Dominick Reuters/AFP via Getty
Everyone loved Tony Bennett for the same reason he loved Louis Armstrong: “The minute you heard him, just the first two bars, everyone started smiling. He made everybody smile.”
There was a contagious joy in his voice, and a kind of enviable contentment, things they don’t teach in music school. He had all the things they do teach too, the phrasing and pitch and timing, but he never flaunted those skills. Listening to him sing, you might not think, what a great artist. But what you were likely to think, and what the singer wanted you to think, was, what a great song.
Tony Bennett’s voice made people smile for a very long time. Long enough, in fact, to get him into the Guinness Book of World Records just for longevity alone: “longest time between the release of an original recording and a re-recording of the same single by the same artist.” Almost 69 years passed before he revisited George and Ira Gershwin’s 1924 standard “Fascinating Rhythm.” Bennett originally recorded the song in 1949 and again in 2018 with Diana Krall. That wasn’t his only time at the Guinness rodeo. In 2014, he and Lady Gaga recorded Cheek to Cheek, an album released when Bennett was 88 years old, making him the oldest person to ever top the U.S. charts (he also set the record for longest lapse between top 20 albums in the U.K).