Celebrating Tony Bennett's Centenary

11 videos of the singer at his emotional, most-moving best

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Tony Bennett’s birth, on Aug. 3, 1926. The pop-jazz singer died on July 21, 2023, following a seven-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. [Photo of Tony Bennett in Central Park]

I interviewed Tony five times for the Wall Street Journal, four times in his art studio on Central Park South and once by phone. Tony, of course, was a huge admirer of jazz, viewing it as America’s most pure form of music.

About 10 years ago, Tony asked me to give a talk at Frank Sinatra High School, which he founded in Astoria, Queens in 2001. I gladly obliged and had a fun time.

Tony also could be very funny, adding a touch of street if he had to. When I told him some years ago that in 2010 I had sung I Left My Heart in San Francisco in the Venetian Room of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where he had first sung the song in 1961, he was momentarily puzzled.

I told him the space was about to be renovated, the lights were off and no one was in there when I slipped in and got up on the purple-lit stage and sang the introduction (“The loveliness of Paris…”). Tony flashed that smile and said, “How’d that go for you?” I told him I got a “sanding ovation,” that there was a sander among the construction equipment in the back. He had a good laugh.

A couple of years before the pandemic, he asked me to interview him at the Village Vanguard one winter afternoon for a Dutch documentary; I was off-camera facing him on a director’s chair. I don’t know whatever happened to that project, but when Tony tried to pay me, I waved him off. He sent me a signed print of his painting of the Golden Gate Bridge as a thanks.

What made Tony special was his powerful street-singer voice, his enthusiasm for performing, his ability to reduce a massive concert hall to a club, his admiration of jazz and improvisation at the highest levels and his signature endings on ballads that built to a crescendo. And his kindness.

So today, in celebration of Tony’s 100th, I’ve selected 11 of my favorite performances that are sure to move you:

Here’s Tony at 25, singing Because of You on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1951…

Here’s Tony in June 1958 on the Steve Allen Show singing Pennies From Heaven (move the time bar to 1:47) in a rare outdoor shoot….

Here’s Tony in 1963 recording So Long, Big Time in the studio, with Harold Arlen, the composer, conducting…

Here’s Tony at his absolute peak singing If I Ruled the World on the Ed Sullivan Show in March 1965, with the Woody Herman Orchestra featuring Bobby Hackett on cornet…

From the same show, here’s Who Can I Turn To…

Here’s Tony singing The Shadow of Your Smile on TV’s 38th Academy Awards presentation in 1966 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles, honoring songs released in 1965. It won an Oscar for best original song…

Here’s For Once in My Life on the Ed Sullivan Show in November 1967...

Here’s Yesterday I Heard the Rain, with music by Armando Manzanero and English lyrics by Gene Lees, from the album of the same name arranged by Torrie Zito in 1968…

Here’s Tony in London singing The End of a Love Affair, arranged by Robert Farnon for the album The Good Things in Life, in 1972, with John Bunch on piano…

Here’s Tony in the studio in 1986, with Henry Mancini conducting Life in a Looking Glass from the 1987 film That’s Life!, with the great Chuck Findley on flugelhorn…

And finally, here’s Tony singing The Way You Look Tonight, accompanied by the magnificent Bill Charlap on piano, in 2015…