Lady Gaga - Bang Bang

Lady Gaga - Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) (Live from Jazz At Lincoln Center) pic.twitter.com/RvOwLQpfee

— Yaren (@gaga_countess) August 3, 2016

Interview: Lady Gaga + Tony Bennett

Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com

After Tony Bennett and I spent a few minutes catching up at his art studio two weeks ago, we sat down on a sofa to chat for The Wall Street Journal (go here) about Cheek to Cheek, his new duet album with Lady Gaga (go here). Ten minutes into our conversation, I asked him a question that for many jazz fans is the elephant in the room:

"What do you say to fans who view the new album as a marketing strategy—a ploy, if you will, to rejuice your hip image and to give Lady credibility with an older and valuable demographic?" 

Tony paused to think. The answer that followed blew my mind, reminding me that Tony's instincts and commitment to art are so much more interesting than most people realize:

"No, no, I don't think that's true," he said. "Lady's a real jazz singer—an improviser who sings these songs differently each time we do them. If we tour, I think many people are going to say, 'Wow, we had no idea she could sing that well.' Look, jazz is so special—I've always wanted to let young people know about it. The world loves jazz, more so than here in most cases. When Lady finished her concert in Japan recently, 40,000 fans were screaming and she said, 'I'll be back and it will be all jazz next time.' That's my dream—to bring jazz out so it won't be forgotten."

So while this partnership between an 88-year-old jazz and pop icon and a 28-year-old phenomenon is the merging of two fascinating recording artists and performers, this is also about jazz's cultural longevity. And the approach is really quite radical: to preserve jazz, you don't need to sell it like soap or dress up in suits and ties; you merely have to expose more young people to it through high-profile ambassadors who love it and want to share the passion. The music will do the rest.

On Friday, I interviewed Lady Gaga by phone from Dubai (go here). We talked about her passion for jazz (she boxes while Ella Fitzgerald is playing), her love of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, and why Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn have been meaningful to her since age 14. Then I asked her the question that's probably on most jazz fans' minds:

"Some may think your interest in jazz is just a fling, that it's just a phase. True?"


"Not at all," she said from the side of the road in Dubai, where she asked her driver to pull over for better phone reception. "I'm planning to release one jazz album a year. I think I will continue to do that forever. I enjoy it so much. I want to spread it to all of my fans."

Let's take two steps back, if we may, for some perspective. The music industry has changed radically in the past five years. If you're a close reader of Billboard as I am, then you know that the way top artists make their living today isn't by recording albums but by touring. You only have to check the concert grosses in the magazine's BoxScore chart to see where the clef signs meet the road. Tony has been recording with young talent since 1994 and knows that for jazz and pop—our music—to endure, you have to expose young people to its virtues, and the best place to do that is on TV or live in concert. All those cell phone pictures and blurry performance YouTubes? Think of it as marketing.

Lady Gaga—whom I found highly articulate, passionate and open when we spoke—works extremely hard and will be touring steadily through Thanksgiving before heading home to the U.S. Just listening to her talk about the road is exhausting. Personally, I sensed a loneliness in her voice, a sadness and fatigue with the pop industry, which she said thrives today on scandal, hype and working talent to the bone to cover costs. My guess is that part of Lady's proclivity for revolving fashion-forward looks and costume changes is art along the lines of photographer Cindy Sherman. But it's also a way for Lady to create an ever-shifting series of personalities so that her original self can hide out in disguise. It's hard to blame her.

But inside this dollhouse of concerts, photo shoots and tabloid stories is a desire on her part to get real, to perform music that actually satisfies her and makes her feel artistically special. Enter Tony Bennett.

JazzWax clips: Here's Tony in 1993 presenting at the MTV Video Music Awards with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Be sure you're sitting down when you view. Move the bar to 2:14 if you want just the presentation...

Here's Tony and Lady singing I Can't Give You Anything But Love...

And here's Lady and Tony singing Anyting Goes...

read more: www.jazzwax.com
Used with permission by Marc Myers

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett

Legendary singer turns 88 next week. Gaga's body language shows she has no poker face.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, July 30, 2014, 2:35 PM

KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES

She leans in. He stays upright.

She paws his arm and gazes his way. He keeps his hands entirely to himself while looking straight ahead.

Such has been the squirm-inducing body language between Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett in a blitzkrieg of appearances this week to promote their upcoming album of jazz standards, “Cheek To Cheek,” which arrives Sept. 23.

Throughout their appearances, her message has been consistently flirtatious and insinuating. His — grandfatherly and kind.

It's looking like Lady Gaga has daddy issues. And people are noticing.

“Watching @Todayshow and Lady Gaga is just creepy,” tweeted Corey Buchholz.

read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/lady-gaga-daddy-issues-tony-bennett-article-1.1885775

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga Make Surprise ....

Press Release: Interscope Records – Mon, 16 Jun, 2014 7:31 PM EDT
NEW YORK, June 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga thrilled over 700 NYC high school students at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts on the last day of school by making a surprise appearance on site today.   Frank Sinatra School of the Arts (FSSA) was founded by Tony Bennett in his hometown of Astoria, Queens and Bennett usually attends graduation but this year due to his tour schedule he is unable to join.  Instead, he decided to do something special for the last day of classes, so he asked his good friend Lady Gaga to join him for a master class in the school's Tony Bennett Concert Hall.

Moderated by NBC's Lester Holt, Gaga and Bennett conversed on stage about a variety of subjects including jazz music, The Great American Songbook, creativity and also fielded questions from the students. Then Tony Bennett performed the classic "The Very Thought of You" followed by Lady Gaga's wonderful version of "Every Time We Say Goodbye." In a spontaneous and playful moment, the two began to serenade each other with the standard "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Gaga then added in a cheek to cheek slow dance. Several musicians have done master classes at FSSA including Billy Joel and Paul McCartney.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140616/118730
read more: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tony-bennett-lady-gaga-surprise-233100272.html

JAZZ: Going Gaga for all that jazz

SHE has taken tea with Julian Assange, spoken out against homophobia and fracking, and shared the LennonOno Grant for Peace with Pussy Riot and investigative writer John Perkins.

But in SA last weekend, Lady Gaga refused to accredit South African news photographers for her Johannesburg concert, robbing them of the right to a livelihood and the public of honest (un-Photoshopped) images. Those pictures you saw the next day were issued to newspapers by the company Live Nation.

This is not the first time the Gaga organisation has restricted journalists: it also happened on the Austrian leg of her tour, which journalists consequently boycotted. The organisation shows scant real respect for some aspects of freedom — despite profiting from South African free-speech protections after religious conservatives here lobbied for Gaga’s show to be banned.

Pop megastars often attempt to shackle the press worldwide. The artist’s image must remain consistent with her marketing, so interviews are sometimes scripted and usually chaperoned, and photographs are digitally airbrushed.

A tour is a vastly lucrative property, and various aspects — for example, the right to the future revenue from all images — are tied down or sold off before any tour contract is even finalised. Yet few South Africans outside the media will have known of the censorship.

The South African National Editors Forum statement of protest scored few column inches, and headline-writers still drooled "Spectacular!" and "Wow!" after the show.

Gaga is merely another pop commodity, but the regularly supine and fawning attitude of showbiz columnists to such restrictions opens a very dangerous door.

There will be justifiable furore if only sanctioned images from Mangaung are permitted. Yet Gaga’s publicists hang from the same low branch of the evolutionary tree as the thugs smashing reporters’ cameras at political conferences.

All these attempts at control, of course, look positively medieval in a digital era where anyone with a smartphone can grab and transmit images. Yet because of their broader implications, it is sad when few journalists anywhere interrogate whether Gaga’s noisily publicised views on human rights are anything more than another tissue in her carefully managed packaging.

Jazz artists in general love to talk about their music and prefer to play rather than preen. None of this week’s live music will be tainted by such restrictions — and the music is enjoying a flurry of activity before all but coastal venues close down for the holiday season.

Read more on: http://za.news.yahoo.com/jazz-going-gaga-jazz-031608088--finance.html

Tony Bennett Records New Jazz Album With Lady GaGa

Tony Bennett has got his hands full as things fall into place for his new collaboration with pop superstarLady GaGa. The "Fly Me to the Moon" crooner expressed his excitement for the project and said that he couldn't wait for the world to hear GaGa in a new light. 

Bennett previously worked with the "Bad Romance" hitmaker in "The Lady Is a Tramp" for his album "Duets II". Bennett now reveals that throughout the course of the recording for "Tramp", the two of them formed a close relationship and had such a good time so they decided to head back to the recording studio. 

In an interview with Billboard, Bennett recalled how GaGa's father, Joseph Germanotta, called him on his daughter's behalf while she was on tour in Australia and explained that GaGa wanted to do a jazz album with him. Bennett immediately accepted the idea saying, "You got it!" He added, "A lot of people don't know it, but she's a phenomenal jazz singer. It's going to really reaffirm that she's one of the best that anyone's ever heard." 

Arranger and orchestrator, Marion Evans is already confirmed to work with the two artists on this new album, though details like title and track listing are still "secret" for now, said Bennett. 

Bennett is busy promoting his new album "Viva Duets" and a book entitled "Life Is a Gift: The Zen of Bennett". 
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00055048.html

Lavish Worlds, and the Headwear to Match

By JON PARELES
Published: January 21, 2010
When Lady Gaga finished her thumping, strobing, razzle-dazzle song-and-dance numbers at Radio City Music Hall on Wednesday night, she held her pose and kept the stage lights on, delighting her many camera-wielding fans. Her Monster Ball tour always provided something worth a snapshot: a sci-fi tableau, perhaps, or a skimpy, glittery costume. The more her image gets around, the better Lady Gaga does.

“Take my picture!” she urged the audience, in her first of four sold-out shows at Radio City. “I want to be a star.”

She is. Well-planned outlandishness plus media exposure plus catchy, stuttering choruses — ”pa-pa-pa-pa-paparazzi,” “p-p-p-poker face” — have made Lady Gaga a multimillion-selling, Grammy-nominated star in less than a year and a half since the 2008 release of her debut album, “The Fame” (Streamline/Konlive/Cherrytree/Interscope). Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a k a Lady Gaga, sings, writes, dresses and apparently exists to toy with celebrity as performance art, seeing how freaky (in a fascinating way) she can be as she reaches a mass audience.

While show people like David Bowie and Madonna established this career path, Lady Gaga is strutting along it with larger-than-life style and, behind it, actual musical gifts. Her voice is strong enough to expose in a cappella singing, or backed solely by her own piano playing, sounding like a female Elton John when she played (and belted) “Speechless,” wearing a huge black-feather shawl.

Her opening acts reflected her two main source genres: R&B from Jason Derulo and glam-rock from Semi-Precious Weapons. Lady Gaga’s songs are solid, most often pumped up by hefty Euro-disco beats. Between snappy choruses — ”Just Dance,” or “Caught in a Bad Romance” — her verses sometimes revel in desire, sometimes question it. Newer songs on “The Fame Monster,” the expanded 2009 edition of “The Fame,” add misgivings and brutal undercurrents to the sex, money and, yes, fame that the original album coveted.

The staging layered more complications onto the songs, placing Lady Gaga in otherworldly realms. She first appeared behind a scrim showing a computerized grid, with a lighted costume that made her more a collection of white dots than a body: a figure in an electronic universe, like a digitized pop star.

No one in pop is more audacious about headwear. Onstage and in photos on video screens, she wore Egyptian-deity golden armor, antlers, a shiny red chauffeur’s hat, a spiked black hood and an exoskeleton-like helmet, not to mention bondage-style rings connecting her head to a bar held up by two men. It’s hard to say what that had to do with “Paparazzi” — which mingles love, stalking and media awareness — but even when connections were cryptic, the show had its own momentum.

The 10 dancers were rarely a comradely chorus line or a party scene. More often, they appeared inhuman with hoods or masks, or made up like animals or ghouls, although that didn’t stop Lady Gaga from mimicking a few sexual positions with them. Her stage persona veered from kindly — urging fellow misfits to follow their dreams, announcing that proceeds from her Jan. 24 show would be donated to Haiti relief — to bellicose, at one point taking a gun off her piano and aiming it at the audience, firing sparks to the sound of automatic weaponry. “I’m a free bitch,” she declared more than once. Near the end, she ascended in an orb of rotating silver rings, like a disco angel.

The spectacle sustains her, she insisted. “When they ask me why I spent all my money on my show, I tell them, because my fans are sexy,” she said. “But the question is, do you think I’m sexy?” The answer was loudly affirmative. It grew even louder as Lady Gaga went on to compare herself to Tinker Bell, needing applause to live.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/arts/music/22gaga.html?partner=rss&emc=rss