Bennett’s Back, With Blues on His Mind

“I can’t believe I get to sing with Tony Bennett!” says a beaming Bonnie Raitt, having in fact just teamed with Bennett on the song “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues” at celebrated Studio A at Capitol Records in Hollywood.

Bennett is excited as well. And why not? The last time he did an album featuring guest singers from the rock generation--1994’s “MTV Unplugged” featuring k.d. lang and Elvis Costello--he won the album of the year Grammy Award. He also came up with his best-selling album in years (almost 750,000 copies) and became an unlikely Gen X hero.

But Bennett doesn’t look at the new project, “Bennett Sings the Blues,” a collection with duet partners including Raitt, lang, Sheryl Crow, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Stevie Wonder and veteran Kay Starr, as a follow-up to “Unplugged.”

“Every album I make is different,” the crooner says between sessions. “Sinatra taught me as a youngster, ‘Be unpredictable.’ I made an album with only drummers years ago.”

That doesn’t mean Bennett, who’ll be 75 in August, isn’t targeting the younger demographic with this album, due in November from Columbia Records.

“We connected with young people [with “Unplugged’], and for a guy my age, that’s beautiful,” says Bennett. “The wonderful thing about this project is with the blues, young people love it. They have fun with it, and for me it’s a definite creative idea.”

Danny Bennett, the singer’s son and manager who is credited with steering his father to the younger audience in the early ‘90s, acknowledges that this is an opportunity to renew that bond.

“That audience is 10 years older now and this kind of record will appeal to them,” he says. “But my objective is to do whatever record [my father] wants to do. This record is not pandering to the audience, but is a natural evolution.”

The commercial strength of the disc is a question mark. “It’s very hard to predict, it’s definitely not a slam dunk,” says Bob Feterl, regional manager of the Tower chain. “If it gets critical acclaim and good buzz right off when it hits the streets, it has a chance to do well. It will need reviews, press, things like that, because it may not have a lot going at radio.”

The guests on the project were picked by Tony not for their commercial appeal, but their appropriateness for the material. Crow, he says, impressed him with her feeling for blues and jazz when they both performed at a show for Monaco’s Prince Albert a few years ago.

The album is being done in quick, live-in-studio sessions in L.A. and New York, produced by fellow Grammy-winner Phil Ramone, with Bennett’s longtime pianist Ralph Sharon leading small combos featuring such jazz-blues accents as Michael Melvoin’s Hammond B3 organ.

“A blues record is not something I planned,” Bennett says. “I never really thought about it. But the first question I always ask when I hear someone sing is, ‘Are they feeling it?’ With the blues, you can tell with the first note if it has feeling.”