and musically. She has won three Brit awards, six Grammys and awards from the Songwriters Hall of Fame and many other recognitions.

She is also well-known for her philanthropic work and social activism. She founded the Born This Way Foundation, which focuses on promoting young empowerment and combatting bullying. She also an outspoken support of LGBT rights.

Filed Under: Collaborator of the Month Tagged With: Lady Gaga, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta

August 31, 2017 By Suzanne 2 Comments

Musical Collaborator of the Month: Ralph Sharon

The Year of Tony Bennett is proud to recognize Ralph Sharon as the musical collaborator the month for September 2017.

Ralph Sharon was born in London on September 23, 1923. He emigrated to the United States in 1954 and in 1958, became Tony Bennett’s pianist and musical director.

I’ll be sharing more about Mr. Sharon over this month. But today I’ll let Mr. Bennett speak, in his wonderful memory of Ralph in Jazz Times.

Tony Bennett Remembers Ralph Sharon – JazzTimes

Each year, in our March issue, we ask prominent musicians to pay tribute to fellow artists who have passed in the previous year. This piece appeared in the March 2016 edition of JazzTimes. As with other artists, there’s always one song that’s bigger than any other song, and for me that was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Filed Under: About His Collaborators, Collaborator of the Month Tagged With: Ralph Sharon

July 31, 2017 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Musical Collaborator of the Month: Count Basie

The musical collaborator of the month for August 2017 is Count Basie.

William James Bailey was born in Red Bank, New Jersey on August 21, 1904. Both of his parents were musically inclined: his father played the mellophone and his mother played piano. His mother gave young Bill his first piano lessons. Later on, she took in laundry and baked cakes to help pay for his more advanced piano lessons.

While still in his early teens, Bill spent his free time at the Palace Theater in Red Bank, where doing some chores got him free admission to performances. He was soon playing piano for various live acts and silent movies.

By 1919, Bill Basie was playing for various groups around Red Bank and began to build a name for himself. In 1920, he moved to Harlem and ran into an old Red Bank friend, Sonny Greer, who was then playing for Duke Ellington’s band, The Washingtonians. Through Greer and his personality, he met many of the great Harlem musicians, such as Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson. He was able to pick up work touring, which carried him to other notable jazz towns: Kansas City, New Orleans and Chicago.

In 1929, he joined Bennie Moten’s band, based in Kansas City, as its pianist and also did some arrangements for the group. At one point, the band voted Moten out and Basie took over, though only for a few months. He then formed his own band, using many of the Moten musicians as well as tenor saxophonist Lester Young. It was during that time he improvised what would become one of his most popular songs: “One O’Clock Jump.”

Basie took his band to Chicago, where he had recording session attended by producer John Hammond who said that it was “the only perfect, completely perfect recording session I’ve ever had anything to do with.” They were also some of Lester Young’s earliest recordings. It was while he was playing in Chicago that folks started calling him Count Basie.

Basie took his band to New York in 1937 and they were soon booked at the Roseland Ballroom. Though they still had some maturing ahead of them, Hammond continued to advise and encourage the band. Hammond also introduced the band to Billie Holiday, who did sing with the Basie band in some live performances, but couldn’t record with him due to contractual obligations. This was when Holiday met Lester Young — a musical match made in heaven.

With their New York exposure and the popularity of radio concerts, the band grew more and more well-known, resulting in Basie signing with the William Morris Agency. His big band last well throughout the 1940s even as other big bands began to falter.

After the end of World War II, Basie disbanded the big band and performed in smaller combos and, occasionally, in orchestras. Basie had an exquisite ear for the music the public wanted; he was able to add a dash of rock ‘n roll, rhythm and blues and newer jazz motifs such as bebop. His bebop credentials lead to him sharing the stage at Birdland with jazz greats including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Pretty soon, he was able to build another band, and was again popular in New York and in Europe. Some of his great albums followed, such as Count Basie at Newport. He appeared on television programs, played for one of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural balls, and even joined forces with Duke Ellington for an album. In 1958, he became the first African-American male to win a Grammy Award.

Even though the popularity of the big bands had begun to seriously wane, he kept his band active into the 1980s, including a terrific scene at the end of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

Bill “Count” Basie died in Hollywood, Florida on April 26, 1984.

Filed Under: Collaborator of the Month Tagged With: Bill Basie, Count Basie

June 30, 2017 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Musical Collaborator of the Month: Mitch Miller

The musical collaborator of the month for July 2017 is producer Mitch Miller.

Mitchell William Miller was born on July 4, 1911 and died at the age of 99 on July 31, 2010.

As a child, I can remember watching Sing Along With Mitch on television and I’m guessing a fair number of the readers of the blog remember that as well. Miller was a classically trained oboist, who started work in the record business in 1940 at Mercury Records in their classical music division. In 1950, he joined Columbia where he hired two new young artists: Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett.

I think many of us, myself included, have a love-hate viewpoint towards Mitch. On the one hand, he had the good sense to sign Tony Bennett to the label, sight-unseen, based on Bennett’s demo recording of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” On the other hand, though, he and Bennett had well-known disagreements about the kinds of songs Miller wanted him to record.

This month, we’ll be looking at some of these earl

Filed Under: Collaborator of the Month Tagged With: Mitch Miller

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