Johnny Mathis retires from the tour after almost 70 years of Croons
Johnny Mathis, a pop music singer and one of the best -selling record artists of the 20th century, said this week that he would have performed only four other live concerts before retiring from the tour after almost 70 years.
Known for his “velvet voice” on romantic ballads like “it’s not for me to say” and “wonderful! Wonderful!” Mathis has sang standard and soft rock since his adolescence, but has started to do professionally tour after hers Debut album It was released in 1956.
Mathis, 89, will take the microphone for the April and May shows, but his concerts scheduled for the summer and autumn have been deleted.
“It is sincere regret that because of the age and memory problems of Mr. Mathis who accelerated, we are announcing his retirement from the concerts on tour and live”, a note published On his website he said.
Mr. Mathis final concert It is scheduled for May 18 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, in New Jersey, the other concerts are April 10 in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania; April 26 in Shipshewana, Ind.; And on May 10 in Santa Rosa, California.
Some tickets remain available for its final concerts, noticed its website and reimbursements will be issued for those that have been deleted.
Mathis grew up in San Francisco, where in 1955 he got a job singing on weekends in a club. His owner In the end persuaded George Avakian, a record producer and talent scout With Columbia records, to see it.
After listening to Mr. Mathis Sing, Mr. Avakian sent a telegram in Columbia who said: “I found a phenomenal 19 -year -old boy who could go all the way. Send white contracts”.
Mathis is widely recognized as a pioneer of the romantic ballad style that emerged in the 1950s as an alternative-musical pop-musc with high energy rock. Mr. Mathis would go on Do More sold albums than any other modern pop interpreter except Frank Sinatra, by the end of the 70s.
Forty years ago this month, the critic Stephen Holden He wrote in the New York Times That “Johnny Mathis is still the most compelling exponent of a Crooning tradition with the theme carried out in recent years by Bee Gees, George Benson, Al Jarreau and Julio Iglesias.”
Mr. Holden noticed in his review of a concert at the Radio City Music Hall in New York who, while Mr. Mathis “Etereal, a tenor androgynous, with his sob and breathed hesitations, has oblictedly obscured, communicates the same aura of an adolescent desire he did in 1957”.
In 2003, Mathis received the Grammys’ Prize for achieving life.
At his peak, he was booking about 200 concert dates per year.
“The road is my home”, he once said. “I bring my best friends with me. We work together, let’s play together. I have no other life.”
But in the middle of his career, Mathis admitted that he was uncomfortable on stage. “I hate him,” he said. “But it’s something I will have to do throughout my life. I don’t know how to do anything else.
“There are moments when the emotion comes out and it is absolutely taken away from me, and I know it’s right, it’s wonderful.”
