The Year of Tony Bennett

An Appreciation of the Art and Music of Tony Bennett

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Remembering Judy Garland

The fabulous Judy Garland was born on June 10, 1922.

In his autobiography The Good Life, Tony Bennett remembers her:

The following year I got the chance to work with Judy Garland for the first time when she invited me to sing on her CBS television special. It was the beginning of a long and treasured friendship. Just like everyone in America, I’d fallen in love with Judy in 1939 when I saw her sing “Over the Rainbow# in The Wizard of Oz. She was always a fantastic entertainer, and like Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante, one of my major influences. Judy was only a few years old than me, but since she’d been a child star, I’d been her fan for my entire life.

I first met Judy in 1958 when she came backstage after my show at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and congratulated me on my performance. It was a thrill that never wore off. She was a true original, full of life and fun.

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The last time I saw her was in London in April, 1969, when I was there doing a TV special with Count Basie. After the show, she came backstage to see me, and the last thing she said to me was, “You’re pretty good!” She died two months later. I’ve never gotten over it. She was so kind, so talented, such a dear friend. When I look back, it’s hard to believe that most of the time she was just trying to hold on for dear life.

We remember Judy Garland today with this video of Tony and Judy singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

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God Is Love

Tony Bennett has written movingly about his long friendship with Duke Ellington.

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They had the opportunity to work together several times. They toured together for a while; Tony insisted that Duke Ellington and his orchestra get top billing (just as he did with his performances with Count Basie). I’m sure I’m not the only one who wishes there had been recordings of those concerts.

Ellington famously supported Tony Bennett at one of his darker moments, after he had separated from his wife Patricia and was spending Christmas alone in a hotel room in New York. Near midnight, Bennett heard music and thought perhaps he’d left the radio on. Instead, he found a choir outside his hotel room singing On A Clear Day, You Can See Forever. Ellington had done one of his Sacred Concerts that evening and had heard that Bennett was having a rough time and so he sent his choir over to cheer him up. Bennett says in his autobiography, The Good Life:

It was his Christmas present to me, the most beautiful I have ever received. It was a moment that made me believe in people, no matter how difficult things might become for me.

Ellington and Bennett had solid and supportive friendship that lasted for many years, Bennett wrote about their friendship in his book Life is a Gift:

Duke and I got to know each other well through playing a lot of gigs together, and eventually he embraced my whole family. He said that my mom was one of the most spiritual people he’d ever met, and his sister became close with mine. It was what he would call a “proper involvement”–a warm friendship based on mutual respect.

Tony Bennett honored that friendship with his portrait of Duke Ellington called God Is Love.  It shows Duke with beautiful pink roses in the background, as over the years, each time that Duke would write a new song, he would send roses to Tony Bennett. Bennett has said many times that this portrait is his favorite of the paintings he’s done.

Tony Bennett Ellington Painting

 

On April 29, 2009, on Ellington’s 110th birthday, Bennett donated this portrait to the Smithsonian Museum, where it hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Ellington’s granddaughter  Mercedes Ellington said in a letter:

Particularly heartwarming for me … is the superb tribute that you have succeeded in creating on this date for both my grandfather and for a special friend, Tony Bennett. Tony has been a dear and close friend of ours, not only during my grandfather’s lifetime, but ever since. A consummate artist, he is one of the few whom Duke Ellington regarded as ‘beyond category.’ Words fail to express how delighted we are that the friendship and mutual admiration between Duke Ellington and Tony Bennett should be enshrined and remembered by the installation of Tony’s portrait of the The Duke in the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.

Proper involvement indeed.

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Duke Ellington Will Always Be With Us

Even though I’ve been writing about Duke Ellington all week, I know that I’ve only scratched the very top surface on the significance and importance of Duke Ellington to American music. And though Ellington is widely known as one of the giants of jazz, he always said that music he played was American music.

Duke Ellington had it all. In addition to his gifts as a songwriter, he was a terrific pianist and bandleader. He was also a very good businessman;  he kept his orchestra going without a break for over fifty years, always making payroll. Considering the challenges of the Great Depression and the changing (and sometimes fickle) tastes of the public, keeping it going all those years was quite an accomplishment.

As a songwriter, Ellington, along with Strayhorn, is responsible for many of the great songs in the American Songbook. Look at these songs and records inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame:

  • “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”
  • “Cocktails for Two”
  • Ellington at Newport
  • “Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue”
  • Far East Suite
  • Black, Brown and Beige
  • “Black and Tan Fantasy”
  • “Take The A Train”
  • “Mood Indigo”

And those are only the tip of iceberg — add on Sophisticated Lady, (In My) Solitude, Caravan, Prelude to a Kiss and many more songs that we have been singing for generations and will sing for generations to come.

But we can not ignore his contributions to classical music as well. His long form pieces showcased not only his sophistication as songwriter, but displayed a solid understanding of the classical form.  The English composer Percy Grainger said “the three greatest composers who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington.”

Duke Ellington wrote his first song nearly one hundred years ago, at the age of 15, while working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe in Washington, DC. We have been singing, dancing to and listening to his music for nearly a century and I have no doubt that we will be doing the same in the next century and centuries to follow as well.

We leave you today with one of very favorite Ellington instrumental recordings: Ellington and John Coltrane In A Sentimental Mood.

In A Sentimental Mood

Listen to In A Sentimental Mood on Spotify. Song · Duke Ellington, John Coltrane · 1963

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Duke Ellington Post-Newport

The outstanding success  at Newport helped revive Duke Ellington’s career, including a new recording contract with Columbia. That same summer, he broke another barrier by being the first jazz musician featured on the cover of Time Magazine.

Duke Ellington - Time Magazine

Ellington and the Orchestra were once again in demand for live performances, including an invitation to the first Monterey Jazz Festival and a very successful European tour.

At this same time, Ellington became heavily involved in his more serious composition work that was predominant in the last part of his career.  Two projects that brought him and Billy Strayhorn great acclaim were their scores for the films Anatomy of a Murder (1959, directed by Otto Preminger, which won two Grammy Awards for composition, including Best Soundtrack Album) and Paris Blues (1961).  Other significant serious works from Ellington and Strayhorn included The Far East Suite and Such Sweet Thunder.

But the most important of these compositions were his three Sacred Concerts in 1965, 1968 and 1973. In these concerts, Ellington and Strayhorn chose to blend Christian liturgy with jazz.  The first Sacred Concert was held at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and repeated again at St. John the Divine in New York in December, 1965.  Critic Richard Ginell (allmusic.com) gave the recording of the concert five stars and said:

… the concert taps into Ellington’s roots in showbiz and African-American culture as well as his evidently deep religious faith, throwing it all together in the spirit of universality and sealing everything with the stamps of his musical signatures.

Billy Strayhorn died much too young, at the age of 51 in Mary,  1967 from cancer. Even in last days, he was still writing songs. His final composition, obviously influenced by his hospitalization, was called Blood Count.  Several months after his death, Ellington released a memorial album to Strayhorn entitled …And His Mother Called Him Bill, which won the 1968 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Large Group.

By the time of the third Sacred Concert, named The Majesty of God, in 1973, Ellington knew that his health was failing. He died from lung cancer and pneumonia on May 24, 1974, just a month after his 75th birthday. His funeral was held at St. John the Divine in New York and was attended by 12,000 people. He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, New York.

Tomorrow … The Influence of Duke Ellington Continues To Be Felt

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Duke Ellington in the 1950s

Welcome back to our exploration of the musical career of the great Duke Ellington.

In a story that is not unfamiliar to fans of Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington found his style of music falling out of favor at beginning of the 1950s. In 1951, he saw the departure of some of his most valuable musicians from his orchestra, including Sonny Greer and Johnny Hodges. Even though he was able to keep the orchestra together, times were tough and the once-popular Ellington found himself booking one-night stands to keep going. Though he found some success in the reissues of earlier material on the “new” long-playing record albums, by 1955 the great Duke Ellington found himself without a record contract and playing background music for an ice  show in Flushing.

The summer of 1956 found Ellington invited by George Wein to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival. What happened on the evening of July 7, 1956 was a legendary performance that is still being talked about today. Duke and his orchestra had played a nicely received set, including a special composition created specifically for the festival. As the night drew towards an end — local statutes required that the music be ended by midnight — Duke Ellington announced that their next number would be an old number from 1937: Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with an “interval” by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves.

What followed was, to many (including this author), the greatest live jazz performance ever recorded. The Gonsalves interval ran for 27 choruses of virtuoso playing: 14 minutes of incredible, perfect jazz. George Avakian wrote these liner notes for the record of this performance:

Throughout the performance there were frequent bursts of wild dancing and literally acres of people stood on their chairs, cheering and clapping. There were 7,000 people there and by halfway through his solo it had become an enormous single living organism, reacting in waves like huge ripples to the music played before it.

From this concert came his most successful album ever, Ellington at Newport. Originally a single LP, there was a double-CD re-release in 1999 that also included stage announcements and other material. In fact, the track after Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue is labeled Announcements, Pandemonium (Live).

And here is that legendary performance:
http://open.spotify.com/track/6Rwf6zMFGJsPkg5G3aJqYx