Appreciation: For Tony Bennett, there was never anything more beautiful than a song

Whenever anyone asked Tony Bennett how he kept his passion for performance alive, the legendary singer always gave the same answer.

“I tell people when they ask why haven’t I retired that I don¹t feel like I have worked a day in my life,” Bennett said when we spoke in 2018 before the then-92-year-old icon played a pair of Southern California shows. “As I have been doing what I love the most — performing for people and entertaining them and making them happy.”

And that truly was the bottom line for Bennett, who died Friday just two weeks shy of his 97th birthday. He loved to sing, and he’d sing for anyone anywhere anytime.

As a boy growing up in Queens, New York, he sang for his family on Sunday afternoons. As a teenager, he was a singing waiter in Italian restaurants in the neighborhood. After serving in World War II, the young Anthony Benedetto started singing professionally, catching the attention of Pearl Bailey, who asked him to open for her in a Greenwich Village nightclub.

Comedian Bob Hope caught one of those shows, and at the start of the ’50s took him on tour and suggested he change his name to Tony Bennett. In 1951, “Because of You” gave him his first No. 1 hit. “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” gave him a signature song and his first platinum album in 1962.

For most singers of his generation all those successes and the others he achieved would have faded into distant memories years ago,. But Bennett kept going, trying new things. In the ’90s, his son Danny urged him to start singing for younger audiences, and in 1994 Bennett taped an episode of MTV’s “Unplugged,” singing standards with his quartet, a few with guests that included Elvis Costello and k.d. lang.

There were no cringey rock crossovers or embarrassing dance remixes. Bennett reached these new generations of fans, most of them unfamiliar with the Great American Songbook, without changing a thing in the jazz and pop stylings that made him the Great American Singer.

“For them the songs I sang were completely new to them,” he told me of the his appeal to the MTV crowd. “I think this music is timeless and it is intelligently written and communicates with everyone — it isn’t based on a demographic.”

Years later, Bennett and Lady Gaga met after performing separately at a benefit concert, and a deep friendship and musical collaboration formed despite the six decades that separated their ages.

“I said, ‘Well I never saw her, let me take a look,’” Bennett told me in a 2015 conversation before he and Lady Gaga played a pair of shows at the Hollywood Bowl on tour for “Cheek to Cheek,” their Grammy-winning album of standards. “And I couldn’t believe how much the audience loved her. I said, ‘I’ve got to go backstage and meet her.’”

Bennett’s fondness for “Lady,” as he called her in that in that interview, was matched by Lady Gaga’s when we spoke separately about the friendship.

“She’s really a one-of-a-kind,” Bennett said then. “On my birthday last year, I was at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. And I looked out the window and there was a beautiful small red airplane, and it (pulled a banner that) said, ‘Happy birthday, Tony – Lady Gaga.’ She flew it around San Francisco for about two hours.”

Bennett, Lady Gaga said, felt like a lifelong friend almost from the moment they met.

“I feel much more comfortable hanging out with and talking to him than I do any artist my age,” she said. “He doesn’t feel like my father or grandfather, he feels much more like a friend, a guy friend. His age is nothing to me.

“What I love most about him is that he just goes straight to the deep stuff. He’s not interested in talking about the weather. He’s not interested in playing with niceties. Tony’s as real as it gets, and that’s why this album came out the way it did, because he took me as I am.”