Photo: Stephen Lovekin / Shutterstock
A new moving AARP profile by Tony Bennett, 94, reveals that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. In the following years, the legendary jazz singer continued to tour extensively and record new songs, including a second album with Lady Gaga (with whom he recorded 2014’s Cheek to cheek), which is scheduled to be released this spring.
Bennett first sought neurological counseling in 2015, after complaining to his wife, Susan, that he was struggling to remember the names of the other musicians on stage. Months later, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Bennett’s neurologist Gayatri Devi, MD, told reporter John Colapinto that she encouraged him to continue working on his music. “It kept you alert and it also stimulated your brain significantly,” she said.
As Colapinto notes in its history, the benefits of music for patients with dementia are “well documented, but not well understood”. In recent years, even with his memory deteriorating offstage, on stage, Bennett was able to perform 90-minute sets perfectly. But the outbreak of COVID-19 meant that the entire tour was suspended, and the interruption had a major impact on Bennett, as well as on many other dementia patients.
“His memory, before the pandemic, was much better,” said Devi. “And he is not alone. Many of my patients are negatively affected by isolation, the inability to do the things that are important to them. For someone like Tony Bennett, the great joy he gets from performing was very important. “
Bennett’s family and friends wanted to share his diagnosis, they explained, because they hoped it would help remove some of the stigma surrounding Alzheimer’s.
“Panicking and hiding is really useless,” Gill Livingston, MD, a psychiatrist at University College London who specializes in dementia, told AARP. “What we want is for people to be as open as they can, within themselves and their families, so that they can be supported in the things they cannot do and be helped to live a relatively full life. Support makes a big difference. “
Bennett’s son Danny said that when he told Lady Gaga that they were considering presenting his father’s diagnosis, she liked the idea. “I wanted to check with her if she was okay, because she takes care of him all the time,” said Danny. “She said, ‘It sure is just another gift that he can give the world.'”