WASHINGTON — Buddy Greco, a jazz pianist and singer in Benny Goodman’s big band in the 1940s, who later hung around with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and developed a well-polished Las Vegas stage show that made him perhaps the ultimate lounge act, died Jan. 10 in Las Vegas. He was 90.
His son Buddy Greco Jr. confirmed the death to the Desert Sun newspaper of Palm Springs, Calif. No cause was disclosed.
Mr. Greco mixed talent, tenacity, and a hot temper in a career that lasted more than 80 years. He was an oft-married ladies’ man and almost but not quite a member of the Rat Pack, the high-living gang of entertainers surrounding Sinatra and Dean Martin that embodied the extravagance of Las Vegas in its glory days.
Mr. Greco had a few minor hits, most notably with a 1962 version of ‘‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’’ and recorded more than 70 albums, but couldn’t quite scale the highest peaks of stardom.
He evolved from being a piano player who sometimes sang into a swinging, high-energy entertainer who jumped up from the keyboard to belt out swelling choruses of songs of occasionally dubious merit, all delivered with a finger-snapping hipster patter.
‘‘I’d always wanted to be a jazz pianist,’’ he told the New York Times in 1963. ‘‘But it’s easier to make a living as a singer. . . . I’d still be working in crummy rooms and playing to an audience of jazz buffs. By singing, I can appeal to the masses.’’
Mr. Greco became a headliner in supper clubs and for years was featured at the Desert Inn’s Starlight Lounge in Las Vegas. He recorded for the Verve jazz label, with symphony orchestras and occasionally in straight-ahead jazz settings.
Throughout the 1960s, he was a familiar presence on television variety shows, where he was introduced as ‘‘Mr. Excitement of Song.’’ If he didn’t reach the showbiz heights of Martin, Sinatra, or Tony Bennett, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
‘‘No performer works harder at pleasing his crowds,’’ jazz critic Will Friedwald wrote in his book ‘‘A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers.’’
‘‘The most purist of jazz purists . . . could conceivably object to Greco’s highly animated offerings, but they’d be tapping their feet four beats to a bar while they did so.’’
Mr. Greco never cracked the Top 40, but he kept chasing hits by changing his style from jazz to pop to country and back again, changing his wardrobe but never losing — at least in public — his 200-watt smile.
Armando Joseph Greco was born in Philadelphia. His music-loving father worked installing floors before opening a record store.
Young Buddy began singing on radio when he was 4 and taking piano lessons at 6.
He studied classical music but was soon drawn to the jazz of Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole, and other pianists. He started performing in his teens and had a minor hit in 1947, ‘‘Ooh, Look-a There, Ain’t She Pretty.’’
In late 1948, he joined clarinetist Goodman’s band for a year, then went on his own. He said he played every nightclub ‘‘at least twice’’ and became a second-tier star and first-rank hothead. He once pushed a piano off a stage toward a patron who wouldn’t put out his cigar.
While on tour, he was known to stop the car on the highway to fight with his brother, who played saxophone in his band. In Las Vegas, he reportedly traded punches in a nightclub with Bobby Darin, charging that the younger singer had stolen parts of his act.
Mr. Greco was also a notorious ladies’ man and, during those heady years in Vegas, a virtual member of the Rat Pack.
‘‘Everyone drank,’’ he told the Independent, ‘‘everyone had a cigarette in their mouth and a lady on their arm, or maybe two.’’
In 1962, Mr. Greco was in Lake Tahoe for a weekend with Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and a few others. It was days before the actress’s mysterious death, and some of the last photographs of the actress show her hugging Mr. Greco by a swimming pool. He never publicly revealed whether they shared more than an embrace.
Mr. Greco’s first four marriages, to Sally Baionno, Dani Crayne, Margret Kinley, and Jackie Sabatino, ended in divorce.
He leaves his fifth wife, singer Lezlie Anders of Palm Desert, Calif.; seven children from his earlier marriages; and many grandchildren.
In the 1990s, Mr. Greco returned to jazz and went on tour with a legacy version of the Goodman orchestra. He continued to record albums as recently as 2013.
He and Anders ran a posh supper club near Palm Springs for several years, then created a tribute show to singer Peggy Lee, with which they toured the world.
Mr. Greco never really retired and, in November, made a final public appearance when he was inducted into the Las Vegas Entertainment Hall of Fame.
‘‘Greco has all the finger-popping shallowness we associate with lounge lizards,’’ Friedwald wrote in 2010, ‘‘but at the same time there’s a sincerity and even a purity to his work that’s quite remarkable. There’s no one quite like him.’’
