Tony Bennett is so hip he turned rock on its ass in 1994. How else to describe the decision of MTV’s ‘Unplugged’ to discharge all of its grunge, rap, rock and singer-songwriters for one historic show this year and give an hour of prime time to this Tin Pan Alley king who was originally christened Anthony Dominick Benedetto.

Watching the programme, and listening to the subsequent CD, one soon realised that ol’ TB certainly didn’t need guest stars such as Elvis Costello and kd lang to give him credibility in rock circles. If anything, the opposite is true. Back when Costello was simply the bespectacled Declan McManus listening to his daddy’s 78s, Bennett was experimenting with the kind of rhythms and rhymes most rock songwriters still dream about.

If you don’t believe me, check his 1957 concept album, The Beat of My Heart, on which Bennett set his voice against a musical backdrop created solely by the post be-bop percussion players from Count Basie’s orchestra. And barely a year later, while Elvis was recording ‘I Got Stung’, Bennett was setting on tape the infinitely more sophisticated ‘A Sleeping Bee’, a tone poem written by Harold Arlen and Truman Capote.

Likewise, as a singer, long before kd lang ever heard of Patsy Cline, Tony Bennett was working with, and absorbing lessons from the vocal style of his idols and friends such as Billie Holiday and Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. And since it was ‘Satchmo’ who first hauled into mainstream popular music the kind of rhythmic innovations and black inflections that later led to rock ‘n’ roll, then perhaps his assessment of Bennett’s talent is worth noting. “If Tony Bennett who sings swing wonderfully can’t send you, there’s a psychiatrist right up the street. DIG him,” he once said.

Speaking equally succinctly, Bing Crosby said of Bennett: “He’s the best singer I’ve ever heard.” And as for a certain Mr. Sinatra, he crowned such compliments by saying: “For my money Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business, the best exponent of a song. He excites me when I watch him – he moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

The man himself laughs loudly when asked if Sinatra’s comment may have been a case of one New York born Italian-American bonding with another, shouting across the floodlights rather than the street: “Yo, Tony!”. He’s sitting in his room in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel and will continue this interview over dinner in Cooke’s Restaurant en route to appear on Pat Kenny Live.

“I gotta straighten you out on that! Judy Garland also called me the best entertainer she’d seen,” he says, revealing neither arrogance nor false humility. “And I could never treat such accolades lightly as they led to a form of metamorphosis in my life. Like Houdini, I’ve always felt I had to come up with new tricks to live up to such praise! And the thing about Sinatra, Crosby and Garland is that these are not just ordinary people, they’re artists at the apex of their profession. You gotta remember that I started out as a singing waiter, earning fifteen dollars a weekend and to end up having guys like Sinatra say I’m the best singer they’ve heard really shocks me into something that keeps me awake, and alive, every day. Singing is supposed to appear effortless but there’s also a lot of artistry involved and when your peers take note of that you know you’re doing something right.”

Talking about his musical influences, Tony Bennett argues that there are strong links between Italians and Irish, particularly in relation to their love of music and the need to sing out.

“A lot of what I do I trace back to my aunt who was one of my biggest teachers when I was a kid,” he explains. “She was Irish, adored Bing Crosby and brought his musical influence into my life. Crosby certainly struck us as being all Irish and the key lesson I learned from him was that his singing had nothing to do with money. He’d take a simple song like ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra’ and if you listen closely you can hear that he just loves the act, and the art, of singing. I still hear that purity in his voice and it’s that purity I’ve tried to retain in my work. In fact, every record Crosby made has been my greatest influence in every sense because he sang with jazz artists like Louis Armstrong and with Joe Venuti. Great guys. My ears still migrate to that music. It still touches my heart.”

Listening closely to Bennett’s own other-worldly reading of ballads such as ‘If I Love Again’ on the highly recommended 4 CD set The Artistry of Tony Bennett , one also hears those fluid and beautiful melodic lines that are clearly rooted in the bel canto approach to singing allied to echoes of the style of vocal projection that is prevalent in Jewish synagogues, where Bennett also learned his trade.

“I’m 67 years old and all the reviewers are saying that I never sounded better and I directly attribute that to my bel canto training in particular,” he says, proudly. “I’ve had popular singing coaches but I’ve also had two bel canto teachers in my life and practising those scales for fifteen-twenty minutes every day has preserved my voice, I believe.”

Equally important in terms of how Tony Bennett interprets a song is his base in the visual arts. He has admitted that he loves recordings such as ‘It Was Me’ because one can easily imagine “the beach, the boy, the girl, the balmy weather.” Likewise, his delivery and the arrangements on songs such as ‘Emily’, if not his overall aesthetic, are heavily influenced by his love of the Impressionists. As a painter whose work hangs in a number of prestigious galleries, including New York’s Lincoln Centre, Bennett fully agrees with Bono who once suggested that music is painting with sound and that he perceives “the E chord as bright red and the three chords as the primary colours” – and so on.

Bennett traces his base in art, and indeed, his epiphany as an artist, back to one particular balmy afternoon in his early adolescence – and the influence of an Irishman.

“I lived in the projects in an area of Long Island, where I was born in 1926,” he recalls, which places his birth just one year after fellow New Yorker, Frank Sinatra. “I used to sketch out on the street, big murals with chalk. Then one day I was doing the Indians and Pilgrims for Thanksgiving and I saw this shadow on the street and turned around and saw a tall, very handsome Irish man standing there and he said ‘I like that’. I was about thirteen at the time and said ‘thank you’ because I was so happy that anyone was even looking at my handiwork!

He then told me he was an art teacher and said, ‘I live in your buildings and every Saturday I go out and do some water-colours, would you like to come sometime?’ I said ‘sure’ and soon afterwards he took me to Willow Park, on the other side of New York city, where you can see the whole John Garfield skyline and he said ‘just sketch what you see.’ I did and that turned out to be the most pleasant day I ever had. Partly because he gave me paints, which I’d never had in my hands in my whole life. And to this day I still watercolour every day and when the brush hits the paper I always remember that afternoon, the enjoyment of the good air, the sunshine and of discovering painting.

“Later he and his wife took me to my first museum – the Museum of Modern Art. Then, to my first opera and Broadway play and a whole appreciation of a world of culture, and artists, which still directs me through life. His name is James MacWhinney and, to think I have that one man to thank for introducing me to the luminosity of artists like Monet, the magnificence of Michaelangelo, and even that one incomparable painting by Velazquez – with the royalty and dwarves – which when I later saw it in Spain showed me in one shot everything that would later become contemporary art. James introduced me to all that ! God bless him.”

Through introducing Bennett to a world of aesthetic beauty beyond the pavements, and housing projects of Long Island, James MacWhinney also provided the young Italian boy with a desperately needed form of escape from more specific, and oppressive, realities in his home life. This escapist tendency has also shaped the nature of Tony Bennett’s art, in painting and in singing. In terms of the latter he has claimed that one of the main differences between himself and Sinatra is that musically-speaking “Frank prefers to walk on the dark side of the street.” Bennett clearly chooses to try and recapture the purity of the sunshine on that afternoon in Willow Park. Or perhaps, more specifically, to burn away with sunlight the childhood memory of his mother’s finger too often being pierced by the needle on an electric sowing machine.

“My mother had to do that work to support us. And in a way, like Charlie Chaplin, my early life was such a shock to me that I’ve just raced forward to escape from that position, and from such memories. Yet, looking back I now see that kind of home situation was an inverted gift because it also directed me towards culture, education, escape.”

Bennett pauses to reflect on the original question.

“I never thought of it that way, but you’re probably right to say that what I do, as an artist, could be described as my way of running from seeing that image of my mother’s nail being pierced. And similar sad realities. Because I do really try and create this premise of truth in beauty, whenever I paint or sing. It’s still what I still aspire to. But on the other hand I could say, why not? The news is always there day and night ready to tell us we’re on the verge of self-destruction. Why not add another colour to peoples’ lives?”

The second major turning point in Tony Bennett’s artistic evolution came after he returned to the United States from serving with the 63rd Infantry Division in Germany. In possession of an ex-serviceman’s grant, he became a student at the American Theatre Wing in New York, which later became the Actor’s Studio and home to the likes of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. However, in 1947, New York was more celebrated as a centre for jazz. And Tony Bennett still fondly remembers the day his singing coach, Miriam Speir, indicated that he could pick up as many tips from listening to great jazz as he could from studying classical music.

“She’d point down the street where people like Coleman Hawkins and Errol Garner were playing and say ‘Go on, go out and listen to the way they phrase. If you can do the same sort of thing in your singing you’ll hit the top some day’. And what was really important about this was that she was telling me to listen to modernists in jazz, musicians who were dismantling form, and creating bebop during that very decade.

“I was talking about this just the other day with a journalist who said ‘the reason people like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells could see into the future was because they knew the history of the world’. She’s right. A lot of young musicians these days don’t realise that free-form is two words. And you must learn form before you can become free. In other words, they don’t bother with technique, just think they can do whatever comes naturally and thus create art. It don’t work that way. If anyone out there has anything of worth to offer they should first gather up as much technique as they can so that when they have something to say they will understand the kind of economy of line I was talking about earlier, in relation to great painting and music. And it was only after I had mastered technique, to a degree, that Miriam said, ‘Now go down onto that street and learn some more’. But her best piece of advice was ‘Don’t imitate singers, because you’ll just end up as part of the chorus, imitate musicians’. And so the people I tuned into were Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Stan Getz, Lester Young and Art Tatum, who were all playing that street at that time, in little tiny clubs. And I went from club to club to club just soaking up what they were all doing.”

More than this, and at least half a decade before rockers like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis were stealing into black blues clubs in the South, the young Tony Bennett was also taken under the collective wing of these musicians with whom he’d frequently jam until the wee hours. Not surprisingly, he later became the first white singer to perform with Count Basie’s band.

“Those jam sessions really were the place where I was brought right up-to-date in terms of what was happening in jazz and where I formed my style,” he recalls. “In particular I loved Stan Getz’s honeyed tones and the way Art Tatum made every song a whole dramatic production. I couldn’t copy his arpeggios, but his rubato and phrasing helped a lot. But from the beginning of my career even musicians would ask, ‘What the hell are you doing that is so different?’. The point was that because of my Italian background I not only sing in that long melodic line, I also sang in a dramatic fashion, on songs like my first hit ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’. I’d even take operatic arias and put English words to them. Yet, what I really was doing, in essence, was, as I say, imitating jazz pianist Art Tatum, by making a production out of a simple 32 bar song. That’s also how my influence went into rock, though I rarely get credit for any of that.”

Tony Bennett also sees irony in the fact that he himself played an influential role in the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in the early ’50s, particularly as a result of the success he had with Hank William’s song ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ which was the first country song to use strings. Did he feel he compromised himself, artistically, by recording a ‘hillbilly’ song at the time?

“I questioned it, but in the end it turned out that I was the first to do a country song that sold millions of records globally,” he says, shaking his head and smiling. “And therefore it was the first time that country people, like the Acuff-Rose Publishing Company, realised they could sell all over the world, not just in the Bible Belt of America, with music that had previously been marginalised, whether it was country or blues. But Johnny Ray really was the one who changed things. Before him, everyone, including myself, sang those long, sweet melodic lines, whereas he incorporated black influences into his singing years before Elvis did. Johnny Ray created rock ‘n’ roll.”

Johnny Ray created rock ‘n’ roll? Does Tony Bennett really believe that?

“I know it and though I don’t really want to use the wise guy line but ‘I was there, Charlie’,” he laughs. “Johnny Ray certainly signalled the end of the Big Band era, when he broke through in 1952 or so, with ‘Cry’ and everyone knows he took his leads from rhythm ‘n’ blues. And when I say I was there, I mean I remember the stir he created at the London Palladium when he was called in to replace some big singer who was ill at the time. Ray’s whole act was pure showmanship, tearing at the curtains, falling down on one knee, banging on the piano and weeping in a way that drove women wild. He had to do all this because he was deaf and didn’t sing in tune! But, he’d create chaos and that kind of theatricality heavily influenced people like Presley, even though Johnny Ray himself is now written out of the history of music. Of course, Elvis was also influenced by the blues singers from the South, like Big Joe Turner, but Ray later told everyone that Elvis once admitted he was one of his original idols. That’s why I believe he later covered Ray’s hit, ‘Such A Night.’

“But, to me, Elvis marks the beginning of the downfall of popular music because he was the first marketed entertainer, in the widest sense. He was the first Coca Cola bottle singer. They really turned him into a commodity, and with him the music. Colonel Tom Parker was, and still is, the greatest con man in America. I remember hearing about how they’d spread sawdust near where the people bought souvenir photo albums so that when coins were dropped on the floor no one would hear them fall and he’d have them collected later. And he was the first to charge 25 cents for even a single picture of Elvis. There were no give-aways when Parker was in town, and that’s what changed music. But, as a singer, even when he did those ballads later, like ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ Elvis was only nice, nothing great. I’m more impressed by jazz singers like Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams, Mel Torme.”

Why only those, or jazz singers?

“Because the thing that great American singers have is swing and swing is never playing the drums loud, like . . . let me show you.” Bennett, suddenly takes a sheaf of pages from this Charlie’s hand, first rolling them up in the shape of a drum-stick and fans them out as a facsimile of brushes. Beating a none-too imaginative rock rhythm he says: “That’s boring, obvious, right? But this (brush beats) is more like what Count Basie did, where the beat was so light you barely noticed it until you realised that all the musicians, and singers were virtually flying in the wings of that sound. It’s minimalism, like in art. It’s Basie’s finesse, his economy of line, to get back to that phrase again. But, on the other hand, there’s nothing subtle or poetic about the rhythms of rock, which always struck me as sounding like bricks rolling down a hill!”

But surely he will concede that rock ‘n’ roll brought about the kind of social changes that black musicians hadn’t even dared to dream about in preceding decades. And didn’t other blacks, such as Nat ‘King’ Cole have to sing “white” for mainstream acceptance, unlike the blacks that followed Elvis – Chuck Berry, Little Richard and so on?

“Those musicians never pretended to be white, white guys pretended to be black,” says Bennett, seemingly a little impatient with having his world view challenged. “The real history of American music is of black improvisation and when whites do it it’s never as good as a talented black person. And this goes back to the beginning of the century to New Orleans where everything that later happened in rock originally took place in jazz. That said, there are a lot of squares who are black. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you have ‘it’, whatever that indefinable element is that makes a great musician, or artist. Elvis had ‘it’ but whatever that was, it wasn’t what the blacks had. But more than all this he had marketing on his side and that’s what has dominated music ever since. So, in that sense it doesn’t really matter what social barriers may have been broken down, at the end of the day, whether you’re black or white, the people who market music these days are the people who are in power.”

Tony Bennett also believes that when it comes to the concepts of “purity of line, form and balance in songwriting”, which he talked about earlier, American popular music reached its peak during the so-called ‘golden age of Tin Pan Alley’.

“Those songwriters, to me, were like the Impressionists,” he explains. “Impressionism came about at the turn of the century and no matter what movement comes along, such as Abstract Expressionism, I still walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and look at Monet, or Pisarro, and adore the way they painted. So, to me, the golden age of music in America definitely was during the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s when you had great artists like Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers and Harold Arlen writing classic popular songs.”

Does it necessarily follow that songwriting has been on a downward spiral since the early ’40s?

“To me it does, yes,” he says, and he is clearly well able to argue his case. “It’s a different era now and what I hear in music these days is a lot more mediocre. Years ago in the United States our greatest artist was Duke Ellington, now we have Michael Jackson! With all due respect to Michael, he is no Duke Ellington, who has gone down in America’s cultural history as our first authentic classical composer. And, as I said earlier, I trace this downward spiral to the fact that since the advent of Elvis first, then the Beatles, marketing has become more important than talent or even music. In my day you had Sinatra, Cole, Sammy Davis Jnr and they were judged by how they performed. Today such judgements are made on how artists are being marketed and who is number one, financially. People like Madonna and Bruce Springsteen are at the top because they get hundred million dollar advances and have the best promotion in the world. That seems to be more important than their music.”

When Tony Bennett hears how George Martin recently claimed that the Beatles could withstand comparisons being made between their work and the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, he laughs loudly in an elevator in the Westbury Hotel and then, within earshot of a couple of clearly ecstatic tourists, begins to sing.

“Is he kidding? Since when did Paul McCartney ever write anything like this (sings): “Now I know how Columbus must have felt/Discovering another world/How Long Has This Been Going On?”

In the back seat of the limo he’s still battering the Beatles and their like.

“George Harrison wrote one hell of a song when he wrote ‘Something’ but that’s about the only Beatles song I ever bothered to record,” he says. “And the point about people like the Gershwins is that those guys were culturally educated, culturally aware, in the broadest sense. But that’s what great about working as an artist in America. It’s a complex country that is not tribal, in that there are so many mixes of people, religions, philosophies – which makes it a magnificent palate for creativity. That black base of improvisation in music, which you and I have been talking about today, is strictly American and the result of the collision of races in places like New Orleans.

“In that sense, jazz is America’s classical music. Yet alongside that you had the Jewish music from the theatre, and movies, because the people in power there were predominantly Jewish. Therefore you had Ira and George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and so on. And writers like Ira Gershwin studied George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare and mastered the art of play structure, plotting. And, in terms of songs, inner rhymes and so on, it wasn’t just ‘moon’, ‘June’ ‘spoon’ stuff.

“A guy like Larry Hart was a mature, intelligent writer who gave his songs a highly-developed philosophical base, with humour to fore. Think of even something like the internal rhyme scheme in (sings) ‘We’ll take Manhattan/The Bronx and Staten Island too’. Or Cole Porter’s, ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’ where he takes the syllable sound from ‘she’s broke’ and runs it into ‘but it’s OK’ then drops the ‘ay’ and uses ‘hates’ to pick up the silent rhyme in ‘hates California’. That is sophisticated writing, whatever way you look at it. That’s why I really believe that during Tin Pan Alley’s golden period those guys wrote songs, and shows, which have yet to be matched.”

Tony Bennett shakes his head and sighs, as if silently singing the title of one of his, and Marlon Brando’s favourite songs: ‘It Amazes Me’.

“I don’t mean to be snobby but can’t you see why these are the kind of songs I still prefer to perform,” he says. “For example, Yip Harburgh was the best lyric writer in America during that period. He wrote ‘I Love Paris’ and ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Dime’, which was probably the first slice of social realism in mainstream American pop music this century. But then he was a great humanist, who’d gone to college and studied with Gershwin. That’s why I say that time was America’s Renaissance, with Cole Porter, Jerome Kern producing three plays a year for performers like Fanny Brice and Will Rogers and, in the movies, great artists like Fred Astaire. But what really frustrates me about American culture is that we ourselves don’t appreciate our past. We don’t realise how good we are, because we’re a country that is so young we’re going for anything that’s new, like reggae, rap, whatever the next fashion is – even if it’s bad. Everybody goes for the latest fad, as long as it’s making money.”

Settling down at a table in the corner of Cooke’s restaurant, Bennett barely pauses to take a breath.

“But, let’s be honest here, works of art have nothing to do with money,” he says, almost angrily. “It’s the integrity that comes first and if it works then money follows. That’s when everything is in its correct orbit. But now super-greed, rather than simply greed, has taken over and money is all that matters in the music business. The executives of record companies are forced to show an increase for their stockholders every month or they’re fired. So the axe is over their heads, which means, for example, that record companies will no longer take a chance on someone like Ella Fitzgerald, who is one of America’s greatest artists. Instead, they go for the easy option, the latest rap group, because they know it will sell in large quantities. Fred Astaire once spoke for me in relation to such trends in the music business when he said there is this cacophony of sound on one side, elevator music on the other side and that in the middle there is a silver lining of music that will survive long after the rest has fallen by the wayside.

“Without seeming too egotistical, or self-satisfied, I think that’s part of what’s happened with my music suddenly coming back into vogue, with a younger generation, after all these years. The same with Sinatra. And what’s great for an artist is to do something with integrity and quality and later find out that it’s won, even if it seemed to be losing all along the way. That’s immensely gratifying. But to just make money for the sake of making money is no great goal.”

While reluctant to challenge any further Tony Bennett’s belief that the decline of the West probably began with rock ‘n’ roll, one must wonder out loud if there is any truth in Sam Phillips’ suggestion that publishers and entertainers in New York in the mid 1950s – the people who handled Perry Como, Crosby and Sinatra – basically hated the advent of rock because it moved the power structure away from Tin Pan Alley and from the Big Apple itself. Particularly, perhaps, from the Italian Mafia.

“I never heard of Sam Phillips but let me tell you that the power in the music business has never left New York, whether that’s in terms of publishing or not,” says Bennett. “Where were the major TV networks? Where did Elvis have to come to conquer America, if not to New York? Where is RCA based? New York. And in terms of publishing, the power centre is still New York. It is still true what that lyric says, ‘If you make it there, you’ll make it anywhere’. Indeed, if you don’t make it in New York you don’t make it in the United States. So, New York didn’t lose its power when rock ‘n’ roll started, no matter what this Sam Philips character may say. It’s like Berlin in Germany, London in England. These places are never going to lose their power. Look at the World Trade Centre, the Museum of Modern Art, all those power centres are in New York and always will be. That’s why it’s the Big Apple.”

And what about its secret core? What is Bennett’s response to Sam Giancana Junior’s claim, in Hot Press, that when his father was head of the Mafia in the ’50s and ’60s, Italian entertainers such as Sinatra, Como, Bennett and Darin had to do deals with “the family” in order to break into showbusiness.

“It was tough to break into showbusiness in those days but it wasn’t the Mafia you had to deal with, it was elements from the underworld,” he says. “That’s a great misunderstanding in relation to the music business. It was the Jewish underworld. Long before I was born, Meyer Lansky became the boss and people like ‘Lucky’ Luciano had to work for him. So the Jews have always been in charge and the Italians go along with that. But as the Jews never want to be shown any disrespect from film-makers, and so on, they perpetuate all the myths about the Italian Mafia with movies like The Godfather. It’s the same in relation to movies that glorify the Irish Mafia, or ‘Murphyia’ and take the focus away from the real underworld, the Jews.”

So, as a man who is both Jewish and Italian, was paying off any Mafia part of the landscape for Tony Bennett back at the beginning of his career?

“It wasn’t that much a part of things for me,” he says. “Like everyone I went through it because you started out in small clubs that were owned by such people. But then every entertainer I know, including everybody in Hollywood, had to go through it and if you don’t they threaten you and your family. But then you finally break away from that. And let’s not forget that Caruso had to pay off the underworld, to keep his career alive. Maybe even to keep alive.”

There are, of course, those who would suggest that the music business has always operated as a form of Mafia, be it associated with the criminal underworld, or not. Tony Bennett reveals that when he got his original deal with Columbia it was intended as a slap in the face of Frank Sinatra, who had recently left the label to move to Capitol. Sinatra also left Columbia having publicly attacked Mitch Miller for forcing him to record crap like ‘Mama Will Bark’ complete with female vocalist Dagmar and accompanying barking noises. Miller then went on to produce many of Bennett’s early hits, including ‘In The Middle Of An Island.’ Does Tony regard these recordings as pop classics?

“Not really,” he admits. “If you had a hit back then the producers would try to get you to do 12 more songs like that; that happened to me after I had a hit with that ballad ‘Because of You’ and ‘Blue Velvet’. But Ralph Sharon, who has been my accompanist for 26 years, kept nudging me in other directions, saying ‘You have a jazz audience, sing for them’. It was his idea for me to do something really offbeat, a jazz album, with no strings and no middle-of-the-road background and that turned out to be The Beat of My Heart. But the record company got mad at me because it broke away from the strings and saccharine sound. Yet that record saved my career, because it won me a whole new jazz audience. And if I’d kept singing the way the record company wanted me to sing then I knew that after six or seven more of those ballads my career would have been dead. But in those days Columbia had only one A&R man and that was Mitch Miller and he told all the artists what he wanted them to do. And it all worked, as far as Columbia was concerned, who were having endless hits with people like Guy Mitchell and so on.”

But not with Sinatra. Did Bennett, unlike Sinatra, respect all of Miller’s choices?

“No,” he says, bluntly. “Mitch Miller was infatuated with money. But he worked out fine with me because he wanted revenge against what Sinatra was saying about him, putting him down, at the time. That is why I got on Columbia. Because he said ‘I’ll get another Italian kid and show this Sinatra’. In the beginning I didn’t know that’s what the game was but we ended up arriving at a good situation. I would do two of his songs at a session then he would do two I’d choose, because in those days you could only do four sides at a session. And I did make sure from the beginning that even the songs he gave me were good songs, because I’d been taught by my teachers not to compromise. Sinatra taught me that, telling me ‘don’t do silly songs’ saying that’s like a prize fighter taking a dive for the easy money. And he hated doing that ‘Mama Will Bark’ which was terrible.”

So would Tony Bennett admit that he himself probably did take a dive for the song ‘Rags To Riches’ which, it’s claimed, he hated and which was, ironically, the one Bennett song that Elvis Presley recorded.

“That is the one record I didn’t want to do and Mitch Miller and Percy Faith had to practically tie me down to record it,” he recalls, laughing. “But then it went and stayed 25 weeks in the charts, including eight at number one, and sold 250,000 so I guess they were, at least, right about its commercial appeal. But, sure I took a dive for that. Yet one record out of a total of 43 albums ain’t bad, is it?”

And the real point, of course, is that singles were almost incidental to Tony Bennett from the beginning. Like Sinatra and Nat ‘King’ Cole at Capitol Records, Tony Bennett was not only one of pop’s premier album artists, but virtually the inventor of the concept of the concept album itself. Apart from The Beat of My Heart , Bennett also recorded an album-length tonepoem to New York, Hometown, My Town which was clearly similar to one of pop’s first concept albums, Manhattan Towers, composed and recorded by Gordon Jenkins in the early 1950s.

“I loved that Gordon Jenkins album and the later stuff he did with Sinatra, like September of My Years ,” says Bennett. “And as for Nat, let’s not forget that he originally discovered both Gordon Jenkins and Nelson Riddle, who did all those great concept albums with himself and with Sinatra.”

So which concept albums by Sinatra and Nat ‘King’ Cole does Bennett believe contains their greatest work?

“In terms of Nat, there is that album he did with George Shearing that has things like ‘Let There Be Love’ which really swings,” he says, smiling. “And as far as Sinatra is concerned, my personal favourite is In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, and the Bossa Nova album he did with Jobim – though I like nearly all Sinatra’s work.”

Asked about his own albums Bennett claims that he rates above all “the Bill Evans records” and The Movie Song album. The latter was later the model for Scott Walker’s album Moviegoer and an acknowledged influence on Walker’s solo works, Scott 1-4, which also included covers of Bennett hits such as ‘When Johanna Loved Me’. What influenced Walker, in particular – apart from Bennett’s singing – was the way in which The Movie Song Album contained interlinking musical motifs, clearly related themes and a consistency of mood.

“I’m happy to hear I influenced somebody at that level but if you want to talk about a concept album that was it,” says Bennett, as he finishes eating his meal. “All the composers were orchestrators, on that album. So Percy Faith conducted his song. Quincy Jones conducted his song. David Rose. So although Johnny Mandel was the overall producer, all the other guys wrote and conducted those fabulous arrangements themselves.”

And why would Bennett choose the Bill Evans albums?

“Because the work we did has been compared to lieder singing – but that was Bill’s input because he was such a musical genius, believe me,” he says, with obvious generosity and affection. “My daughter goes to Berkeley Music College, in Boston, which is a great music school, and she tells me the major influences there are John Coletrane and Bill Evans. He’s a master. He had a classical background, yet was the first classical artist I knew who could also swing. He crossed that bridge and took with him all that great knowledge of the construction of music and the mathematics of it. Yet when he played he played great jazz so people like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Coltrane wanted to record with him, and did. They never heard chord changes like that, from a piano player. That’s how he became famous, because all the top jazz artists in the world kept saying they wanted to record with Bill Evans. I was blessed to do two albums with Bill. And I really love the medley of ‘Some Other Time/My Foolish Heart’ and ‘But Beautiful’ we put on the box-set.”

And so, as ever, Tony Bennett’s core commitment is to the music. Last year when he did his Sinatra tribute album it highlighted a definitive difference between both singers. Whereas, Ol’ Blue Eyes will deconstruct a song and remake it in his own image as a form of musical autobiography, Bennett – as Sinatra himself suggested – still pursues what he perceives to be the songwriter’s original vision. In the end, as in the beginning, he obviously is a believer in art for art’s sake.

“That is true,” he says.” I’ve always tried to get at what the composer originally had in mind. I may change notes and improvise on a nightly basis but staying true to the song is what is most important to me. Besides, I don’t need to sing my life story into songs. If I wanted to do that I’d write my own songs. My job is to just entertain people and maybe lift their spirits a little higher not because they read my life story in the songs but because they maybe recognise something about themselves in the music. And in the end, isn’t that what art is all about?”