Burt Bacharach RIP

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And No Coffee Table
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Burt Bacharach RIP

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Burt Bacharach, legendary composer of pop songs, dies at 94
By Hillel Italie | AP

Burt Bacharach, the singularly gifted and popular composer and Oscar winner who delighted millions with the quirky arrangements and unforgettable melodies of “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and dozens of other hits, has died at 94.

Bacharach died Wednesday at home in Los Angeles of natural causes, publicist Tina Brausam said Thursday.

Over the past 70 years, only Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a handful of others rivaled his genius for instantly catchy songs that remained performed, played and hummed long after they were written. He had a run of top 10 hits from the 1950s into the 21st century, and his music was heard everywhere from movie soundtracks and radios to home stereo systems and iPods, whether “Alfie” and “I Say a Little Prayer” or “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “This Guy’s in Love with You.”

Dionne Warwick was his favorite interpreter, but Bacharach, usually in tandem with lyricist Hal David, also created prime material for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and many others. Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra were among the countless artists who covered his songs, with more recent performers who sung or sampled him including White Stripes, Twista and Ashanti. “Walk On By” alone was covered by everyone from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to the British punk band the Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

Bacharach was both an innovator and throwback, and his career seemed to run parallel to the rock era. He grew up on jazz and classical music and had little taste for rock when he was breaking into the business in the 1950s. His sensibility often seemed more aligned with Tin Pan Alley than with Bob Dylan, John Lennon and other writers who later emerged, but rock composers appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility.

“The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album “Painted from Memory” with Bacharach, said in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press. “It may be agreeable to listen to these songs, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”

He triumphed in many artforms. He was an eight-time Grammy winner, a prize-winning Broadway composer for “Promises, Promises” and a three-time Oscar winner. He received two Academy Awards in 1970, for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and for the song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (shared with David). In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, won Oscars for “Best That You Can Do,” the theme from “Arthur. His other movie soundtracks included “What’s New, Pussycat?”, “Alfie” and the 1967 James Bond spoof “Casino Royale.”

Bacharach was well rewarded, and well connected. He was a frequent guest at the White House, whether the president was Republican or Democrat. And in 2012, he was presented the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama, who had sung a few seconds of “Walk on By” during a campaign appearance.

In his life, and in his music, he stood apart. Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn liked to joke that the smiling, wavy-haired Bacharach was the first composer he ever knew who didn’t look like a dentist. Bacharach was a “swinger,” as they called such men in his time, whose many romances included actor Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965-80, and Sager, his wife from 1982-1991.

Married four times, he formed his most lasting ties to work. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to write “Alfie” and might spend hours tweaking a single chord. Sager once observed that Bacharach’s life routines essentially stayed the same — only the wives changed.

It began with the melodies — strong yet interspersed with changing rhythms and surprising harmonics. He credited much of his style to his love of bebop and to his classical education, especially under the tutelage of Darius Milhaud, the famed composer. He once played a piece for piano, violin and oboe for Milhaud that contained a melody he was ashamed to have written, as 12-point atonal music was in vogue at the time. Milhaud, who liked the piece, advised the young man, “Never be afraid of the melody.”

“That was a great affirmation for me,” Bacharach recalled in 2004.

Bacharach was essentially a pop composer, but his songs became hits for country artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues performers (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synth-pop (Naked Eyes). He reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s with the help of Costello and others. Mike Myers would recall hearing the sultry “The Look of Love” on the radio and finding fast inspiration for his “Austin Powers” retro spy comedies, in which Bacharach made cameos.

In the 21st century, he was still testing new ground, writing his own lyrics and recording with rapper Dr. Dre.

He was married to his first wife, Paula Stewart, from 1953-58, and married for a fourth time, to Jane Hansen, in 1993. He is survived by Hansen, as well as his children Oliver, Raleigh and Cristopher, Brausam said. He was preceded in death by his daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.

Bacharach knew the very heights of acclaim, but he remembered himself as a loner growing up, a short and self-conscious boy so uncomfortable with being Jewish he even taunted other Jews. His favorite book as a kid was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”; he related to the sexually impotent Jake Barnes, regarding himself as “socially impotent.”

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but soon moved to New York City. His father was a syndicated columnist, his mother a pianist who encouraged the boy to study music. Although he was more interested in sports, he practiced piano every day after school, not wanting to disappoint his mother. While still a minor, he would sneak into jazz clubs, bearing a fake ID, and hear such greats as Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

“They were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before,” he recalled in the memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” published in 2013. “What I heard in those clubs turned my head around.”

He was a poor student in high school, but managed to gain a spot at the music conservatory at McGill University in Montreal. He wrote his first song at McGill and listened for months to Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song.” Music also may have saved Bacharach’s life. He was drafted into the Army in the late 1940s and was still on active duty during the Korean War. But officers stateside soon learned of his gifts and wanted him around. When he did go overseas, it was to Germany, where he wrote orchestrations for a recreation center on the local military base.

After his discharge, he returned to New York and tried to break into the music business. He had little success at first as a songwriter, but he became a popular arranger and accompanist, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers and Polly Stewart, who became his first wife. When a friend who had been touring with Marlene Dietrich was unable to make a show in Las Vegas, he asked Bacharach to step in.

The young musician and ageless singer quickly clicked and Bacharach traveled the world with her in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. During each performance, she would introduce him in grand style: “I would like you to meet the man, he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer. But that isn’t true. He’s everybody’s composer ... Burt Bacharach!”

Meanwhile, he had met his ideal songwriter partner — David, as businesslike as Bacharach was mercurial, so domesticated that he would leave each night at 5 to catch the train back to his wife and children on Long Island. Working in a tiny office in Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building, they produced their first million-seller, “Magic Moments,” sung in 1958 by Perry Como. In 1962, they spotted a backup singer for the Drifters, Warwick, who had a “very special kind of grace and elegance,” Bacharach recalled.

The trio produced hit after hit, starting with “Don’t Make Me Over” and continuing with “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “Trains and Boats and Planes,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and more. The songs were as complicated to record as they were easy to hear. Bacharach liked to experiment with time signatures and arrangements, such as having two pianists play on “Walk on By,” their performances just slightly out of synch to give the song “a jagged kind of feeling,” he wrote in his memoir.

Besides Warwick, the Bacharach-David team was producing winners for other performers. Among them: “Make It Easy on Yourself” for Jerry Butler, “What the World Needs Now Is Love” for Jackie DeShannon and “This Guy’s in Love with You” for Herb Alpert.

The partnership ended badly with the dismal failure of a 1973 musical remake of “Lost Horizon.” Bacharach became so depressed he isolated himself in his Del Mar vacation home and refused to work.

“I didn’t want to write with Hal or anybody,” he told the AP in 2004. Nor did he want to fulfill a commitment to record Warwick. She and David both sued him.

Bacharach and David eventually reconciled. When David died in 2012, Bacharach praised him for writing lyrics “like a miniature movie.” Meanwhile, he kept working, vowing never to retire, always believing that a good song could make a difference.

“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he told the AP in 2018. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”

___

The late Associated Press writer Bob Thomas was a contributor to this report from Los Angeles.
Offshoreram
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by Offshoreram »

:( So sad. I saw him once in Australia about 12 years ago and it was like listening to the history of popular music. Of course God Give Me Strength was part of the setlist and in was a mesmerising night.
I so wish I had seen him and Elvis on stage together
My head is spinning and my legs are weak
popguynyc
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by popguynyc »

Wow. What a phenomenal career. What a life. Rest In Peace. Very sad yet grateful for his contribution to the world.
Last edited by popguynyc on Thu Feb 09, 2023 10:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
bronxapostle
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by bronxapostle »

What a day to get this sad news...the big first night at Gramercy. Reminiscent of when Allen passed the night we had the book release show in BAM...TERRRIBLY SAD. another legend gone. :( :(
Hey Woz
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by Hey Woz »

Such a sad way to start the day. He was a wonderful man who could not have been more pleasant the one time I actually met him. RIP
Neil.
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by Neil. »

What a genius! Loved Burt, the stuff with Hal David but also a lot of the stuff with Elvis - loads of it, in fact. Can't wait to hear their newest stuff. A long life, filled to the brim with amazing songs.
sweetest punch
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by sweetest punch »

Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello "God Give Me Strength" & "I Still Have That Other Girl" | Letterman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiKCKQhsZbg
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/bac ... vid-bowie/

Tribute to Burt in new MOJO:
(…)
BURT BACHARACH An in-depth tribute to the songwriter’s songwriter, with the help of Jimmy Webb, Barry Gibb, Elvis Costello and more. “What he did was alchemy.”
(…)
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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And No Coffee Table
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Re: Burt Bacharach RIP

Post by And No Coffee Table »

Burt Bacharach remembered by Elvis Costello
12 May 1928 – 8 February 2023
The musician recalls a giant of American song – a man who through their collaborations taught him the real art of songwriting
Wed 20 Dec 2023 06.00 EST

I’m Just A Lucky So And So – that’s a lyric Mack David wrote in 1945 for Duke Ellington, the same Mack David who co-wrote Baby It’s You with Burt Bacharach, a song I first heard performed by the Beatles.

Yet despite these links back to its very beginnings, Burt Bacharach isn’t part of the dull orthodoxy of rock music. When a dogmatic journalist faulted his absence from the rock’n’roll revolution in the 1950s, Bacharach responded, “I was studying with the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud and listening to Dizzy Gillespie. Bill Haley just didn’t make it for me.”

When John Lennon cheekily suggested the Royal Box “rattle yer jewelry” at the 1963 Royal Variety Performance, Burt was backstage rehearsing Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, as musical director for Marlene Dietrich.

And long before my first exposure to distorted electric guitars or a Tamla drum beat, my musical curiosity began with the comical bassoon part on Perry Como’s version of the early Burt Bacharach/Hal David song Magic Moments, playing on the radio in our basement flat, near Olympia, west London, in 1958.

Bacharach’s practically unbroken collaboration with David from that time until 1973 gave the world more songs than anyone can sing in one evening, perhaps a week of evenings. If they had only written the bridge of Alfie they would have given more to music than a whole bargain bin of progressive rock concept albums. It doesn’t matter that Tom Jones thought What’s New Pussycat? was a prank when Burt first played it to him, this was the man who wrote, Walk On By, The Look of Love, A House Is Not a Home, I Say a Little Prayer – as sung by Aretha Franklin – while Manfred Mann, Mel Tormé and Love were left to arm-wrestle over My Little Red Book. Even today, you are probably only 20 feet or as many minutes away from some kind of rendition of one of his compositions.

Bacharach’s music is sometimes blandly labelled “easy listening” because of its restraint, something almost completely erased in contemporary ballad construction, assembled like Lego. In truth, his music can be exacting, famously employing uneven time signatures, which might seem like just a clever numbers game until one encounters Anyone Who Had a Heart. Burt told me that musicians used to the common, even pulse of 1950s ballads in 6/8 were perplexed by his use of odd bars of 3/8, 9/8 and one of 7/8 that turns up in the coda of this song. They represent the way longing takes your breath away or makes your heart skip a beat or nine.

There are few singers today, or perhaps at any time, with the gifts of Dionne Warwick, who first recorded Anyone Who Had a Heart – with apologies to Cilla Black fans. Dionne began working as a demonstration singer for Burt and Hal, but they quickly recognised that she had a unique voice at both ends of the dynamic and musical range, unerringly accurate when confronted with the unusual intervals in Burt’s melodies and at the same time able to inhabit the rhythmically precise narratives of Hal’s lyrics.

I can speak with some experience about this latter challenge, as from 1995 until just a few weeks before Burt’s passing we were collaborators, writing more than 30 songs together. It wasn’t as if Burt needed to add a single storey to his tower of song by the time we wrote God Give Me Strength, but the curious experience of writing via long-distance correspondence only made us want to get into the room together to see what else might be discovered, which we did first at his writing studio in Santa Monica, then behind two keyboards in a grand New York hotel suite and finally working at a dilapidated spinet in a Greenwich Village apartment.

Obviously, I took care of the words but it was a mark of Burt’s curiosity that he permitted me to write some songs in musical dialogue with him. Having never studied a note of music at school or college, I found working with Burt more of an education than I’d been offered in my 50 years of writing songs. He was extreme in his focus on the details. If I was up working at 3am, I would find out later that Burt had been up until 4am. “I no longer drive myself mad going for 110%,” he said, “I settle for 95%.”

While in no way attempting to cast myself as Oscar Hammerstein Jr, I believe Burt Bacharach to be the heir to Richard Rodgers in the continuity of American songwriting. On the one occasion when I persuaded Burt to play a song by another composer, he played the Rodgers and Hart song Little Girl Blue. It sounded as if it might have been one of his own compositions.

Burt’s many collaborations with his third wife, Carole Bayer Sager, including That’s What Friends Are For and Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do), would have to take the Oscar role in this story over my slim folio of co-written songs. But while Burt’s life and work ran alongside so many innovations in popular song, his was always an instantly recognisable musical voice, one that adapted in time, the way Rodgers travelled from My Funny Valentine to You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Burt was once and for always. I have nothing but gratitude for the time we spent together.
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