And he took to heart the advice of his vocal coach, Miriam Spier. He learned the more intimate Bel Canto vocal technique which helped him sustain and extend the expressive range of his voice. His acting lessons helped him develop his phrasing and learn how to tell a story. James Infirmary.”īennett took advantage of the GI Bill to attend the American Theater Wing, which later became The Actors Studio. His earliest recording is a 1946 air check from Armed Forces Radio of the blues “St. A combat infantryman during World War II, he served as a librarian for the Armed Forces Network after the war and sang with an army big band in occupied Germany. The teenager got a job as a copy boy for the AP, performed as a singing waiter and competed in amateur shows. He studied commercial art in high school, but had to drop out to help support his family. “I saw her working and every once in a while she’d take a dress and throw it over her shoulder and she’d say, ‘Don’t have me work on a bad dress. “We were very impoverished,” Bennett said in a 2016 AP interview. Bennett credited his mother, Anna, with teaching him a valuable lesson as he watched her working at home, supporting her three children as a seamstress doing piecework after his father died. His father was an Italian immigrant who inspired his love of singing, but he died when Anthony was 10. The school is not far from the birthplace of the man who was once Anthony Dominick Benedetto. “Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. “No country has given the world such great music,” Bennett said in a 2015 interview with Downbeat Magazine. His final album, the 2021 release “Love for Sale,” featured duets with Lady Gaga on the title track, “Night and Day” and other Porter songs.įor Bennett, one of the few performers to move easily between pop and jazz, such collaborations were part of his crusade to expose new audiences to what he called the Great American Songbook. His rapport with Winehouse was captured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Amy,” which showed Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure young singer through a performance of “Body and Soul.” Three years earlier, he topped the charts with “Duets II,” featuring such contemporary stars as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, in her last studio recording. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for “Cheek to Cheek,” his duets project with Lady Gaga. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a No. He not only survived the rise of rock music but endured so long and so well that he gained new fans and collaborators, some young enough to be his grandchildren.
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