I’m often asked how I’ve been able to continue evolving as a singer while keeping my voice in such great shape at the age of eighty-six. It’s like anything else; you’ve gotta take care of yourself in mind and in body. I make it a point to work out at the gym at least three times a week. I also avoid elevators and escalators, and insist on taking the stairs.
You don’t need a strenuous regime to stay fit. As long as you make it a daily habit, even a little exercise can be effective. The same holds true for the voice. The vocal cords are a muscle; if you don’t use it, you lose it. That’s why I run through my scales whenever I can. It doesn’t take much time at all, especially when I apply the method I learned when I was starting out.
Pietro D’Andrea, a talented vocal coach—I named my first son, D’Andrea (Danny), after him—taught me the technique that has kept my voice strong all these years. It’s called bel canto, which means “beautiful singing.” This method originated in Italy and was popular in opera through most of Europe during the eighteenth century. The style emphasized graceful phrasing, pure, even tones, and a disciplined form of breath control. It never fails to improve my voice.
Bel canto teaches you to love every note that you sing. It’s the art of intimate singing; you’re singing into someone’s ear. Many of the Jewish cantors are incredible vocalists because they were trained in bel canto. This technique has really saved my voice over the years. I do my scales with a tape cassette of exercises from Pietro. He always said, “The first day you don’t do your scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows.” I’ve kept that in mind, and I always return to the basics to keep my voice in shape.
If you’re going to sing, you have to sing in tune. You have to be right on target, as if you’re an archer aiming for the bull’s-eye. It is essential to hit as close to the center as possible. It takes a lot of practice and hard work to make something as simple as a note sound so perfectly effortless.
The old Italian masters like Giotto knew this. Giotto had been asked to submit a drawing to Pope Boniface, who was at the time commissioning some paintings at St. Peter’s. With only a brush dipped in red paint, Giotto effortlessly painted a perfect circle with one continuous stroke. When the pope was shown the work and it was explained to him how it was achieved, freehand with no compass, he understood the scope of Giotto’s abilities and gave him the commission. Like singing a note in tune, painting a circle might seem simple, especially considering that it took Giotto only moments to achieve—but as Giotto pointed out to the courtiers, to create it, he drew upon a lifetime of learning. It took years of training and a wealth of cumulative knowledge to get to the place where he could execute something that well.
On the topic of Italian artists, did you know that there are over fifty geniuses from that country, including Michelangelo, Galileo, da Vinci, Fermi, and so on? Italians also created the art of sprezzatura, which was the ability of courtiers to be well versed in almost every science—from the physical to the arts, to languages. And Italians invented the violin and the piano, as well as the orchestra; they came up with everyone playing the instruments together.
All the great masters, whether from Italy or elsewhere, spent decades as apprentices before going on to perfect their work. They learned their craft and mastered the basic techniques until they became experts. Picasso studied the early Egyptian painters and the Old Masters; later on he applied their techniques to his modern works.
As with art, it takes a long time and a lot of work before you get comfortable as a performer. I’ve been doing this for six decades; I’ve made over seventy albums, so I’ve put in the time. Many people think what I do is effortless, but it takes years of practice to make it look so easy. Before I head into the studio to record an album, I prepare. The result is a seamless recording finished in a few days. I recorded Perfectly Frank, which has twenty-eight songs, in three days. But before I set foot in the studio, I’d been preparing for three months.
When I was asked to record a song for a movie soundtrack, I couldn’t travel to the studio in Los Angeles, so we recorded the song through a fiber-optic tie line transmitted from New York. They had booked six hours for the session, but my son Danny told them it wouldn’t take nearly that long. “He records a whole album in six hours,” he told them. But they didn’t believe him.
The day came. I ran the song down, and there was silence on the end of the phone.
“Hello?” I said.
“Oh my God, that was fantastic,” the producers replied.
“I was just warming up,” I said. I think they were starting to understand what Danny had meant. We recorded the song in one take. “Wow,” the producer on the phone said. “It took you fifteen minutes to do that.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Fifteen minutes and fifty years.”
I had to learn the hard way that you have to know the basics of the business before you can expect to succeed. But many of today’s artists are coming up out of schools—such as Berklee in Boston or Juilliard in New York—that teach these principles. Lady Gaga studied piano and voice at New York University, where she worked with good teachers, and she’s a fantastic singer and dancer. Yet even with all her talent, she was wise enough to know that singing alone would just get her performing in small clubs and bars, so she created a whole show with outrageous costumes and sets. Michael Bublé has a savvy attitude about how to emulate others. He’s clever about putting a little bit of those influences into his act—a little Dean Martin, a little Sinatra, a little of me. He puts on a great show and makes it all his own.
I’m so pleased to see that many contemporary artists are getting their education nowadays and are so well prepared. Since it takes years to become a consummate performer, they’re getting a jump on their craft.
For me, singing provides the ability to dig deep into my own psyche. The human voice is more flexible than any other instrument in existence. It can express various nuances in tone, volume, and inflections that are beyond compare. It gives me the ability to tap right into the innermost feelings deep in my soul and communicate them in ways that are not possible otherwise. It keeps me in touch with my own true nature, which in fact is a reflection of the nature that surrounds us all.
The voice communicates and makes a direct connection to the listener. This is what unites me as a performer to my audience; we are able to share the experience as one. When the audience listens to me, I hope that, even if for only a couple of hours, I give them the ability to forget about all their daily worries and cares. That’s really my goal—to make people feel good through the art of singing.
The Zen of Bennett
Bel canto teaches you to love every note that you sing.
To hit it down the line every time like Federer does in tennis, you have to do a lot of practice.
Even the greatest artists of all time learned their craft and mastered the basic techniques until they became experts.
It takes years of practice to be able to make the best work seem effortless.