A salute to Tony Bennett at a Queens high school

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out what’s going on at the high school in Queens founded by a man named Anthony Benedetto. You know him as Tony Bennett. We will also get details about what prosecutors say was a murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by an Indian government official against a Sikh separatist in New York.

For high school students rehearsing for a tribute concert tomorrow, there are reminders that Tony Bennett left his heart in Astoria, Queens. The school’s marquee features the distinctive metal lettering ‘Tony Bennett, Founder’. And then there are the charts the band will play: copies of the actual sheet music used when Bennett performed songs like “New York, New York” with Lady Gaga.

“It’s the professional charts,” said Ella Rubin, a trombonist who is in the 12th grade at the school, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. (Bennett, who died in July at age 96, named it after that other great crooner.)

“I have a lot of experience playing jazz,” Rubin said. “I can definitely tell the difference between the average high school play they make us play and this one.”

But the principal, Gideon Frankel, said there would be a difference between this concert and many previous performances at the school. “Tony won’t be here,” he said. “We’re used to having him in the audience.”

For nearly two decades, Bennett attended the public school, which opened in 2001. “He often came over and held court cases with students,” Frankel said. “He sang a tune when we had students in the auditorium. Sometimes he just came over to hang out. He brought Billy Joel. He brought Lady Gaga. He brought others with him.”

Frankel said the last performance Bennett attended was in 2018, during the last full academic year before the pandemic, when the students performed the musical “Ragtime.” “He attended the whole thing for two and a half hours and gave a standing ovation at the age of 92,” Frankel said.

For Friday’s tribute concert, student performers will be joined by alumni from the school and on Aran Bell And Catherine Hurlin, principal dancers at the American Ballet Theater. They will perform “Fly Me to the Moon,” a ballet choreographed by Jessica Lang to a medley of songs that Bennett recorded. The school expects Bennett’s wife, Susan Benedetto, who co-founded the school with him, to attend. The concert is sold out, but will be streamed live on www.fssahs.org.

Heidi Best, the school’s choir director and the concert’s musical director, said it was not the first time students had paid tribute to Bennett since his death. “We had a small group sing at the US Open in honor of Tony,” she said. And a cabaret show for students in October featured “all of Tony and Sinatra’s songs,” she said.

“It was good to hear those songs from the kids,” she said. “The material is timeless and beautiful, but you don’t always hear it on the radio anymore. His death brought it all back.”

Rubin, the trombonist, said she would have known about Bennett even if his name wasn’t on the school’s marquee. She remembered going to the Toys “R” Us store in Times Square as a child. “We heard Lady Gaga all the time, we heard Tony Bennett, we heard all those classic New York songs,” Rubin said.

Best, the musical director, said that when Lady Gaga visited the school, “she said she felt like she was cheating on her Gaga persona by singing these songs” with Bennett.

And what about Frankel? Was he a fan of Tony Bennett before he became director?

“There’s only one way to answer that,” he said, laughing.

He had studied at Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan. “Certainly, I was a fan of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack as a singing student, as a music student – ​​how could you not be?”

Weather

It’s a sunny day in the high 40s. At night it is partly cloudy, with temperatures around thirty degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until December 8 (Immaculate Conception).

The latest New York news

Crime

• Jonathan Majors trial: The actor was charged in March with assault and harassment. He was tried on Wednesday and tried to keep his career alive in an unusual procedure.

• Shot on the subway in BrooklynDuring the evening rush hour on Tuesday, a gunman shot a 17-year-old boy and a man in his 40s on a moving subway train, police said.

Art & Culture

An Indian government official plotted a $100,000 plot to kill a prominent Sikh separatist leader who is a U.S. citizen, federal officials said.

It was a dirty job in New York with international implications, as my colleagues Jesse McKinley, Julian E. Barnes, and Ian Austen write. An indictment unsealed Wednesday said the plot was masterminded by the Indian official and linked to an assassination attempt in Canada, an allegation that could complicate relations between Washington, Ottawa and New Delhi.

The indictment included a photo of a roll of hundred-dollar bills that prosecutors said was an advance for the New York job. But the alleged assassin actually worked for the federal government.

The intended target was identified by US officials as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the general counsel of the New York-based group Sikhs for Justice. Pannun is an outspoken supporter of independence for the northern Indian state of Punjab, home to a large number of Sikhs, a powerful minority group in India. The separatists want a sovereign state called Khalistan.

The Indian government official who led the plot has described himself as a “senior field officer” with “security management” and “intelligence” responsibilities, the indictment said. It said he had also said he had served in the Indian Central Reserve Police Force and had received “officer training” in “combat craft” and “weapons.” He was not mentioned by name in the indictment.

It said he recruited Nikhil Gupta, 52, in May to “orchestrate” the murder in New York. Gupta “described his involvement in international narcotics and weapons trafficking” in communications with the Indian official and turned to someone he believed was a criminal associate to find a hit man.

That person was a confidential source working for the federal government, and the alleged assassin hired by Gupta was an undercover law enforcement officer, prosecutors said.

Gupta arranged for an associate to deliver $15,000 in cash as a down payment for the June murder. Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic later that month and is now charged with “murder for hire and conspiracy to commit murder for hire,” prosecutors said. Each count carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.

The attempted hit outlined in the court papers poses a new challenge to a key element of President Biden’s foreign policy agenda: positioning India as a geopolitical counterweight to Russia and China.

That effort came under pressure in September when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada accused the Indian government of involvement in the killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia, also in June. Trudeau’s comments fueled concerns about India’s commitment to democracy and its reliability as an ally of the West. The new accusation that someone in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government plotted to assassinate a critic on US soil could be even more damaging.

METROPOLITAN diary

First time

Dear Diary:

I’m from Toronto and my oldest friend lives in London. Every few years we meet in New York for a week of fun.

Last summer we were in a gallery in the West Village looking at prints based on posters from old Bob Dylan concerts.

After a while we started talking to the owner. He asked when we first came to town in our lives.

My friend surprised me by saying that when he was ten, his parents took him to New York to see a specialist because they were concerned that he was small and not growing.

“How tall are you?” the gallery owner asked.

“One and a half meters long,” my friend said.

The owner stopped.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said finally.