I had heard the name Amy Winehouse, but never heard a single song of hers until after she had died. I hadn't really been all that interested in exploring her music, as all that I had known of her was that she was a drug addict, but died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27. And to be sure, there had been some disastrous concerts where she was too drunk to perform. I learned recently that she also had a heavy smoking addiction, to the extent that years earlier she had been treated for serious respiratory illness which was extremely rare for somebody so young. That's usually an elderly person's problem after smoking heavily their entire life. If Amy died now, they probably would say she died of the corona virus.
It was a Tony Bennett album, Duets II, that introduced me to Amy's music. I have liked Tony Bennett since I was 17 years old, when he released his album, "If I Ruled The World". I was entranced by his song, "Song of the Jet", and a whole lifetime later, when I decided to sing a song in a public concert, that was the song I chose to sing.
What made me buy Tony's album Duets II was that it had been arranged by Jorge Calandrelli. I will talk more about Jorge Calandrelli later in this series. Even as far back as when I was in nursery school and allowed to play music on my parents' records player in the living room (my mother said I was so careful and reverent with the records that I was allowed to do it), I was aware of songwriters, because you could read their names right on the labels of the records we had back then, black vinyl records with a song on each side. Yes, I could read then, and I got so I could see that some of the music that I liked best were because of the songwriters, not necessarily the singers, so I knew how to choose songs based on who wrote them. Than much later in life I expanded to choosing my music based on the arrangers. Nowadays I say that I don't have a favorite singer or song writer, etc. but a favorite arranger. While I truly like Tony Bennett very much, I don't have every album he ever made. But I can say that I have every recording that Jorge Calandrelli arranged or composed! And that took some doing, to find all those, because songs aren't marketed based on the arrangers!
I highly recommend that Duets II Tony Bennett album, so many great tracks on that album, but the one that stopped me in my tracks was his duet with Amy Winehouse. Tony had a huge admiration for Amy and it was quite a great gift for him to ask her to join him in a song on that exemplary album. He put her in a category quite close to Ella Fitzgerald (whom Quincy Jones said was THE best in the business), so that was extremely high praise for Amy. I just fell in love with her. Yes, there was a certain "roughness" to her, which I think might have been based on her being nervous in that recording session, despite the fact that she had performed in huge stadiums and Tony was being so kind to her and supportive of her. You can see how she was for yourself, since I chose to link this to a video of that recording session. She was so sweet, vulnerable, and coquettish, but she has you in the palm of your hand.
Amy died two weeks after that recoding. Quite soon after that, a movie was made about her, Amy, which I saw. Her husband is blamed for getting her into drugs but what I got out of it was the misery of fame. For example, I never grasped before I saw that movie how awful the paparazzi are in general. Regarding her, they were like locusts, just countless numbers of them watching her and her husband whenever they ventured out--swarms of them walking with them, surrounding them, constantly taking pictures of their every move, telling her to pose a certain way, always under foot any and everywhere. It made me absolutely hate them, people who treat people as a commodity like that, deny them a single shred of privacy and peace and quiet rest. They could really drive a sensitive soul to drink themselves to death.
18. Song Name: Body and Soul (Video)
Artists: Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse
Lyrics by: Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, and Frank Eyton
Music by: Johnny Green
Arranger: Jorge Calandrelli
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