Tony Bennett’s Time of Rediscovery

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Tony Bennett strolled out of the Blue Note, a jazz joint in Greenwich Village, after hearing a set by a pal, Jay Leonhart, the bass player, composer and singer.

Bennett stopped to talk with friends. A kid accidentally bumped him, backed off and then did a double-take. The kid’s face lit up. He pulled out a notebook. “Hey, sign this for me, will you?” he said.

The singer grinned good-naturedly. He borrowed a pen and complied.

Only a little thing. But it is amazing that a 63-year-old singer of works by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer would be recognized by someone of an era in which only Bon Jovi seems to be spoken.

“No, I get a lot of that these days, and I don’t mind,” Bennett said. “The kids are starting to listen, starting to realize there’s a lot of good songs out there . . . and the advent of the compact disc sure has helped.

“That’s brought everybody back to collecting records . . . instead of using them as something your dog can chase after.”

Like those of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, many of Bennett’s earlier albums now are in CD form, touching off rediscoveries and often discoveries of what some musical elders call the Right Stuff.

It helps the cause, though, that Bennett has recorded “The Art of Excellence” and “Bennett/Berlin” CDs for Columbia in recent years, and drawn critics’ praise each time out. He has another one due out next month.

It’s called “Astoria: A Portrait of an Artist,” done with strings, reeds, French horns and the Ralph Sharon trio that backs Bennett in concerts.

Astoria is the working-class section of Queens, N.Y., where Bennett was born. He recorded the album there last June, at the same Astoria Studios where Bill Cosby tapes his hit NBC sitcom.

“It’s a concept album about someone who goes back home and reflects on his whole life,” said Bennett. His new effort has a batch of new songs and some fine old ones, the latter including “The Girl I Love.” (It’s actually the Gershwin evergreen “The Man I Love,” but with male-vocalist lyrics written by Gershwin’s lyricist brother, Ira, Bennett explained.)

He doubtless will be doing a few songs from the album on Friday, when he plays the Universal Amphitheatre, and again in a two-week November tour of Japan with the big band of Harry (Sweets) Edison, whose bluesy trumpet graced several Sinatra albums arranged by the late Nelson Riddle.

Japan, whose jazz fans are many and devoted, isn’t new to Bennett. He has toured there for several years. But he found a new experience last fall, when he was the opening act for Tokyo’s new Blue Note, a virtual duplicate of the one in New York.

“In concerts, they’re very quiet, polite and cheer you at the end of the show,” he said. “But at the Blue Note, I got to rub shoulders with them. I found them very sweet, very shy, very respectful of a performer. And it’s a helluva lot of fun.”

It wasn’t much fun in 1971 when Columbia, after 88 albums in 21 years and an assortment of Bennett ballad hits that started with “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” in 1950, decided to part ways with him.

However, unlike others in the unsynthesized section of popular music, Bennett--who partly learned his craft listening to jazzmen such as Lester Young and Stan Getz--never waved the flag of surrender and vanished into the land of past tense.

He kept on performing, increasingly interpreting the old masters in concerts, clubs and on public TV--the most recent in that arena a “Live From Wolf Trap” appearance that aired this year.

“It worked out for the best,” he said. “I was able to perform more.”

Last year, enjoying a resurgence aided by the Columbia deal in 1986 that led to his new CDs, he played two distinctly different venues--NBC’s David Letterman show and Radio City Music Hall.

The recording deal, a Columbia spokesman said, “is on an album-by-album basis.”

Bennett likes this approach. In the old days, he said, he had to cut three albums a year, “and it was a panic all the time to get them out. Now I do one every 18 months . . . and I have the liberty of singing whatever I want on the album.”

Although it’s widely believed he hadn’t recorded anything until the Columbia rapprochement, his dossier includes two albums he made in the ‘70s in Berkeley with the late Bill Evans, a brilliant jazz pianist.

The first, now in the category of hard-to-find, was made for Fantasy Records in 1975. It includes Evans’ highly melodic jazz classic, “Waltz for Debby,” for which Evans wrote lyrics.

Two years later, they did it again, this time a CD for Bennett’s short-lived Improv label. It includes another classic, Thad Jones’ lovely “A Child Is Born,” with lyrics by Alec Wilder, himself a pretty fair composer.

“Annie Ross, the singer, suggested the whole thing,” Bennett said. “She got me together with Bill and he told me, ‘Let’s just keep all the cronies home and just have you and I in the studio.’ ”

They spent three days on each album, just the singer and the pianist, “and it was amazing each time. We just played straight through, said ‘Keep the tape rolling,’ and kind of made up the whole production right on the spot.”

When Bennett plays the Amphitheatre, it is likely he’ll sing what has become his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” His pianist, Ralph Sharon, discovered it and suggested that Bennett sing it in their first engagement in the City by the Bay.

That was in 1962. He still sings it, still gets requests for it. Is he perhaps, er, sick of singing it by now?

He just laughed. “Do you ever get sick of making love?”