Little Tony

Little Tony (born Antonio Ciacci) was an Italian-born Sammarinese pop singer and actor, who achieved success in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the lead singer of Little Tony & His Brothers, before returning to Italy where he continued a successful career as a singer and film actor. Little Tony began his career in 1957 and produced dozens of albums throughout the next six decades.

Bennett, whose recorded legacy has been gathered in a 76-disc boxed set titled The Compete Collection, has been doing that for over 60 years: saving our souls with the greatest songs ever written. The Complete box is an absolute necessity, first because it contains several previously unreleased albums, like On the Glory Road and From This Moment On, a live concert taped in Las Vegas that collectors have been salivating over since 1964.

This collection features a sampling of four Tony Bennett Christmas albums – Snowfall: The Tony Bennett Christmas Album, Our Favorite Things, Christmas with Tony Bennett, and A Swingin’ Christmas – released between 1968 and 2008. Highlights include such traditional holiday standards as "Silver Bells," "Silent Night," and "Winter Wonderland," plus “Christmas in Herald Square” taken from the album The Playground. This is a nice addition to any Christmas collection.

The Roulette half of the two Bennett/Basie sessions is a band singer's paradise, with the Basie band caught at a robust and swinging peak and Bennett never sounding happier or looser in front of a microphone. The Count himself, alas, appears on piano only on two numbers ("Life Is a Song" and "Jeepers Creepers"), while Bennett's perennial pianist Ralph Sharon takes over on the remaining ten tracks and does all the charts. Yet Sharon writes idiomatically for the Count's style, whether on frantic rave-ups like "With Plenty of Money and You" and "Strike Up the Band" or relaxed swingers like "Chicago." Though not a jazz singer per se, the flavor of jazz is everywhere in Bennett's voice, which in those days soared like a trumpet…

“Bennett’s ability to straddle jazz and popular music was one he shared with few others. He managed to retain more of a jazz feel than either, and that’sN what Basie senses in him: a kindred spirit who is devoted to the not so very taxing business of s(w)inging the song with minimum distraction.”

Billie Holiday. The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing. Billie Holiday's highly stylized reading of this blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry for either the song or the band…

When "Polk Salad Annie" blared from transistor radio speakers in the summer of 1969, the first thought was of Creedence Clearwater Revival, for Tony Joe White's swamp rock bore more than a passing resemblance to the sound John Fogerty whipped up on Bayou Country and Green River. But White was the real thing – he really was from the bayou country of Louisiana, while Fogerty's bayou country was conjured up in Berkeley, CA. Plus, White had a mellow baritone voice that sounded like it had been dredged up from the bottom of the Delta. Besides "Annie," side one of this album includes several other White originals. The best of these are "Willie and Laura Mae Jones," a song about race relations with an arrangement similar to "Ballad of Billie Joe," and "Soul Francisco," a short piece of funky fluff that had been a big hit in Europe in 1968. "Aspen, Colorado" presages the later "Rainy Night in Georgia," a White composition popularized by Brook Benton. The second side consists of covers of contemporary hits, with the funky "Who's Making Love" and "Scratch My Back" faring better than the slow stuff.