Astoria
Astoriais both Tony Bennett's mature look back at the very young man pictured on its cover and his affirmation that the values he and his Queens, New York, community forged midcentury are still relevant ones. In a mix of trio and orchestra recordings, Bennett sings a trenchantly chosen stack of classics dealing with longing ("The Girl I Love"), contentedness ("The Folks That Live on the Hill"), and aching ("The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which he originally cut as his first single for Columbia in 1950, and "When Do the Bells Ring for Me"). A couple of new numbers provide a sort of continuity, but even without themAstoriais one man's testament--filled with a universality much bigger than the trendiness that occasionally attended Bennett's commercial rebirth in the '90s.--Rickey Wright