Tony Bennett, still loving to perform at 84

NEW YORK - On a rain-soaked Monday when the Manhattan monsoons robbed everybody of composure, Tony Bennett popped into his Central Park South studio, his natty sportcoat and sockless shoes not looking in the least bit damp. Maybe the rain doesn't fall on him?

He certainly has enough inner sunshine these days to ward off rainy-day blues. The 84-year-old Bennett is still performing in the seventh decade of his career, not simply because he wants to sing - which he will Saturday at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts - but because "I can't not do it."

The velvet-voiced crooner of the 1950s and the high-energy jazz singer of the 1960s gave, in 2010, one of his more emphatic performances, recorded live in a new EP download from iTunes Festival London. The now-raspy Bennett voice extols the beauties of life in a manner that resembles oration as much as singing.

Applause doesn't give him a "mission accomplished" signal as much as it inspires him to do it again - to repeat the song's most climactic moments. Ella Fitzgerald, he recalls, had much the same attitude: "We couldn't wait to get in front of the audience and knock them out of their seats."

Life seems to be a series of simple truths for Bennett these days. In an hour-long interview, the Queens-raised Anthony Benedetto showed how he has emerged into his 80s without cynicism, despite the failed marriages, career dips, and drug dependence that came with those 15 Grammy Awards.

Question: I love the moment in your concerts, usually near the end, when you sing without a microphone. How did you come to do that?

Answer: Years ago when New York cabdrivers were all philosophers, I had one guy, he had a Brooklyn accent, who said, "All you guys are a bunch of bums. You use microphones. I grew up in an era when Al Jolson and Ethel Merman used to hit the back wall with their voice." And that stayed with me. The microphone is almost like . . . an invisible curtain between you and the audience. When you eliminate the microphone, the curtain disappears. It's like you're visiting something really personal.

Q: Often, late-in-life singers maintain their voices but lose their fire for performing. They seem bored. I can't imagine you falling into that.