Tony Bennett - Biography

Last Editor: tarhands88				Tony Bennett Biography -   Name : Tony Bennett Date of birth : 3 August 1926 Place of birth : Astoria, New York, USA Birth name : Anthony Dominick Benedetto

Tony Bennett Trivia -

Well known for hit ballads like "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" (a come back hit released in 1962), and "Rags to Riches" (released in 1954). Was a close friend of Frank Sinatra. Bob Hope suggested Tony change his stage name from "Joe Bari" to "Tony Bennett." Received the Pied Piper lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. [20 May 2002] Has founded The Frank Sinatra Highschool of Performing Arts in Queens, New York. Named after his long time friend Frank Sinatra. [2001] Inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997. He is an accomplished painter with an art studio in New York City, USA. Recipient of the 2005 Kennedy Center Honors. Other recipients were Robert Redford, Tina Turner, Suzanne Farrell, and Julie Harris.

Tony Bennett Detailed Biography -

Tony Bennett (born August 3, 1926) is an American popular music, standards, and jazz singer who is widely considered to be one of the best interpretive singers in these genres. After having achieved artistic and commercial success in the 1950s and early 1960s, his career suffered an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era. However, Bennett staged a remarkable comeback in the late 1980s and 1990s, expanding his audience to a younger generation while keeping his musical style intact. He remains a popular and critically praised recording artist and concert performer in the 2000s. Tony Bennett is also a serious and accomplished painter. Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born in Astoria, Queens in New York City. (Though some records show that the first name on his birth certificate is Antonio.) His father was a grocer and his mother a seamstress. He grew up listening to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, and jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Joe Venuti. An uncle was a tap dancer in vaudeville, giving him an early window into show business. By age 10 the young Benedetto was already singing, performing at the opening of the Triborough Bridge. He attended New York's High School of Industrial Arts where he studied music and painting (an interest he would always return to as an adult), but dropped out at age 16 to help support his family. He then set his sights on a professional singing career, performing as a singing waiter in several Queens Italian restaurants. Warned by Miller not to imitate Frank Sinatra (who was just then leaving Columbia), Bennett began his career as a crooner singing commercial pop tunes. His first big hit was "Because of You", a ballad produced by Miller with a lush orchestral arrangement from Percy Faith. It started out gaining popularity on jukeboxes, then reached #1 on the pop charts in 1951 and stayed there for 10 weeks, selling over a million copies. This was followed to the top later that year by a similarly-styled rendition of Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart", which helped introduce Williams and country music in general to a wider, more national audience. The Miller and Faith tandem continued to work on all of Bennett's early hits. Bennett's recording of "Blue Velvet" was also very popular and attracted screaming teenage fans at concerts in the famed Paramount Theatre in New York (Bennett did 7 shows a day, starting at 10:30 a.m.) and elsewhere. In 1952 Bennett married Ohio art student and jazz fan Patricia Beech, whom he had met the previous year after a nightclub performance in Cleveland. Two thousand female fans dressed in black gathered outside the ceremony at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral in mock mourning. Bennett and Beech would have two sons, D'Andrea (Danny) and Daegal (Dae). A third #1 came in 1953 with "Rags to Riches". Unlike Bennett's other early hits, this was an up-tempo big band number with a bold, brassy sound and a double tango in the instrumental break; it topped the charts for eight weeks. Later that year Bennett began singing show tunes to make up for a New York newspaper strike; "Stranger in Paradise" from the Broadway show Kismet reached the top, as well as being a #1 hit in the United Kingdom and starting Bennett's career as an international artist. Once the rock and roll era began in 1955, the dynamic of the music industry changed and it became harder for existing pop singers to do as well commercially. Nevertheless Bennett continued to enjoy success, placing 8 songs in the Billboard Top 40 during the latter part of the 1950s, with "In the Middle of an Island" reaching the highest at #9 in 1957. In 1956 Bennett hosted the television variety show The Tony Bennett Show as a summer replacement for The Perry Como Show.