Both take some time alone in the spotlight (Bennett on “Don’t Wait Too Long” and Gaga on the more familiar standard “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”) but neither stays solo for too long.Ĭheek To Cheek debuted at the top of the US Billboard charts and made the Top 10 in other major territories. Each singer’s contributions appear evenly matched, and that’s in part what makes the album work so well. While Gaga would, no doubt, offer the elder statesman his place center-stage as a default, it’s not an invitation he accepts all the time. What’s particularly welcome on Cheek To Cheek is the space each entertainer gives the other. The song has been covered many times, but the Gaga and Bennet version perhaps comes closest to matching the Astaire original, which got inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame at the dawn of the 21st Century.
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Jaunty and light-footed (handy, given that the song was written by Irving Berlin for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ 1935 movie Top Hat), “Cheek To Cheek” perfectly captures the accessible but sometimes unpredictable spring of pop-oriented jazz. The ad-libs and easy camaraderie of the two voices riff along nicely – especially on “Goody Goody” – with the title track seeing everything align perfectly. The fun the pair had making the tracks was evident in this recording and, more importantly, proved infectious.įrom the well-known (a cover of the Nat “King” Cole standard “Nature Boy”) to the lesser remembered (Bennett’s own “Firefly”), Cheek To Cheek offered a seductive and nicely flowing mix giving both artists the space to innovate without reinventing anything too radically. Cole Porter’s opening composition, “Anything Goes,” sets the scene perfectly with its playful, familiar melody and was a logical pick for the album’s first single, immediately dispelling rumors that the record would be an overblown indulgence.
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“There’s a part of me that has been quiet for a long time that is now being reawakened, after years of producers and record-label people telling me to make my voice sound more radio-friendly.”Ĭertainly, the 11 songs on the standard edition, which were all recorded live with a band, introduced a richer, more authentic timbre to a voice people thought they had the full measure of. “It’s me rebelling against my own pop music,” she said on the album’s release. Returning to the genre again was, she says, liberating. She’d loved the singer since she was a girl, and his music helped her develop her voice she had even been picked from her school to perform at a state-wide jazz competition. Gaga later admitted to journalists that the thought of working with Bennett had terrified her. “It’s me rebelling against my own pop music” It wasn’t until a 2013 reunion at one of President Barack Obama’s ceremonial balls that Gaga was ready to announce that the project was definitely going ahead, revealing the name of the record. That collaboration turned out so well that the pair discussed a more ambitious project, but it would take time for their busy schedules to synchronize. The genesis of the duets album lay in a New York charity gala held three years earlier, when the jazz legend met the contemporary superstar and asked her to record “The Lady Is A Tramp” for his upcoming second duets project. It’s likely that the solo release delayed the collaborative one, as most of the Cheek To Cheek recordings had been completed during spring 2013. Her previous studio set – the ambitious ARTPOP, issued the previous year – attracted the first mixed notices of her career and a slower, if still impressive, sales start. That familiarity was, however, beginning to lose its shine for some. By the time of Cheek To Cheek’s release, on September 23, 2014, the world had become more than familiar with Gaga’s increasingly out-there dance-pop extravagance.
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