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Doubling up
Tony Bennett and Townes Van Zandt
BY WAYNE ROBINS

Back in 1967, when Otis Redding was the reigning star of soul music, someone had the idea to team him up with his Stax labelmate, Carla Thomas. In a bit of typical Memphis soul hyperbole, the album was called King and Queen, a set of duets featuring a spontaneous-sounding remake of Lowell Fulsom’s blues standard "Tramp" and other tracks familiar to everyone in the room, along the lines of "Knock on Wood."

The session seemed to have been recorded in one raucous take — you could do that when you had Booker T. and the MG’s plus the Bar-Kays’ horn section behind you. Everyone involved got an "A" in chemistry: Otis and Carla’s "Tramp" remains one of the great soul numbers ever recorded, and during the summer of The Doors and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it became Redding’s first Top 40 hit.

You don’t need Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand to bring you flowers to make the point that most duets are icky exercises in crass commercialism. They’re usually one-of-a-kind things, not to be confused with the work of duos, musical partnerships built from the ground up, from the Everly Brothers to Indigo Girls. Duets are about songs: Michael Jackson brings the ebony, Paul McCartney the ivory (though from appearances, Michael could be carrying the ivory these days too).

But for duets to work, they require musical affinity, creative intelligence, and at least a little empathy. Which is one reason that Tony Bennett and Townes Van Zandt are both good duet performers, and their latest albums standouts.

Van Zandt is a songwriter of great emotional resonance who sang passably, sometimes eloquently, sometimes incoherently, before his death five years ago in a 3-D disintegration: drugs, drink, and depression. Bennett couldn’t be more opposite. At 75, he is hale and hearty and in fine voice, his artistic curiosity still a prime motivation. He discovers unexplored nuances in songs that seem a thousand years old. Maybe that’s because he is also a wonderful painter who can look at familiar landscapes with a fresh eye. No songwriter, he’s free to pursue the art of singing, alone or with pals.

Even if he’s not a "blues" singer. Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues (Columbia) is as cozy and satisfying as its title suggests. It’s suffused with class, from the stay-outta-the-way sensibility of producer Phil Ramone to the dynamic sensitivity of the Ralph Sharon Quartet. Pianist Sharon has been Bennett’s accompanist since the Medici were in power: they go one on one, or with a bass, or bass and drums, or bass, drum, and Gray Sargent on guitar.

Bennett’s other blues excursions have involved the likes of Count Basie. Bennett Sings the Blues doesn’t go against type: the musical personalities he sings and swings with, from Stevie Wonder to Sheryl Crow, from B.B. King to Diana Krall, go with the up-tempo flow that Bennett and Basie established all those years ago.

Van Zandt too brings his compadres to his own turf on Texas Rain: The Texas Hill Country Recordings (Tomato), as appealing and enigmatic a duet album as you’ll hear. It was part of a grandiose master plan by Kevin Eggers, the founder of Tomato Records and Townes’s producer for almost all of the great music of his brilliant, ill-starred life. (A revitalized Tomato will be issuing the Van Zandt catalogue over the next year). Finding a window of opportunity in the late 1980s, when Van Zandt was in good voice and relatively sober, Eggers decided it was time, as he explains over the phone, to have "a new conversation with the songs," some 60 of them, envisioned as a five-album set, and he invited the entire picking and playing contingent of Van Zandt’s musical fans to come to the Fire Station in San Marcos or Willie Nelson’s studio in Pedernales and have a song with Townes.

For Van Zandt, sobriety and stability lasted as long as shooting stars. And though I frown on letting the living (Emmylou Harris, Kathy Mattea) double-track with the dead, as Eggers does here, the cream on Texas Rain’s dozen songs certainly rises to the top. "Blue Wind Blew," with Jerry Jeff Walker, features some not-so-old coots in comfortable boots. Especially easy to love are "Pancho and Lefty" and "Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria," which feature Townes with the golden voice of Freddy Fender taking some verses in Spanish, as well as with Doug Sahm and Augie Meyer of the Sir Douglas Quintet and Rubin Ramos & the Texas Revolution Band. It’s uplifting to hear Townes and his pain seek shelter under a broad musical tent. Then again, Van Zandt couldn’t have too much of that, so the most haunting duet is with Calvin Russell, a tale of poverty, prison, and prophecy. It’s called "Waiting Around To Die."

Issue Date: April 4 - 11, 2002
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