I played with Tony just once, when he sang a set with Illinois Jacquet's big band at the Blue Note in Manhattan. At the end of the set, the audience, naturally, demanded "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". They weren't chanting it or anything, but they knew, we knew, and, above all, Tony definitely knew what was expected of him.
By this point, I was pretty hooked into the collective mind of the band (they were, after all, my peer group: 80 and 90 year old black dudes). I sensed, and shared, the consensus: "Aw, the poor bastard!"
We all knew the song was his albatross, of course, but this wasn't even his own gig. He hadn't even sung a full concert. And I'm quite sure he wasn't getting paid. Yet the audience wasn't going to let him out of there without obediently performing his little tap-dance - that stupid sentimental novelty song of little musical value which no one actually likes.
The song pattern matches to the guy, that's all. You don't want or need to hear it. Nobody does. But it's mentally associated with the name "Tony Bennett", and Tony Bennett was right there. So, of course, all is not right until he does his Tony Bennett thing (which is not at all Tony Bennett's thing, but everyone else's Tony Bennett thing).
He was gracious about it. Tony, after all, was the exemplar of graciousness. It's got to be weird to be at the top of your profession, 74 years old (at the time), and worth hundreds of millions of dollars and still be forced to dance, varmint, dance everywhere you go. But, from the band eye's view, he was - there is no other word - gracious.
The next thought waving through the communal band mind was "Poor Richard!" The great Richard Wyands was our pianist, and this Tony thing was all impromptu. We weren't working off of music parts. And "San Francisco" has all sorts of very specific and tricky little piano elements, none of which can be missed. And while Richard knows every goddamn song in the jazz and standards playbooks, this one, we all realized with a collective gulp, was outside his perimeter. It's not something he'd be called upon to play on a gig, though even the most grimly unmusical audience member knew every single note like their own face in the mirror. Plus, our bandleader was a raging bucket of irrational sadistic fury known by one and all in the jazz world (though, dear god, never to his face) as "The Beast". So, yeah, there was a wee bit of pressure on poor Richard, who prefers to project an image of cooly elegant authority.
Richard, pro that he is, survived the obstacle course (we heard his shattered nerves but the audience did not). And Tony sang his ass off. While this was my only data point from behind the guy, I took away the unassailable impression that he sang the song fresh.
I can't explain to you what that meant, in terms of actual notes. I'm not saying he broke into some merry bit of scat-singing to make This Time Different. He obligingly sang the song the way his audience (aka his captors) needed it sung. But he sang it fresh. Musicians - especially musicians sitting behind you - know the difference.
Inspirational!
I had once sat in an identical rear-facing position to the great singer Joe Williams, who'd risen to fame with Count Basie's orchestra.
- all about the music, not the show biz. To contemporary eyes, it looks wrong.
Why is he not shucking and jiving?!?
After having backed a ton of singers in a ton of contexts, Joe was the first (and last) who wasn't doing karaoke. Most singers suck all the oxygen in the room, leaving the band as their wallpaper. They, alone, are performing, while we're MSPs, music service providers. Like Teamsters brought in to work the musical equipment. Think MRI technicians.
Playing behind Joe was like playing with a musician. Again, I can't explain this in terms of notes. But he locked in with us, it wasn't just us locking in with him. He was in the band, not just backed by the band.
Tony wasn't like this (though I'm sure he, too, loved Joe Williams). He was an oxygen-sucker - which is one reason he died with $200 million, while I assume Joe left a twelve year old Cadillac and a reasonably nice house. But he was such a great oxygen sucker that it was impossible to criticize. The set was so musical that it didn't need to be musical on musicians' terms. Sometimes the suboptimal, done extraordinarily well, is as good as (or even better than) optimality.
It's very late in my music career. I may have already started Chowhound. I am out of practice, but my old high school bandmate, Brian, calls in a panic. A trombone player cancelled out of his big band's gig that night, and Brian needed a last minute replacement. Would I do him the favor?
The gig was way out on Long Island, but, by coincidence, so was I at that moment. No time to run home to get my horn, but Brian runs a music store, so I asked him to bring his best student rental trombone to the gig, and I'd fill in.
The horn was a monster. The slide barely moved, the tuning slide was jammed (so everything needed to be played 1% sharp to compensate). It was essentially unplayable, but I'd make it work.
I've told the story of playing a terrible Dixieland gig in terrible physical condition with a terrible band in a vacant field in some obscure corner of rural Spain on three hours sleep, and one of the most important figures in the business of jazz (who, egads, knew me) was improbably present for the performance. Now it was years later, and I thought I'd learned my lesson, but as the band tuned up (I opted out, as my instrument was literally un-tuneable), we learned that Tony Bennett would be enjoying dinner in this cheesey Long Island steakhouse. He'd be present to hear my high school friend's semi-professional big band with me on a student trombone incapable of producing, well, notes. Fun!
Brian is a very nice guy and an excellent musician, though he never broke out of the provincial Long Island scene, or the square swingy music we'd played together in high school. So he did what a very nice guy in those circumstances does: arranged a big feature for me. Naturally, I'd be soloing over Cherokee, the fastest song there is.
"No! NO, Brian! Do not make me play Cherokee with this terrible trombone with Tony Bennett watching me! Please don't...."
"Ladies and gentleman, it is my great pleasure to introduce an old schoolmate of mine...."
"NO!!!!! Brian, DON'T!!!!!"
"...an honor to have him..."
"Ok, ok, but PLEASE, for the love of god, Brian, don't remind him who I...."
"You may have heard him perform with Illinois Jacquet's band!"
From this point forward, I did not once look in Tony Bennett's direction. I somehow got through the extended solo, standing in a spotlight in front of the band, struggling to operate my unmusical instrument. At one point, Brian generously directed the rhythm section to stop for an entire chorus so I could play a cappella. I'd pronounce it mortifying, but some benevolent force inside my brain - who even knew there even was a benevolent force inside my brain? - has erased all specific memory.
Anyhoo, that was the last time I was in a room with Tony Bennett.
Sorry. That last one was a bit of a shaggy dog story, I know. Not the heart-warming pay-off you were expecting to mark the death of a major icon. But, hey, it's music biz stuff (Tony'd have gotten a kick out of it). Remember the time the greatest orchestral trombonist of his time, Ron Barron, utterly butchered the solo in Ravel's Bolero?
1 comment:
Awesome stuff, Jim.
It's the essence of what life and performance is, you're there, this is probably going to be your only life, what will you do?
I think of the extended recitative in "Barber of Seville", where the Count is arguing with Figaro in the bushes until Figaro plants a foot firmly in Reluctant Tenor's ass and like catapults him out into the spotlight and his solo. Of course, it does help to have "Il sio nome" in the ole' back pocket as your emergency audition song.
B
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