This time, Tony Bennett will leave his heart in Latin America.
Fresh off a record-smashing run to the top spot of the Billboard music charts with 2011’s Duets II, the 85-year-old crooner is planning a new Latino duets album with Spanish singers.
Duets II included the likes of Lady Gaga and the late Amy Winehouse, in her last recording sessions. But both this album, and its predecessor also featured a pair of very successful Latino collaborations, something that that emboldened Bennett and his manager son Danny toward a full-length project.
“We had Juanes on Duets I and we had Alejandro Sanz on this record (Duets II), to a tremendous response,” Danny Bennett told contactmusic.com, “so the idea that I had was to do a Latin kind of edition of this version in Spanish … We did some outreach, and 27 Latin artists came back wanting to do the project. So, basically, we’re looking at doing that this year to release it in the fourth quarter of 2012.”
Here’s a look back at our recent thoughts on Tony Bennett. Click through the titles for complete reviews …
TONY BENNETT – THE CLASSIC CHRISTMAS ALBUM (2011): Tony Bennett’s warm, inviting delivery would seem perfectly suited to seasonal music — and it is. You can hear the very best of his Christmas projects, from a seminal 1968 Yuletide release to this burst of holly-jolly projects in the 2000s. Classic features five tracks from ’68’s Snowfall: The Tony Bennett Christmas Album, arranged and conducted with a sensitive joy by Robert Farnon — a frequent collaborator with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Williams, among others. That might be highlight enough, if not for the inclusion of five more tracks from 2008’s aptly titled A Swinging Christmas, the Grammy-nominated, Bill Holman-arranged effort featuring the Count Basie Big Band. And there’s more. A terrific sampler.
ONE TRACK MIND: TONY BENNETT WITH AMY WINEHOUSE, “BODY AND SOUL” (2011): You hear, for one final time, the promise of Amy Winehouse — if only in the way she can so expertly imitate the memorable phrasing of Dinah Washington. No, it’s not a virtuoso performance in the traditional sense of the word. She sounds too much like her sultry mid-century forebear, right down to Washington’s sharp, blues-cut pauses. But it was enough, in the wake of Winehouse’s untimely passing in 2011, to land Duets II at an unlikely spot atop the Billboard album chart — his first ever such honor. Best to head straight to Bennett’s track with Norah Jones from this RPM/Columbia Records release — a moving take on ‘Speak Low.’
TONY BENNETT AND BILL EVANS – THE COMPLETE TONY BENNETT/BILL EVANS RECORDINGS (2009): The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album remains, for me, one of the three or four most engrossing vocal jazz recordings — along with Sinatra’s Jobim collaboration, Ella performing with Satchmo and Nat “King” Cole’s After Midnight. But what made the initial Bennett/Evans project, and its follow up — 1976’s Together Again — so special was not just that hearing a big-band singer like Bennett in such an unadorned context was unusual. Evans doesn’t simply provide a supporting presence for the singer; instead he and Bennett brilliantly trade ideas back and forth — improvising with word and deed, not just combining their towering talents so much as opening an engrossing conversation that intertwines their very different personas.
[amazon_enhanced asin=”B005KSJAD0″ container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B000V9HWJW” container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”1400532620″ container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B0052GACNM” container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B000069JIL” container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /]
- Ernesto Cervini’s Turboprop, “When I Fall” (2024): Video premiere - March 15, 2024
- Disaster Pony,“Dead Neon & The Noon Sun” from ‘Disaster Pony’ (2024): Video premiere - February 27, 2024
- Christopher Hoffman, “Farewell Forever” from ‘Vision Is The Identity’ (2024): Streaming premiere - February 19, 2024
