Gorgeous music from the legends

I love Lil Nas X, his latest Industry Baby featuring Jack Harlow from the Montero album gets everybody grooving to its very contagious beat, and I am awed by Olivia Rodrigo, who has all the cuts in her debut album Sour in the singles chart.

But for me, there is nothing like the classics, so smooth and elegant when I want to listen to music that makes me feel moneyed and sophisticated. Here are three that I believe every music lover should treat themselves to. For your Great Gatsby moments.

Love for Sale, the second duet album by Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. This is their follow-up collab to the very successful Cheek to Cheek which came out in 2014. It is made up of songs created by the legendary Cole Porter, who was one of the architects of the great American Songbook.

The duo launched the album with a concert at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City last Aug. 4 and 5. It was also a celebration of Bennett’s birthday last Aug. 3. It was his 90th. He was born in 1926 and he is still performing. So, is there anybody out there who believes that age has something to do with failing vocals?

Included in the album are Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love), Night and Day, Wunderbar, All Through the Night, Blow Gabriel Blow, Anything Goes, the title cut Love for Sale and the lovely first single I Get a Kick Out of You.

Release Me 2 by Barbra Streisand. No, there is no cover of the Engelbert Humperdinck original hit Release Me in this album. Just like the first Release Me from 2004, this one is made up of recordings made for some past albums, but which did not make the final cut.

That happened not because they were bad recordings, there is no way that Streisand would have made one of those. It was because they just did not go together in the moods of the other songs of those albums. So, these are tracks that were stored all these past years in Streisand’s private vault and Release Me is what they had been pleading her to do to them all these years. And so, she did.

Great decision because the resulting album is made up of works by some of the greatest songwriters of our time. Highlights are the first single, a wistful duet of Rainbow Connection composed by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher, which she sings with Kermit the Frog himself; one of her first recordings ever, listen to a very young Streisand in Right So the Rain by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, all the way from 1962; and Michel Legrand and Allan and Marilyn Bergman’s Once You’ve Been in Love, which Streisand sings live with an orchestra conducted by Legrand himself.

There are also Living Without You by Randy Newman; Sweet Forgiveness by Walter Afanasieff and John Bettis; You Light Up My Life by Carole King; If Only You Were Mine by Barry Gibb; Be Aware by Hal David and Burt Bacharach; I’d Want It to Be You, a duet with Willie Nelson; and One Day (A Prayer) also by Legrand and the Bergmans.

And because I cannot help but marvel that he is turning 86 years old come Sept. 30, I thought I should also check out The New Great American Songbook by Johnny Mathis. One of the greatest singers of all time, he is an expert with the great American songbook, you know the works of Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and others. But this time around, he sings covers of current hits, songs that have become so popular, they now make up the New Great American Songbook.

I am sure that all of you out there will love this line-up: Hello popularized by Adele; Happy by Pharrell Williams; Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen; You Raise Me Up by Josh Groban; I Believe I Can Fly by R. Kelly; Just the Way You are by Bruno Mars; and Run to You by Whitney Houston, which features Kenny G on the sax. Truly a gorgeous popfest.