NEW YORK POST: Tony Bennett, the legendary pop, jazz, and big-band vocalist, has died. He was 96.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death, revealing he passed away in his hometown of New York. His cause of death — just two weeks shy of his 97th birthday — has not yet been announced.
“I come from good Italian stock — but I’ve tried to stay fit through the years,” Bennett told me nearly 20 years ago.
At the time he was a spry 72, meeting and greeting concertgoers with swagger before a benefit performance in the blazing hot Sonoran Desert of Tucson, Ariz.
For two decades beyond that, the 20-time Grammy winner kept swinging as smoothly as ever — making history as one of the only artists to chart new albums in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and the first three decades of the 21st century.
Anthony Dominick Bennedetto was born into a poor family of Italian immigrants living in Astoria, Queens, on Aug. 3, 1926. His father Giovanni, a grocer, died 10 years later, forcing his seamstress mother Anna Maria to find new ways to win bread amid the Great Depression. » | Rob Bailey-Millado | Friday, July 21, 2023
