Photo credit: Paul Drinkwater/NBC
At his age he should be going downhill.
His voice should be shot. He should be sitting on a stool.
But his show last Saturday at Caesars Atlantic City’s Circus Maximus theater showed once again that science is at a loss when it comes to Tony Bennett.
Yes, he works out with a trainer three days a week, and plays tennis as often as he can. But the guy’s 83 years old in two weeks (August 3)! There really is no earthly explanation for the fact that he’s never sounded—or looked--better.
Maybe it’s the band. When he brought in Boston jazz guitarist Gray Sargent to fatten the sparing piano-bass-drums sound of his longtime backing group the Ralph Sharon Trio 12 years ago, it seemed like messing with a good thing. Looking back now, though, it was a stroke of genius: Sargent’s playing is simply breathtaking in its beauty and subtlety, giving Bennett’s spontaneous jazz-inflected vocalizing both a firm foundation and ample room to roam. And he’s now the veteran of the group, the legendary Sharon, who brought Bennett his signature “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” having since retired.
The newer players—Brooklyn classical/jazz piano virtuoso Lee Musiker, Count Basie’s favorite drummer Harold Jones and most recently-added upright bassist Marshall Wood--seem to have infused Bennett with youthful energy. At Caesars, he was stepping out way more than the spry little spin move he does when he sings the titletrack of his 1993 Fred Astaire album tribute “Steppin’ Out,” the video for which introduced him to the MTV generation and new career heights.
Here he actually threw in prolonged dance steps three times, at one point even shaking an imaginary pair of shakers. And as always, he kept moving gracefully about the stage, either to sing alongside his musicians or just to delight in their instrumental mastery.
Mostly, though, he maintained a typically relaxed pose, leaning against the piano, standing still with a hand in his pocket, or visualizing the emotions of the song lyrics with expressive gesturing. But all this, of course, is secondary stuff: Vocally, Tony Bennett is singing with such confidence, color, conviction, melodic invention and dynamic control that the 1,500 fans filling the Circus Maximus were standing or screaming or doing both every other song or so.
The gorgeous Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash standard “Speak Low” from the musical One Touch Of Venus is always a Bennett concert case in point. With Sargent virtually diagramming the song with understated chord progressions, Bennett conveyed the tune’s sense of lost time and love almost as if he were reciting a poem. As applause started to build he had to hold it back in order to murmur the final lines, cutting it off dramatically before dropping his pitch deep down for the final “speak low.”
His last album being last year's A Swingin' Christmas, there was no need to promote it in July. Hence he coud focus on favorites, including a brisk string of hits including "The Good Life," "Because Of You," "The Best Is Yet To Come," "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (the first song he ever recorded), "For Once In My Life" (he recorded it before Stevie Wonder), "The Shadow Of Your Smile" and "I Left My Heart In San Francisco."
You could sum it up with the title of his pivotal 1986 album The Art Of Excellence, or simply bask in the infectious joy of his singing.
"That's the real thing,” he said after delivering a knockout version of Duke Ellington's "In A Mellow Tone" (Ellington, incidentally, is the subject of a Bennett painting that he recently presented to the Smithsonian Museum). “It’s so nice to hear real music,” he added, then asked Jones to take four bows.
He had noted earlier that he's been singing professionally now for 60s years. He likes to say that if people let him, he'd like to do it another 60 years. Be that as it may, he appears to have a good many years of performing left--and at the very highest level.
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