Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: DANIELA CAPPELLA
Tony Bennett has Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of age-related dementia.
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Read More »Since the COVID lockdown last March, Susan has had to let their assistant go to minimize Tony's potential exposure to the virus. That only increased his total, minute-to-minute dependence on her. The stresses of caring for an Alzheimer's patient can be acute. Because Tony does not wander, Susan can leave him with someone else for an hour to run errands, but otherwise is with him in the apartment. “I have my moments and it gets very difficult,” she said. “It's no fun arguing with someone who doesn't understand you,” she said with a rueful laugh. “But I feel badly talking about it because we are so much more fortunate than so many people with this diagnosis. We have such a good team. Danny handles Tony's business affairs. We have great doctors, David helping us with the exercise.” And Tony himself remains content and happy. It has been that way ever since the diagnosis, which he took calmly. “But that's because he already didn't understand,” Susan said. “He would ask me, ‘What is Alzheimer's?’ I would explain, but he wouldn't get it. He'd tell me, ‘Susan, I feel fine.’ That's all he could process — that physically he felt great. So, nothing changed in his life. Anything that did change, he wasn't aware of." One thing that did not change was Tony's love of music and singing. Music's peculiar power to reach even severely afflicted dementia patients, stirring memories and reestablishing connections to those around them, is well documented but not well understood. The documentary Alive Inside (2014) shows nursing home patients with severe dementia aroused from immobility and silence when issued earbuds and iPods with the favorite music of their youth. One patient, a silent 94-year-old man, begins speaking volubly about his childhood and is able to recall his forgotten daughter after a session of listening to his beloved Cab Calloway. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, author of the best sellers This Is Your Brain on Music and Successful Aging, points out that it is music's primarily emotional appeal that enables it to tap memories not otherwise accessible to a mind afflicted by Alzheimer's disease. Even severely affected patients are often able to recall the lyrics and melodies to songs they loved in adolescence, a time of high emotionality and self-discovery when the developing brain “tags” memories as particularly salient and important. This would go far to explain the astonishing fact that after his diagnosis with Alzheimer's, Tony Bennett continued to tour extensively, singing his 90-minute set of sophisticated music with such panache, precision and professionalism that audiences and critics never suspected his condition. Devi, his neurologist, strongly encouraged Danny and Susan to keep Tony singing and performing for as long as he could happily do so. “It kept him on his toes and also stimulated his brain in a significant way,” Devi told me. Both Susan and Danny said that backstage, Tony could seem utterly mystified about his whereabouts. But the moment he heard the announcer's voice boom “Ladies and gentlemen — Tony Bennett!” he would transform himself into performance mode, stride out into the spotlight, smiling and acknowledging the audience's applause. And start singing. Still, Susan spent every performance, post diagnosis, worried about him losing a lyric, panicking, growing confused onstage. “I was a nervous frigging wreck,” she said. “Yet he always delivered!"
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Read More »And he did so right up to his last public performance, on March 11, 2020, at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey — after which the COVID-19 pandemic forced all musical acts off the road. Just how therapeutically beneficial performing had been for Tony soon became obvious when his world shrank to the confines of his apartment. “This has been a real blow from a cognitive perspective,” Devi told me. “His memory, prior to the pandemic, was so much better. And he's not alone. So many of my patients are negatively affected by the isolation, the inability to do the things that matter to them. For someone like Tony Bennett, the big high he gets from performing was very important." So, Devi recommended that Tony continue to rehearse, and twice a week, his longtime pianist Lee Musiker, who lives a mere three-minute walk away, comes to the apartment and runs through Tony's 90-minute set with him. On the day that I was visiting, Musiker arrived and stuck his head into the art studio where I was sitting with Susan, Danny and Tony. “Hi,” he said. “I'll go set up.” Susan led Tony from the studio to the adjoining living room, an oceanic space that held a black Bösendorfer grand piano. At the far end of the room, under a huge picture window holding a vista of the park, was an arrangement of sofas and chairs beneath a large canvas by Tony's friend, the renowned English artist David Hockney. This was a rehearsal, not a performance, so Tony faced his accompanist, his back to the nearby dining table where Susan, Danny and I sat. Musiker placed a set list on the piano in front of Tony, but they didn't stick to it. Indeed, the first chord Musiker hit was from a song that wasn't on the list and that Tony hadn't sung much in recent years. Yet immediately, incredibly, he opened his mouth and out rolled a stream of rich, resonant notes, swelling up and outward from the lower part of his range, the melancholy tone perfectly matched to the lyric, which he produced with his famously clear articulation: “Maybe this tiiiime, I'll be luckyyyy …” The song was “Maybe This Time” by John Kander and Fred Ebb, made famous by Liza Minelli in the movie Cabaret in 1972, which is when Tony recorded it, in a stunning performance that he reproduced now. The song built in intensity as the lyrics and aching melody mounted into his high register, a full three octaves from where he started, increasing in volume and power until he was filling the room with a crescendoing cry: “It's got to happen, happen sometime—maybe this time, I'll winnnnnnn!"
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