Bennett’s lament for a fallen star

Tony Bennett felt a bond with Amy Winehouse, said Neil McCormick in the London Telegraph. Earlier this year, the legendary singer recorded a duet with Winehouse. Four months later, she was dead. “I broke down and sobbed when I heard the news,” Bennett says. “Of all the young people I’ve met over the past 50 years, she sang the right way. She was ready to take a chance, right on the spot, right on the microphone.” Bennett came to admire the young singer’s fluid, jazz-like phrasing and her “spontaneous and intimate” improvisations.

He understood Winehouse’s demons, too. Now 85, Bennett once had his own issues with drugs and alcohol. In 1979, he nearly died of a cocaine overdose. “I was almost the Amy Winehouse of my day.” A chance encounter changed everything. “I was talking to Woody Allen’s manager, Jeff Rawlins, and he said he used to handle Lenny Bruce. I said, ‘Oh, I knew Lenny, what did you think of him?’ And he said, ‘He sinned against his talent.’” That comment made Bennett clean up his act. “I threw away all kinds of corruption, I just went back to being pretty normal. I’d like to have talked to Amy about that. She had a gift. Don’t sin against your talent.”

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