Tony Bennett: “I left my heart in San Francisco” (1962)

Who despise the great crooners classics and encompass them under the disdainful label of the easy listening They should at least go to the trouble of spending half an hour of their lives on this Tony Bennett album. It was the year 1962, exactly the year of the irruption of the Beatles, Beach Boys or Bob Dylan, but also, to contextualize everything, that of the Jazz samba by Charlie Byrd with Stan Getz. And in those good old Anthony Dominick Benedetto hit the right dose of elegance, sense and sensitivity to canonize and dignify the foundations of light music. Which can also enter inside the terminology more pejorative than descriptive, but prejudices evaporate as soon as you hear your voice raised –just just enough– to this gentleman.

Bennett was no longer a child when he entered the Columbia studios to record this marvel. It was close to 36 springs, he had embarked on a feverish recording career as early as 1955 and in his already large discography he did not always find the balance between pop and the most profound music (or, at least, pomposity). Here he found the intersection: seducing without being affected. When in the minute and 55 seconds of Have I told you lately? interrupts the verse “When I think of all the girls I could be hung up on” with a hint of laughter we discover that he is not a braggart, but a romantic.

He was already singing with more gravity and the good old Anthony posed by now, much more inclined to the baritone tessitura of his maximum competitor, Frank Sinatra, than to the tenor of a Chet Baker. Everything made him slower, more seductive without the need for fuss. I left my heart…, the lovely theme song, earned him a couple of instant Grammy Awards and a years-long stay on the best-seller charts, though so much time has passed that we are no longer fully aware of the impact it made. She was not the most virtuous of her performances, yet. The vibrato, the color and the duration of the notes in the much less remembered I’m always chasing rainbows It is used to feel chills.

The reading of The best is yet to come (where there is also a giggle: 2’05 ”) was a couple of seasons ahead of Frank himself, and musicals and movies were ideal fishing grounds for Bennett’s profile, in grace with both Once upon a time (from All american) as with Tender is the night, from the homonymous movie. And, speaking of feature films, he made his admiration for Chaplin official by recreating Smile with sharpened vocal velvet. In June 2017 we were pulling each other’s hair when a last minute indisposition (he was in his early thirties) prevented him from offering two recitals in Madrid and Barcelona. What a shame to have felt a myth so close and not have the opportunity to caress it.

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