Award-winning recording artist Matt Dusk will perform his captivating tribute to Tony Bennett, one of the greatest singers of modern times, at the Algonquin Theatre on November 02, 2024, at 7:30 p.m. in a show titled “The Best Is Yet to Come.”
With over a million album sales, three number-one radio hits, and five Juno Award Nominations, Dusk is considered a preeminent stylist of a much beloved and revered era of jazz singers. Known for his rich, scintillating baritone, Dusk has toured North America with his special productions of legendary giants Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker, two of the smoothest saloon singers to have set their voices to recordings.
Dusk explains his inspiration for his current Tony Bennett show, “So, I think I can be honest, in today’s day and age, people love putting an anchor. So, it’s easy to say Tony Bennett, and people understand his music. For me, I did get to spend a bunch of time with him early in my career, so it just seemed like the appropriate time.”
Dusk will be featuring songs from his newest album, his fourteenth studio album, ‘The Best of Bennett,’ released October 25, 2024, a project he started three years ago.
“I never sung on stage with him. I would sing with him backstage, but you know, every time, to be honest with you, most of the time I (just) hung out with him, pre-show, after-show,(and) a couple times I opened up for him. You know, we rarely talked about the technical side of music like how do you do this? It was more life lessons, more him telling stories. When you’re in the presence of greatness, who has the longevity of having the same career for 70 years, Tony would always tell me that although he loved music, his first passion was painting, (and he) talked about all the places he‘d go and paint and why he does it and if [there]was one thing he could do, he would just paint.”
Tony Bennett possessed one of the most distinctive, elaborate voices from the swing era. His sophisticated delivery, eloquent phasing, impeccable intonation, and charismatic demeanor garnered him several international hits, most notably his signature tunes, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “If I Ruled the World,” amongst many others.
For all his accolades and hits, Bennett was a resourceful and innovative entertainer throughout his long career, recording with a myriad of artists in duos and special performances that kept him in the public eye well into the nineties. His exceptional, profound understanding of what made a song “swing”, kept him relevant and a highly sought after artist, who retired only a few years prior to his death due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2023.
Dusk became a student of jazz at a young age and gave up his university studies in economics to study music, where he was enrolled in master classes taught by Oscar Peterson, winning an Oscar Peterson Scholarship.
“I remember Oscar said, if you’re gonna do it, you got to do it because you love it. Because there’ll be times when you’re broke, there will be times when you might get a divorce; you won’t have time with your family. If you do it for the right reasons, it’ll always make it worthwhile,” Dusk recalls
Dusk spent years in pursuit of a record label deal, apprenticing in Las Vegas as in-house entertainer at the Golden Nugget Casino. His debut album, from 2004, ‘Two Shots’, was certified gold in Canada. It contained the hit single, written by U2’s Bono and the Edge, “Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad.”
Since that early success, Dusk has toured persistently and continued to record numerous successful albums, covering a wide range of material from holiday seasonal favourites to the American Songbook, culminating in this latest album of Bennett standards.
Dusk will be bringing his full rhythm section for his show at the Algonquin Theatre and he promises to intersperse his two-set show with anecdotes and memories from his own storied career.
You can buy tickets for the show HERE.
Dusk Sings Bennett:
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