The Great American Songbook is loosely defined as the culmination of 20th-century America’s significant popular music, standards and “classic” tunes. Within its framework is contained a library of songwriting that was born from Tin Pan Alley’s bottled-lightning, that swept Broadway and conquered Hollywood, and ultimately bore itself into our collective consciousness. It has been described as “America’s Classical Music”, and written in its proverbial pages are decades of cultural history. That history, predominantly from the oeuvre’s golden age between 1920 and 1965, has for most become exactly that — history. Associated names such as Fats Waller, George Gershwin and Cole Porter, while titans in their own time, are often moved a degree-per-decade from contemporary relevance. So the archival preservation and interpretive promotion of the Songbook is imperative.
Michael Feinstein and Tony Bennett are and were, arguably, the foremost preservation and interpreter, respectively, of the Great American Songbook.
The former founded the Great American Songbook Foundation in 2007, its Indiana offices housing and archive of tens of thousands of artifacts, ranging from original LPs, 45s, analog tape, magazines, lyrics sheets, and instruments. He mentors at a subsidiary Academy, educating future generations on the Songbook’s continued impact on current music. It’s a passion project he cultivated in a dynamic career that included stints on Broadway, night clubs and cabaret bars. If there is an expert, or someone uniquely qualified to adequately extolled the virtues of the Songbook, it’s Feinstein.
And the latter? Well, you probably already know. But, were you in need of a refresher, here is a grossly-insufficient retelling of a career that cannot be simply told:
Tony Bennett spent an astounding seven-decades rendering the Great American Songbook’s script. It began upon being discharged from the army in 1946, using his GI Bill to study the bel canto at the American Theatre Wing, crooning in clubs, honing an impressionistic approach to cover the music of his contemporaries. It truly kicked off in 1949 when a 23-year old Anthony Dominick Benedetto was invited by Bob Hope to come on tour with him. From then, until his passing in 2023, he amassed an armories worth of hardware, sold upwards of 50 million records across the blue planet, was honored innumerable times. His influence is as far reaching as his fingerprints, which can be found in several zeitgeists. He was the first male pop vocalist to work with Count Basie’s band. He was the first guest on the first episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and for several stints replaced Perry Como on late-night. He was ever present, and all the while he stayed true to the Songbook. He thrived even amidst the seismic shift the industry undertook as the world’s gaze veered towards Rock and Roll and the British Invasion, then Folk and the rise of protest anthems, then the pendulum swinging Punk birth, the glitzy Disco-era, the Funk, Hip Hop. As era’s came and went, and a catalogue of essential American songwriting came to incorporate more genre’s than its pioneers could have ever imagined, Bennett forced the audience to acknowledge timeless brilliance. It was his ordained purpose. Despite being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016 (a fact he stoically hid until just prior to his retirement), Bennet sang almost every day until he died. According to his son, even post-retirement Bennett continued to rehearse and practice with his director multiple times a week.
In his lifetime he delivered over seventy albums, the last of which — his 2021 collaborative album with Lady Gaga) made him literally the oldest person to ever release an album of new material at a ripe 95 years and 60 days young. It also broke the record for longest span of Billboard Top-10 albums, coming 59 years after his I Left My Heart In San Francisco peaking at number 5 in 1962. It’s no stretch to say championing the Great American Songbook dominated his life, and his devotion ultimately confirmed him as the definitive champion of 20th century America’s traditional music canon.
Their shared passion for this most American of artforms led to a beautifully symbiotic relationship. Their careers powered each other; without Bennett’s continued popularizing of otherwise lost songs, Feinstein would likely not have been able to found the GASF; without Feinstein’s continued excellence in archiving his preferred medium, Bennett would not have been able to fill a lifetime's worth of new material. Their friendship goes back to 1983 where they collaborated on a benefit show with Rosemary Clooney. An archaeologist of sorts himself, Bennett reached out to request access to unreleased songs by Ira Gershwin. Feinstein endeared himself to the already-veteran Bennett by, in his words, “speaking the language.” Bennett reciprocally endeared himself to Feinstein by escorting him on a veritable Songbook tour of New York, showing him the hallowed clubs and bars rich with the city's romantic history of music AND, notably, buying Feinstein a box of imported British throat lozenges. Accordingly, Feinstein has used this same brand of lozenge his entire career. This writer, sadly, was unable to discern the specific brand of lozenge.
In homage to his foundational idol, Feinstein has embarked on the Because of You: A Tribute To Tony Bennett tour. An extended homage to the late-great, the layers of reverence run deep. The tour’s grandiosity is further provided by a newly-formed Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, an homage in and of itself to the raw physicality of Duke Ellington and Count Basie’s big-band jazz that reigned supreme in the Songbook’s Golden Era. Carnegie Hall is notably where Bennett made his stage debut in 1961, nearly twenty years before Feinstein would start tracking Bennett’s giant footprints in the annals of American songwriting. Because of You is certainly a tribute to Tony Bennett — in his selection, his renditions, and in his recounting of a cherished mentor and friend — but its implications are grander even than Bennett’s illustrious career. It’s a paean to a style, an era, the Great American Songbook.
Arts Commons Presents brings Michael Feinstein in Because of You: My Tribute to Tony Bennett to the Jack Singer Concert Hall at Arts Commons on March 20th, 2025. For more information and to book your tickets, click here.