Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: One Last Time (CBS-TV, aired November 28, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a much-hyped CBS-TV concert special featuring Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga performing at Radio City Music Hall for what was billed as “One Last Time.” Bennett is 95 and has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – though, as with Glen Campbell, it doesn’t seem to have affected his musicianship any. Experts on Alzheimer’s have said that out of all one’s memories, music is the last to go – and Bennett’s singing on this show, though hardly what it was in his glory years, was tuneful and musical. Only one high note in one song escaped his reach; otherwise he was in quite good late form. The concert began with four songs by Lady Gaga solo, which showed that despite the occasional heaviness of her voice she’s got the chops to be a great jazz singer. When I first heard Lady Gaga on her album The Fame Monster (actually an earlier record called The Fame reissued in a package with an EP called Monster) I was impressed more by her songwriting than her singing. There’s not much you can do with so-called “electronic dance music” anyway except spit out the lyrics in time, but what impressed me about Gaga was she wasn’t just sticking a few words on top of a dance groove and calling it a song. Her songs were well constructed and had identifiable beginnings, middles and ends.

Then I heard her and Bennett do “The Lady Is a Tramp” on Bennett’s Duets II album (unlike Frank Sinatra’s two duets albums, Bennett insisted on recording the parts with his partners present in the studio and singing with him in real time instead of overdubbing their parts later) and it impressed me that Lady Gaga had the rhythmic flexibility to sing standards and wasn’t strait-jacketed into the strict tempi of dance music. (It also made me wish the late Donna Summer had cut a standards album: judging by her beautiful phrasing on the slow introductions of songs like “Last Dance” and “On the Radio,” a Summer Sings Standards album would likely have been quite good.) The four Lady Gaga solo songs that opened last night’s show were Frank Loesser’s “Luck, Be a Lady” from Guys and Dolls, Milton Delugg’s and Willie Stein’s “Orange Colored Sky” from 1950, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)” from the late 1920’s and John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s “Theme from New York, New York.” After Lady Gaga subjected “Luck, Be a Lady” to some awkward lyric changes to make it more suitable for a woman (it was originally written for a man), I was wondering what she was going to do to “Let’s Do it” to duck the P.C. Thought Police’s condemnations she would surely have got if she’d sung the opening lines of the refrain, “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland little Lapps do it.” As it turned out, she deleted that part of the song altogether, going straight from the verse (which she phrased beautifully) to the ninth bar of the refrain.

She said “Orange Colored Sky” was one of two jazz songs she’d sung at a benefit which Bennett was also present for; he sent someone backstage to her and asked to meet her, and when they finally got together Bennett told her, “You’re a jazz singer.” “Orange Colored Sky” was written in 1950 and first recorded a year later as Capitol Records’ choice for a vehicle to pair Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton – and as Cole tried his best to swing with the big brassy blatts of Kenton’s elephantine ensemble behind him, he closed the record with a joke, “I thought love was quieter than this!” (“Of course you did!” I joked back. “Your wife had sung with Duke Ellington!”) I was also amused that Lady Gaga, in the middle of “Theme from New York, New York,” “A lady can sing this song, too” – either she forgot or she never knew that this song was written for a woman, Liza Minnelli, for the film New York, New York that gave it its title. Then Bennett came out for his solo set, three songs: Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens,” Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out” (written for Fred Astaire’s 1948 musical Easter Parade and the title track of Bennett’s tribute album to Astaire) and Bart Howard’s “Fly Me to the Moon” (originally called “in Other Words” when it was recorded by Kaye Ballard and Peggy Lee in the early 1960;s, but retitled by Frank Sinatra when he recorded it with Count Basie for the album It Might as Well Be Swing).

The next set featured duets between Bennett and Gaga on the song “The Lady Is a Tramp” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and two songs by Cole Porter, “Love for Sale” and “Anything Goes,” to promote the Bennett-Gaga duet album (their second) which features exclusively Porter songs. Cole Porter wrote “Love for Sale” as the world-weary lament of a prostitute, something that didn’t really come off here even though they included the song’s rarely performed verse. But my favorite version remains Dinah Washington’s from the 1955 album After Hours with Miss D, which doesn’t include the verse and made one change in the lyrics (“Appetizing young love for sale” became “I’m advertising young love for sale”), but her rendition buzzes with anger and venom over being sexually exploited. Bennett and Gaga did the verse relatively slowly but sped up to Dinah’s tempo on the refrain, though without the sense of righteous indignation. For “Anything Goes” Bennett and Gaga were clearly both having fun with Porter’s song about changing mores (the verse reads, “Times have changed/And we’ve often rewound the clock/Since the Puritans got a shock/When they landed on Plymouth Rock/If today, any shocks they would try to stem/Instead of landing on Plymouth Rock/Plymouth Rock would land on them”). After that Lady Gaga sang a verse of “Happy Birthday to You” to Bennett on his 95th birthday and then introduced what she claimed would be the last song Tony Bennett will ever sing in public – and of course it was his greatest and most monumental hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

That song had an emotional significance for me, not only because when it became a hit in 1962 it was a blessed respite from all the garbage rock ’n’ roll that was clogging the charts just then (with most of the great rockers from the 1950’s – Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis – sidelined by death, draft or scandal, the pop charts were filled with the so-called “rock” of people like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Brian Hyland, whose hit “Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” would be my choice for the absolute worst song of all time), but because both Tony Bennett and I were born in San Francisco. The song was discovered by Bennett’s long-time accompanist, the late (and beautiful) pianist Ralph Sharon, who thought it might be a nice novelty item for Bennett to add to hsi set list when his upcoming tour played San Francisco. Then Bennett’s label, Columbia, mounted a big promotion for the Broadway musical All American, not only recording the original cast album but having Duke Ellington record an entire album of the All American songs and getting as many of their other artists to record songs from the musical’s score as they could. They assigned Bennett to do the show’s lovely ballad “Once Upon a Time” and needed something to put on the B-side of the record. Bennett and Sharon trotted out their little novelty and recorded it, whereupon some D.J. somewhere flipped the record over, played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and it turned out to be an enormous hit, the biggest of Bennett’s career and the legacy song for which he will no doubt be best remembered when he finally croaks. Kudos are also in order for the exciting jazz band that backed Bennett and Gaga on this show – especially the ferocious Black drummer, whose first name is Donald (I didn’t catch his last name), who drove the performances aggressively.