“Good songs last forever, and I've come to learn that
there's a whole group out there in the audience who's studying that with me.
There's a greatness in an audience when it gets perfectly still. It becomes a
beautiful tribal contact, a delicate, poetic thing. A great song does that.”—
Tony Bennett (1926-2023), Grammy-winning, indomitable interpreter of the Great
American Songbook, quoted by Whitney Balliett, “A Quality That Lets You In,”
originally published in
The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 1974, reprinted in
Balliett’s American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song
(1988)
The image accompanying this post, of Tony Bennett in
performance at the 2012 Monterey (Calif.) Jazz Festival, was taken Sept. 22,
2012, by David Becker.
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