Astoria’s Tony Bennett Proves You Can Go Home Again : Tony Bennett

These are good times for Tony Bennett and Anthony Benedetto.

Anthony Benedetto is, of course, Tony Bennett’s alter ego: the Benedetto signature is attached to oil paintings, water colors and pastels seen at exhibitions around the world.

Bennett the singer continues to wend his way across continents; he returned to Los Angeles last week from a tour of Britain and will appear Tuesday at the Betty Clooney Foundation benefit at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Bennett’s latest album, “Astoria: Portrait of the Artist,” is an effort with more than a trace of deja vu surrounding it. The album front shows Bennett standing in his Astoria neighborhood at age 15, while the back cover has him in the same spot last year at age 63.

“My son Danny, who’s been my manager and producer for 11 years, came up with the photo idea,” Bennett said the other day. “We were amazed to find almost nothing has changed. It’s a blue-collar town with secretaries, teachers, writers; only 15 minutes from New York, yet just like a little Midwestern town. It was a wonderful environment to grow up in.”

The music in the album is about “looking back, as well as looking ahead,” said Bennett.

It opens with “When Do the Bells Ring for Me?,” a new song by Charles de Forest that evokes for Bennett the days when, looking across the East River at the New York skyline, he wondered whether good fortune would strike.

The break came in 1949 when he was spotted in a Pearl Bailey revue in Greenwich Village by Bob Hope, who changed his stage name from Joe Bari to Tony Bennett and took him on a 10-day tour. A year later, he auditioned for Mitch Miller at Columbia Records with a demo record of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” It became Bennett’s first release and was a semi-hit.

“It got me on the road to places like Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston. Because I still love the song, I recorded it again for this album.”

Charles de Forest is represented by two other songs on “Portrait of the Artist”; “Where Do You Go From Love?” and “I’ve Come Home Again,” the latter almost involuntarily commissioned by Bennett.

“De Forest is a great musician in the Cole Porter tradition,” he said. “He’s always been famous in New York, playing piano at East Side clubs. I heard him one night battling a noisy crowd that was either paying no attention or asking him to play ‘Melancholy Baby.’ I tried to tell him, over the noise, that I was doing an album reflecting back on life in my hometown.

“I didn’t even think he’d heard me in that din, but the next morning at 10 a.m. he came over with this new piece, and I was so taken with him, I wound up doing three of his songs.”

Most of the other tunes relate to friends or places in Bennett’s past.

“A Little Street Where Old Friends Meet” reminds him, he says, of “my days as a singing waiter (in New York), when I’d wait on tables and take requests. Al Cohn, the saxophonist, played on some of my early jobs.

“The song ‘I Was Lost, I Was Drifting’ was suggested to me by Ella Fitzgerald. It brings back the days when I really was lost, just back from my World War II service in the infantry and trying to adjust to civilian life.

“Carmen McRae, who always comes up with wonderful song ideas--she suggested ‘For Once In My Life’ and ‘Georgia Rose’--gave me ‘It’s Like Reaching for the Moon.’ She knew it from an old record by another of my early idols, Billie Holiday.”

Bob Wells and Jack Segal, who composed “When Joanna Loves Me” for Bennett’s eldest daughter, have followed it up with an attractive sequel, “Antonia,” for her young sister, now 15.

If there aren’t as many singers recording the kind of classic pop material Bennett favors, he feels the reasons are primarily economic. “Everybody today,” he said, “is too involved with who’s making the most money. When we started out, it was who did the best recordings. That’s why the Nat Coles, the Louis Armstrongs, the Sinatras were always right on top. Now it’s too much of a media push.”

Vic Damone, a contemporary who still does the great pop tunes, feels it’s the love of singing, rather than the money, that keeps Bennett going. “I’ve seen some of the places he’s worked,” Damone recalled, “and said to myself, ‘Wait, what is he doing here?’ Then I’d watch him onstage--often he didn’t know I was in the audience--and he’d be experimenting, trying out songs. Later I’d see him elsewhere and some songs he’d retained, others were gone.

“There’s no facade with Tony; what you see and hear is what you get. He just sings with his heart and I love him.”

Danny Bennett, who has become closely involved with every aspect of his father’s musical and artistic activities (both Bennett and Benedetto), feels that lately a significant goal in his father’s career has been reached. “I always wanted to see that he could be free to do whatever he wants,” Danny said, “to finally have, for once in his 40-plus years in the business, the ability to relax and know that everything is taken care of.”

Pianist-conductor Ralph Sharon, who worked with the singer from 1954-65 and then rejoined him in 1979, is another person who’s deeply important to Bennett. “Ralph is closer than a brother to me,” Bennett said. “Of course, he found ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ for me, and many other songs, but what’s important is his great temperament and his ability to make the show work, to understand me and conduct so that it all comes together.”

Bennett has long been highly respected in the world of music. The quotes from Bing Crosby (“The best singer I’ve ever heard”) and Sinatra (“The best in the business; he excites me whenever I hear him”) are the stuff of legend. Less often cited is his empathy with jazzmen.

“He was so easy to work with,” said Tommy Flanagan, Bennett’s pianist for a year in the late 1960s. “And he could be spontaneous. He was on a Grammy award show and everything was blocked out. Then at the last minute, Duke Ellington showed up and said, ‘Tony and I will do it this way.’ We had been out there for hours and they changed it all around in five minutes, but Tony loved it.”

Spontaneity was a central force in “Tony Bennett Jazz,” a collection of Columbia sessions that found Bennett comfortable in the company of Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, Nat Adderley, Art Blakey, Al Cohn, Joe Marsala and the Count Basie Orchestra.

Bennett always finds time to paint or draw. “I’m kind of into Chinese scrolls right now,” he said. “Also, if I come to a town, say like Pittsburgh and I see a panoramic view from my hotel room, I’ll sketch that. I also recently did a painting of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, sort of a moody thing--a nice painting, I think, and I’m hoping that the Smithsonian Institution will take it, to be added to their Ellington archives.”

The current Bennett vocal tour will not include a return to one of his favorite venues--the Venetian Room at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where he played last New Year’s Eve just before the room’s talent policy was abandoned. It seemed like an ominous symbol for his values.

“But what happened,” Bennett said, “was that we did so much business, the owners had a change of heart. I gave them a list of names like Peggy Lee, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Mel Torme, people that could still fill the room; now it looks as though they may reopen four nights a week. That closing night was a sad occasion for us all; but maybe things are looking up after all.”