Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
I Wanna Be Loved
I Cant Give You Anything But Love
Our Lady Of Fatima
Just Say I Love Her
Sing You Sinners
Kiss You
One Lie Leads To Another
Don't Cry Baby
Once There Lived A Fool
Beautiful Madness
The Valentino Tango
I Won't Cry Anymore
Because Of You
While We're Young
Cold, Cold, Heart
Since My Love Has Gone
Please, My Love
Blue Velvet
Solitaire
Silly Dreamer
Sleepless
Somewhere Along The Way
I'm Lost Again
Have A Good Time
Here In My Heart
Roses Of Yesterday
You Could Make The Smile Again
Congratulations To Someone
Anywhere I Wander
Staywhere You Are
Take Me
No One Will Ever Know
(I'm) The King Of Broken Hearts
I'll Go
Rags To Riches
Here Comes That Heartache Again
Someone Turned The Moon Upside Down
Stranger In Paradise
Why Does It Have To Be Me
Until Yesterday (Non E La Pioggia)
Please Driver (Once Around The Park Again)
There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight
My Heart Won't Say Goodbye
Take Me Back Again
Madonna, Madonna
Not As A Stranger
Cinnamon Sinner
Old Devil Moon
I Fall In Love Too Easily
While The Music Plays On
Love Letters
My Reverie
Darn That Dream
Funny Thing
My Pretty Shoo-Gah
Give Me The Simple Life
My Baby Just Cares For Me
My Heart Tells Me
I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me
Lost In The Stars
Taking A Chance On Love
I'm Just A Lucky So And So
It Had To Be You
You Can Depend On Me
Love Walked In
These Foolish Things
I'll Be Seeing You
Without A Song
Always
Just In Time
In The Middle Of An Island
Life Is A Song
Chicago
Are You Having Any Fun ?
Jeepers Creepers
Poor Little Rich Girl
I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face
Anything Goes
Growing Pains
Guess I'll Have To Change My Plans
With Plenty Of Money And You
Tony Bennett with Orchestras under the direction
of Marty Manning, Percy Faith, Mitch Miller,
Ray Conniff, Gordon Jenkins, Count Basie and
his Orchestra; and small groups featuring
Charles Panelly, tp; Dave Schildkraut, as;
Ceasar Di Mauro, ts; Al Cohn, ts; Harvey Leonard
and Gene di Novi p; Chuck Wayne, g; arr; Clyde
Lombardi, b; Ed Shaughnessy, d.
rec. 1950-58
There’s a satisfying line
of ascent in this four CD account of Tony
Bennett’s early years. We go from the straining
braggadocio of those first discs to the relaxed
swing of his 1958 encounter with the Basie
band. The tension here is between what he
was told to sing and what he wanted to sing.
Mitch Miller was a commercially astute man
and he knew better than Bennett what would
sell. The trouble is we’d now far rather hear
what Bennett wanted to sing and not those
grandiose or maudlin tear jerking ballads.
Who in their right mind would sit twice through
the lachrymose religiosity of Our Lady
of Fatima, the cod-operatic strain of
Just Say I Love Her or the blowsy blues-generic
plod of Don't Cry Baby? This is pre-Bennett
Bennett in my book with unsympathetically
beefy orchestrations and pitched too high
for vocal comfort. One of the features of
the discs is hearing just how long a process
this was. He took a long time to shake off
the crypto-Lanza line, the Massenet transcriptions,
the Neapolitan hues, and the horrible galactic
female choirs. For a musician like Bennett
all this stuff must have been a trial. Even
into 1953 things were still inconsistent.
Country and Western songs rubbed shelf space
with novelty numbers, Debussy paraphrases
were stubbornly paraded, and those damned
spectral choirs were still there.
But by 1954 things had begun
to take on a more conversational and relaxed
drive. The strings in the big bands had always
been stellar – for connoisseurs of such things
we can note the names of violinist Felix Slatkin
and cellists Frank Miller and Bernard Greenhouse,
amongst a veritable orgy of talent. But the
first inklings of his growing eloquence came
in the small band sessions. Bennett had some
superb sidemen with him – Al Cohn makes an
appearance and Gene di Novi several. Lesser-known
but fine players such as Charles Panelly,
Dave Schildkraut and Ceasar Di Mauro also
bump up the literacy quotient. The arrangers
also change – Neal Hefti and Gil Evans start
to appear and the level of sophistication
rises. By the fourth CD Bennett is sounding
sassy and confident. There’s one example of
an appearance on the Nat Cole show – the only
live track here – and then the whole album
he made with Basie, Strike Up The Band.
Together they take on standards and not-so-standard
things, such as Noël Coward. The results,
by and large, are laudable and one feels Bennett
cresting the wave of personal and artistic
satisfaction.
Proper’s documentation and
standards are up to their accustomed high
level. The booklet is useful and attractive
with a full discography. The discs aren’t
packed to the rafters but perhaps that reflects
the amount of material available to them.
But certainly admirers of Bennett can delve
back to these early sides and follow his progression
from the days of generic fodder to the emergence
of the relaxed artist we so admire today.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
PROPERBOX 121 [4 CDs: 55:23 + 56:50
+ 63:05 + 58:23]
