Jazz singer-pianist Buddy Greco dead at 90

Buddy Greco, the jazz pianist turned Las Vegas showman who had a presence from the 1950s through the 2000s, died Tuesday. He was 90.

Like many performers of his era, Greco’s live career sustained him well beyond his best-known hit, a finger-snapping 1960 rendition of “The Lady Is a Tramp,” which established his Las Vegas hipster credentials for years to come.

Greco once recalled he met Frank Sinatra 1955 while performing in the lounge at the Sands hotel. Sinatra “came to see Nat (King) Cole. I went into the main room after I was through, and I’m standing in back, and Frank turns around and says, ‘Hey … come sit down with me.’ And we became instant friends.”

“Buddy was kind of a hard-driving swinger in his music, and Frank liked that,” Greco’s wife Lezlie Anders later explained. “All the other boy singers — Vic Damone, Jack Jones — they were all ballad singers. Nobody was that hip hepcat (Greco ) was.’

Greco recorded more than 60 albums, but he was never a major headliner on the Strip, working more in the lounges (during their loss-leader heyday) and smaller clubs around the country. In 1986, he had a guest stint in the Riviera’s “Splash” revue.

It was later in life, in the 1990s, when Greco recommitted to Las Vegas for the last glory days of the Desert Inn in 1992, anchoring the lounge while stars such as Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli played the main showroom. There he met and married his fifth wife, Anders, a singer also working the Desert Inn lounge.

In 1998, Greco and Anders bought and remodeled a 3,600-square-foot, Spanish-style house with a bell tower in southeastern Las Vegas. The South Philly native found himself surrounded by geese (named after Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme), a pig and a 45-pound turkey. They lived there until they moved to Palm Springs, California, to open Buddy Greco’s Dinner Club in 2006. The venture lasted three years.

In 1999, Greco and Anders staged a live Friday-night radio broadcast, “Las Vegas Live!,” from the Flamingo Hilton. The two also workshopped a Peggy Lee tribute called “Fever” at UNLV in 2002 and brought back a road-tested product in 2004.

Greco was able to attend a 2015 induction into the Las Vegas Entertainment Hall of Fame and his 90th birthday party last August, both at the Italian American Club.

In 1986, Greco told the Review-Journal he started singing when he was 4 years old and began piano lessons a year later.

“My father had a record store in Philadelphia and he was one of the city’s top opera critics, so I was surrounded by all kinds of music from the beginning,” he recalled.

“My first show business job was singing on the radio when I was 4. They had an Italian show and I got to sing on it. Art Tatum and Billy Eckstine were my idols and Nat King Cole was my main man. We both started out as jazz pianists who made it as singers.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.