Master pop vocalist Tony Bennett, dies aged 96

The master pop vocalist Tony Bennett, whose professional career spanned eight decades with a No. 1 album at age 85, died at 96.

Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, but had continued to perform and record through 2021.

His peer Frank Sinatra called him the greatest popular singer in the world. A gifted and technically accomplished interpreter of the Great American Songbook, he may be best known for his signature 1962 hit “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”.

Though never strictly a jazz singer, he cut memorable sessions with Count Basie’s big band and the lyrical pianist Bill Evans.

Active as a recording artist from 1949, and one of the top pop performers in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Bennett saw his career surge in the 1990s, as well as memorably dueting on the standard “Body and Soul” with Amy Winehouse, a full-length duet album with Diana Krall and a pair of recordings with Lady Gaga.

His last public appearance came with Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in August 2021, two months before his last release, the Bennett-Gaga set “Love for Sale,” the sequel to their chart-topping 2014 collaboration “Cheek to Cheek.”

His “MTV Unplugged” album of 1994 — released when Bennett was 67 — won a Grammy as album of the year.

Winner of 18 Grammy Awards (with 36 total nominations), and a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient in 2001, Bennett also garnered two Emmy Awards. He was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.

He was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Astoria, Queens, New York in 1926 to Italian immigrant parents; his father was a grocer, his mother a seamstress. Raised in poverty, he began singing as a child, and studied music and his other lifelong love, painting, at New York’s High School of Industrial Art. His vocal influences included Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and, later, Frank Sinatra, as well as such female singers as Billie Holiday and Judy Garland.

Drafted at 18 in 1944, he served in World War II, doing combat infantry duty and liberating a German concentration camp. After the end of the conflict, he sang as a member of an Armed Forces band.

A landmark 1962 concert at Carnegie Hall with Sharon’s trio was followed in 1963 by the top 20 hits “I Wanna Be Around” and “The Good Life.”

He is survived by his wife Susan Benedetto, his two sons, Danny and Dae Bennett, his daughters Johanna Bennett and Antonia Bennett, and nine grandchildren.