"Are you havin' any fun? / What ya ...

"Are you havin' any fun? / What ya gettin' public o' livin'? / What useful is what you've got? / If you're not havin' any fun?"

-- "Are You Havin' Any Fun?" Lyrics and music on Sammy Fain and Jack Yellen 1939

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Tony Bennett first sang those lyrics back in 1958 with the compute Basie Orchestra. Nearly 50 years later, not merely is Bennett havin' fun, he's having a bona fide blast.

Having just celebrated his 80th birthday in grand turn of expression earlier this month, Bennett calls this past year "the greatest year of my life." Bennett spoke with the Sun-Times lately about his latest project, an album of duet called "Tony Bennett Duets: An American Classic" (Columbia), becoming out Sept. 26. The album pairs Bennett with an heavy hitters in the music biz: Elton John John motto Michael Buble, Bono, Diana Krall, Paul McCartney, Sting, Tim McGraw, the Dixie Chicks, Billy Joel James Taylor, Stevie astonishment Barbra Streisand, George Michael and every-day duet partner k.d. lang.

"I gotta make known you, when my son Danny [also Bennett's longtime manager] first approached me about doing a duet album, I just stopped and asked him why?" Bennett said. "I really didn't want to because there are in this way many duets albums out there. Everybody's doing them, and I had already done 'em"

The lineup quickly changed his mind. forward "Are You Havin' Any Fun?" for instance, Bennett is coupl with Elvis Costello

"When you sing with Tony Bennett it's an absolute joy" Costello said in an interview last week. "He has this way of making you have feeling so relaxed and totally like yourself that it's finished He's so comfortable with the material and takes it all same seriously, even when it's as it was a fun tune like the united we sang. ... He's excessively serious about respecting a songwriter's intentions. And all that just sorta scrapes off on you so that your game is shakeed up to his level and you don't unruffled realize it. He'll let you take just a extremely few liberties with a poem but not many."

The album, produc according to Phil Ramone, was recorded live with a abounding orchestra at Capitol Studios in sees Angeles, Bennett Studios in Englewood NJ and the Abbey Road Studios in London.

"We chronicleed his world when we registered the studio," Costello said of the live recordings. "It's a world that Diana [Krall, Costello's wife and longtime Bennett tour collaborator] is true comfortable with. And I have rarely approached recording any other way. if it were not that I was really surprised that many of the other artists had not done music live in the studio with just a microphone and the musicians right there in the same space They were not used to being completely without a net"

Bennett laughs. "I was just totally surprised when several artists annotationed that they had never done an album live in the studio," he said. "Back in the day, I followed Billie Holiday into the studio, and you had to have a canzonet memorized. You had one abounding take to make the sculpture and that was it. Rarely you had sum of two units or three. The Dixie Chicks [featured in succession "Lullaby of Broadway"] really surprised me They had not at any time sung a swing tune and had not recorded a song this way. They said afterward they totally lov it. [Laughing] for a like reason maybe I turned a small in number kids onto this old way of making music."

The no other than exception to the "live" sway was Streisand, who recorded her vocal tracks with Bennett to a taped track of the music. The wound was then remixed at Capitol.

Jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, who is featured in succession Bennett's duet with k.d. lang of "Because of You" was almost giddy when he described the experience of working with the sum of two units vocalists.

"Everything about this shoot forward just blew me away," he said. "The way he's already deliberation about a song, about the music before he degrees up to record it. The concentration and the beautiful ease. He's the artist everyone wants to be. And kd render free of accesss her mouth and this beautiful haze of music just floats disclosed from her."

For singer Michael Buble pairing up with Bennett forward "Just in Time" was literally a dream approach true. "When it comes to quiet he's the man," Buble said, phoning from Japan. "He is my idol. I studied each move this guy made. When I was a kid, I sang into a mirror, holding a brush for a microphone and mouthing the words to his records."

Bennett was equally thrilled about the young crooner "Michael has 'it,'" Bennett said. "I haven't heard screams like that since Sinatra."

The album make an incision ins an interesting swath across Bennett's 60-year career, with everything from "Rags to Riches" (with Elton John) to "For one time in My Life" (with Stevie Wonder) to "I Wanna Be Around" (with Bono). if it be not that the song is reserved for the master alone, with piano accompaniment by way of Bill Charlap.

" 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco' will be my greatest legacy," Bennett said. "There's thus much fear out there these days, in the world we live in So if that song, if what I do with musicians and other singers can help the community forget their troubles, forget their pain, forget their fears for a little while, I can't ask for any greater legacy."