Tony Bennett's Just Getting Started: Joyful, Thankful

Tony Bennett's tributes to his mentors have been piling up in my music library since the 1990s - the singer's recordings of music associated with Fred Astaire, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and his collaborations with Bill Evans and Lady Gaga.

Bennett's Thanks for Others

No surprise, tributes to those musicians are among those collected in Just Getting Started. Written with NPR host Scott Simon, the book is Bennett's memoir, 91 years ingeniously meted out among 42 appreciative profiles of musicians, actors, writers, and family, with a lesson he learned from each person (or place -- his grandparents' home in "rural" Queens, for instance).

But Bennett springs some surprises in his memoir. (Tony Bennett with Scott Simon.  Just Getting Started.  Harper Collins. Kindle edition, November 2016.)

His long appreciation of Frank Sinatra alludes to "another side of his character" that Bennett knew only through gossip in the press.  To Bennett, Sinatra was kind and courteous, bestowing invitations and one heckuva compliment that catapulted Bennett from being just one of many crooners to being Sinatra's heir apparent: "For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business.  He excites me when I watch him.  He moves me.  He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more" (quoted from Life magazine, April 23, 1965).

Sinatra makes a surprising appearance in a chapter about Judy Garland.  A little woman under five feet tall, a child star who'd never had a childhood, Garland's appeal was due to her genuine vulnerability, Bennett says, even more than it was due to her vocal power and interpretive skills.  "When she came out onstage -- small as a wounded bird but with that huge, gorgeous voice that reached the back of the house -- everyone wanted to take care of her."  Bennett tells about taking an urgent call from Garland just before he went onstage in London.  She was in London, too, and pleading for Bennett's help, because a man she had invited to her hotel room was beating her up.  Bennett tells us, "Some people would have called the cops.  I went one better: I called Frank Sinatra."  After his set, Bennett checked in with Garland, who laughed, "I wanted help, but this is ridiculous! ...There are nine hundred cops downstairs and five lawyers in my room."


Bennett includes a chapter on Abraham Lincoln, because, "Hasn't every American been influenced by Abraham Lincoln?"  Bennett, whose paintings of landscapes and still life arrangements conclude every chapter of the book, sees "the very face of America" in photos of Lincoln.  Bennett applies his singer's sensibility to the Gettysburg Address, analyzing it as he would a song.  "[Lincoln] begins with a phrase that draws you in and puts what follows into a rolling tide of a story. He sets up a rhythm and cadence... on his way to a shattering end."

Two chapters concern substance abuse that killed two of his collaborators.  "I loved Bill," Bennett tells us about the pianist Bill Evans, with whom he recorded the two albums he's most proud of in the mid-1970s. "A lot of people in show business (including me, I have to confess) used cocaine during that time, and we all kind of pretended with each other that it wasn't a problem... that drugs were just what creative people used to open their imagination...."  Evans's death by hepatitis, due ultimately to the needles he used for his addictions, was "an alarm bell" that scared Bennett straight.  He writes ecstatically of getting to know the young singer Amy Winehouse when they recorded "Body and Soul" for his Duets album, and tells how he wept when she died of alcohol poisoning.  He gives us good reasons why a word from him would have probably made no difference to her addiction, but still rues the fact that "I said nothing on the day that I might have had a chance."

Silent film pioneer Charlie Chaplin gets a long biographical chapter in this singer's book, but not because Chaplin sent Bennett a rare gift as thanks for his recording of Chaplin's song "Smile."  It's because Bennett, strolling past Chaplin's home on Lake Geneva, hesitated "the better part of an hour" to knock on the door. "I guess I wondered how he would receive an uninvited visitor from the United States.  I guess I worried that he wouldn't recognize my name at first... I guess I just didn't want to disturb a great artist...."  So they never met. Bennett's missed opportunity to express his gratitude is a singular moment of regret.

My Thanks for Bennett

I'll take that cue from Bennett to express my thanks to him for his two albums with Bill Evans.  "You couldn't give them away at the time," he writes, and it's true.  In 1979, I was in New York to see Sweeney Todd.  I found the LPs at Colony Records on Broadway, a store famous for having music that one could find nowhere else.

I fancied myself a singing actor, an apprentice saloon singer, an aspiring pianist-composer.  I'd read with interest an article about Bennett that started, "The most underrated singer in America today is Tony Bennett.  Tony Bennett?! "  With that intro, the reporter acknowledged that Bennett was a dinosaur, repudiated by Boomers.  Compared to rock, folk, and soul, the polished American standards in Bennett's songbook were considered inauthentic.  But Bennett told this reporter the same thing that his mother tells him in the first chapter of his memoir, that he would stick to quality.  So Bennett had lost his contract at Columbia, and was gambling on his own recording company, called Improv.

In the article, Bennett claimed to have a new song written for him by Stevie Wonder.  He told the author something that doesn't show up in the memoir, how he would sing along with recordings of jazz pianists, "to learn their phrasing." I was intrigued.

Then I was disappointed.  Bennett's second album with Evans, Together Again, was the first one I heard.  His voice seemed gravelly, he strained for high notes, his New York accent distorted some syllables.  I was mystified by Evans' piano playing - understated, not flashy.  I wanted bass and drums, some "production values."  My friend Matt Hutchinson winced. "You can tell he has a good voice," Matt said, "but he's not using it, you know what I mean?"  I did.

But I'd had a similar experience listening to Cleo Laine, so I gave Bennett another listen.

What we hear on the album is exactly what my generation said we wanted, authenticity.  Bennett remembers,

It was one of the most intense musical experiences of my life.  I'd suggest a tune, and Bill would say, "Good, let's try that."  We'd find a key, than work it out note by note.  No take -- no measure -- was the same as the next.  Bill was always changing, jamming, winging it, and inviting me to come along.

You'd think you'd know a song...but Bill would turn it over, note by note, phrase by phrase.  It was like setting off on great expedition and never knowing what was around the next turn - but you couldn't wait to find out.

That joy in discovery, almost childlike excitement, comes across in Bennett's first song in the set, "Lucky to Be Me," music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.  To this day, that's the song that comes to mind when I'm happiest, and I hear Bennett and Evans when I sing it. The next song, lyrics by the same Comden and Green, with music by Jule Styne, is "Make Someone Happy," made a little sad, tinged by regret, in this performance.

Sometimes Bennett belted, sometimes he whispered.  I learned to hear expressiveness in the gravelly voice, energy in the reach for the high note, and color in the bend of a syllable. 

Just Thanks

Only once, in his appreciation of Duke Ellington, does Bennett speak of faith. Ellington told him that the Bible was the only book he ever read cover-to-cover, and the only one anyone needs to read.  Ellington drew the conclusion, "God is love."

It's synchronicity that, midway through reading Tony Bennett's tribute to his mentors Just Getting Started, I happened to hear a discussion of songs in the Bible, collected as the Psalms. The episode was called "Anatomy of Gratitude" for Krista Tippet's program On Being, and a monk Bennett's age, 93, discussed with her how the Psalms cover the full range of human emotions, yet often "choose" to be grateful.  "You can't be grateful for everything that happens," said her guest David Steindl-rast, "but you can be grateful for every moment."

There's pain in this book.  Bennett tells of unrelenting cold and horror, of arbitrary death in war -- and the unexpected gift of Bob Hope's USO performance.  He writes earnestly of Civil Rights struggles, and he records some indignities suffered by people he revered -- as when a white man mistook Count Basie for a valet after their Carnegie Hall triumph, and when Duke Ellington could not join Bennett in the club where both of them had just performed.  He tells us how, like every son, he saw his dad as strongest  man in the world, but how illness killed his dad when Tony was ten.

But Bennett chooses to be grateful: for others' generosity, for their wisdom, for Bennett's own opportunities, for his successes, for the principles to which he held during the lean years.

Thank you, Tony Bennett.