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NEW YORK -- Tony Bennett, the eminent stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and knack for creating new standards graced a decadeslong career that brought him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday. He was 96.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett's death to The Associated Press, saying he died in New York. There was no specific cause, but Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2016.
Bennett often said his lifelong ambition was to create "a hit catalog rather than hit records," which he accomplished through more than 70 albums, garnering 19 Grammys -- all but two after he reached his 60s. If his singing and public life lacked the emotional drama of Sinatra's, Bennett appealed with an easy, courtly manner and an uncommonly rich and durable tenor that made him a master of caressing a ballad or brightening an up-tempo number.
"I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems," he told the AP in 2006. "I think people … are touched if they hear something that's sincere and honest and maybe has a little sense of humor. … I just like to make people feel good when I perform."
Bennett received many accolades from fellow singers, but none so meaningful than when his friend and mentor Sinatra said in a 1965 Life magazine interview: "For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more."
In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for "Cheek to Cheek," his collaboration with Lady Gaga. Three years earlier, he topped the charts with "Duets II," featuring such contemporary pop stars as Gaga, Carrie Underwood, and Amy Winehouse in her last studio recording.
For Bennett, one of the few performers to move easily between pop and jazz, such collaborations were part of his crusade to expose young audiences to what he called the Great American Songbook.
"No country has given the world such great music," Bennett said in a 2015 interview with Downbeat Magazine. "Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. Those songs will never die."
Ironically, it was two unknowns, George Cory and Douglass Cross, who provided Bennett with his signature song when his career was in a lull. They gave Bennett's musical director, pianist Ralph Sharon, some sheet music he forgot about until he was packing for a tour that included a stop in San Francisco.
"Ralph saw some sheet music in his shirt drawer … and on top of the pile was a song called 'I Left My Heart In San Francisco.' Ralph thought it would be good material for San Francisco," Bennett said. "We were rehearsing and the bartender in the club in Little Rock, Arkansas, said, 'If you record that song, I'm going to be the first to buy it.'"
Released in 1962 as a B-side, it became a grassroots phenomenon, staying on the charts for more than two years and earning Bennett his first two Grammys, including record of the year.
Bennett may have sung about San Francisco, but his heart belonged to Astoria, the working-class community in the New York borough of Queens, where he grew up as Anthony Dominick Benedetto during the Great Depression.