Category: Features

As a young trumpeter he used to practice near an open window, just in case Louis Armstrong was wandering past and heard him. Not that Armstrong lived in St Louis, but Lester was an optimist. He’d always trot off and audition when Ray Charles came to town, again without luck.…

He was 75 when he finally did it. That’s an age at which most singers’ breath-control is declining, their range diminishing and their tone becoming clouded with rasps and wheezes. No one told Tony Bennett. He walked into a New York studio in 2001, four weeks after 9/11, and delivered…