Tony Bennett, He May Have Left His Heart, but He Brought His Hands

He May Have Left His Heart, but He Brought His Hands

By BEN RATLIFF
Published: December 17, 2008
Poise in the wind of uncertainty is a very old idea in American pop. Basically outdated and nearly archaeological, it’s the default disposition of all songs that cycle constantly through cocktail-hour soundtracks, songs from a disappearing race of sanguine, moral-romantic heroes

When Tony Bennett, now 82, enacts that kind of poise onstage, what’s impressive isn’t that he’s doing it at all but how he does it, his consummate and subtle technique. You don’t look at his face for clues of what the song’s about, you look at his hands and gauge the timbre of his voice.

On Tuesday night at the Apollo Theater, where he performed with the Count Basie Orchestra (currently led by Bill Hughes), he kept demonstrating the meaning of lyrics with perfect hand gestures. In Kander and Ebb’s “Maybe This Time,” after he sang the pitifully hopeful epithets “Mr. Peaceful, Mr. Happy,” he raised an open hand, as if he were in a classroom, to finish the line: “that’s what I want to be.” The raised hand meant that these are privileges, not rights.

Near the beginning of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” delivering the line “the glory that was Rome is of another day,” he folded his arms as if about to deliver a history lecture. This is the moment, the motion implied, where you start trusting the protagonist of this song. And in Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand’s “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?,” as he sang the counterintuitive line “the more I love, the more that I’m afraid,” he did something so quickly it was nearly subliminal. It was a slight shoulder shrug; a half-swivel of the wrists so that the left thumb is pointed to 10 o’clock and the right thumb to 2 o’clock; eyebrows raised and eyes looking downward. It meant: This might be hard to understand, but stay with me. Obviously, he made all these gestures while holding a microphone.

Mr. Bennett holds the mike in the left hand, up between his tie knot and his breast pocket, and occasionally down by the button of his jacket; he never raises the upper arm or blocks any part of his face. The crooked-arm posture looks comfortable, as if he’s not thinking about it, but he is a one-man mixing board: he slightly raises or lowers the microphone constantly, depending on the force of his singing — from the conversational level to the almost flamenco-style yelling he got into during the first and last songs of the set — and the force of the band.

In one case he didn’t use the microphone at all. Demonstrating the superior acoustics of the old Apollo — “new theaters are like filing cabinets,” he remarked — he sang “Fly Me to the Moon” accompanied only by his guitarist Gray Sargent. There was no instrumental solo here, and that was the case for most of the songs in this swift, concise show. Mr. Bennett got in and out of songs quickly. When a solo was played — by Mr. Sargent or the drummer Harold Jones or the pianist Lee Musiker — it counted.

The concert looked from a distance as if it might be holiday oriented; Mr. Bennett’s new record, with the Basie band, is “A Swingin’ Christmas.” And there was a short sequence when the show changed gears: Mr. Musiker was replaced by the pianist Monty Alexander, and Mr. Bennett sang a few songs from lyric sheets, including “My Favorite Things” and “Jingle Bells.” It wasn’t his thing: he didn’t particularly swing, gesticulate or pace his delivery. But it didn’t last long. Within 10 minutes the pianists changed again, Mr. Bennett called for the Ellington song “In a Mellow Tone,” and he resumed his role as a delicate, almost scholarly guide to strong emotions — elation, depression and unreasonable hope.