NEW YORK — Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and knack for creating new standards such asgraced a decadeslong career that brought him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday. He was 96, just two weeks short of his birthday.
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. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 charthis duets project with Lady Gaga. 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.
Ironically, his most famous contribution came through two unknowns, George Cory and Douglass Cross, who in the early ‘60s provided Bennett with his signature song at a time his career was in a lull. They gave Bennett’s musical director, pianist Ralph Sharon, some sheet music that he stuck in a dresser drawer and forgot about until he was packing for a tour that included a stop in San Francisco.
That led to an offer in 1994 to do an episode of “MTV Unplugged” with special guests Elvis Costello and k.d. lang. The evening’s performance resulted in the album, “Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged,” which won two Grammys, including album of the year. The school is not far from the birthplace of the man who was once Anthony Dominick Benedetto. His father was an Italian immigrant who inspired his love of singing, but he died when Anthony was 10. 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.