Dennis McLellan
LOS ANGELES — At the Brill Building, the legendary songwriters’ mecca on Broadway in New York City, composer Burt Bacharach first teamed with lyricist Hal David in 1956. Over the subsequent decade, the 2 helped outline the broad reaches of common music with a run of hit songs that poured from the radio, added depth and emotion to movies and evoked reminiscences with listeners.
Through their collaboration, Bacharach emerged as a commanding determine in common music as a composer, arranger and file producer whose musically subtle songs had cross-generational enchantment.
A a number of Grammy and Oscar winner, Bacharach died of pure causes Wednesday at dwelling in Los Angeles along with his household by his aspect, his publicist Tina Brausam confirmed to The Times on Thursday. He was 94.
“Burt Bacharach. The very name is a synonym for pop-music success in the 1960s,” wrote Leonard Feather, The Times’ former jazz critic.
The beneficiaries of the Bacharach-David partnership had been merely staggering: Gene Pitney (“Only Love Can Break a Heart,” “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa”), Jerry Butler (“Make It Easy on Yourself”), Bobby Vinton (“Blue on Blue”), Jack Jones (“Wives and Lovers”), Tom Jones (“What’s New, Pussycat?”), Dusty Springfield (“The Look of Love,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’”), Herb Alpert (“This Guy’s in Love With You”), Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”) and B.J. Thomas (“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”), amongst others.
But Bacharach and David are most carefully related to Dionne Warwick, a proficient younger backup singer whom they initially enlisted to sing on their demo information.
Beginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in late 1962, Warwick scored with a slew of Bacharach-David songs, together with “Walk on By,” “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart),” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “Alfie,” “Promises, Promises,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Message to Michael” and “Trains and Boats and Planes.”
“We were lucky,” Bacharach advised the Chicago Tribune in 1987. “It was a case of all the right people in the right place at the right time. Hal and I found the perfect partnership, and Dionne was the perfect voice for our songs.”
Singer and music historian Michael Feinstein advised The Times in 2011 that Bacharach and David had been “absolutely the greatest songwriters of their generation,” standing shoulder to shoulder with essentially the most treasured American composers.
Music historian and journalist Paul Grein mentioned Bacharach, the winner of three Oscars and 6 Grammys, was “one of the greatest composers in pop music history.”
Bacharach and David “are, in some ways, the bridge between the Great American Songbook writers from the 1930s and the contemporary writers from the rock era,” he mentioned.
And within the Sixties, when there have been two distinct markets — “music for kids and music for adults” — Bacharach and David uniquely appealed to each, Grein mentioned.
Unlike most songwriters who are usually not acknowledged in public, Bacharach grew to become a widely known performer and recording artist in his personal proper.
As a piano-playing singer, he appeared in sold-out live shows and starred in his personal TV specials, together with the Emmy Award-winning “Singer Presents Burt Bacharach” in 1971.
“He was not a great singer, but he was a charming performer,” Feinstein mentioned. “He knew how to put an entertaining show together. With backup singers, great orchestration, it was a great theatrical show. So he compensated for his own vocal shortcomings by creating a very entertaining, musically rich concert.”
The boyishly good-looking Bacharach, whose aura of glamour benefited from his 1965 marriage to actress Angie Dickinson, continued to tour in live performance nicely into his later years.
During their ‘60s heyday, Bacharach and David also worked in film and shared Academy Award nominations for the title songs “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “Alfie” and for the tune “The Look of Love” from “Casino Royale.”
In 1970, Bacharach received an Oscar for his rating for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and he shared one other with David for his or her hit tune from that movie, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
The duo additionally labored on Broadway, writing the music and lyrics for “Promises, Promises,” the long-running 1968 hit musical comedy whose e-book was written by Neil Simon.
In 1970, the Carpenters scored a No. 1 hit with Bacharach and David’s “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and the fifth Dimension had a No. 2 hit with “One Less Bell to Answer.”
But the celebrated songwriting group broke up after collaborating on the 1973 musical remake of “Lost Horizon.”
After that critically drubbed box-office failure, Bacharach recalled in a 2003 Associated Press interview, “I didn’t need to write with Hal or anyone. It grew to become an issue as a result of we had a dedication to file Dionne for her subsequent album. I didn’t really feel like doing it, and that’s mistaken.
“Dionne didn’t get recorded, and she sued us. And Hal, to protect himself, sued me. It was just ugly and stupid on my part.”
The lawsuits had been settled and all three later reunited. David died at 91 in 2012.
Bacharach’s post-David collaborators included lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982 after he and Dickinson divorced.
Among Bacharach and Sager’s hits are the Oscar-winning “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” which they co-wrote with Christopher Cross and Peter Allen for the 1981 Dudley Moore comedy “Arthur.”
The couple additionally wrote “That’s What Friends Are For,” a 1982 tune for the movie “Night Shift” that was launched by Rod Stewart. A 1985 cowl model of the tune recorded by Warwick and “Friends” — Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder — benefited the American Foundation for AIDS Research and have become a No. 1 hit.
Bacharach and Sager, who later divorced, additionally wrote the 1982 single “Heartlight” with Neil Diamond, and so they collaborated with Bruce Roberts on “Making Love,” the title monitor of the 1982 movie, which grew to become successful for Roberta Flack.
Bacharach, who by then owned a steady of racehorses, underwent a renaissance within the Nineties, a time by which the hit film “My Best Friend’s Wedding” featured a rousing rendition of “I Say a Little Prayer” in a restaurant scene.
He additionally teamed with singer-songwriter Elvis Costello on the 1998 album “Painted From Memory,” which resulted within the duo profitable the Grammy for pop collaboration with vocals for his or her tune “I Still Have That Other Girl.”
And in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” in 1997, Bacharach made the primary of three cameo appearances in actor-comedian Mike Myers’ Sixties spy-movie spoofs.
An solely baby, Burt Freeman Bacharach was born May 12, 1928, in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Bert, was a division retailer clothes purchaser who later grew to become a syndicated newspaper columnist; his mom, Irma, was a painter and occasional songwriter.
In 1932, the household moved to Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, the place Burt started taking piano classes in elementary college.
“People always think I was this child prodigy on the piano, that I just couldn’t wait to sit down and practice,” Bacharach mentioned. “But you want to know the truth? I hated it. In fact, I only did it to please my mother. She was the one who encouraged me.”
In highschool, Bacharach and a few mates shaped a 10-piece band that performed at events and native dances.
After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at McGill University in Montreal. He later studied underneath French classical composer Darius Milhaud on the Mannes School of Music in New York.
After a stint within the Army, Bacharach performed piano in nightclubs in and round New York and have become an accompanist and arranger for singers reminiscent of Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen and Paula Stewart, who grew to become his first spouse in 1953.
After he turned to songwriting, Bacharach and David had their first hit collectively in 1957 with Marty Robbins’ recording of “The Story of My Life,” which was adopted by a 1958 hit for Perry Como, “Magic Moments.”
Before he and David started writing songs collectively completely, Bacharach teamed with different lyricists, together with Bob Hilliard (“Any Day Now,” “Tower of Strength”) and Hal David’s brother Mack and Barney Williams (“Baby, It’s You”).
For a couple of years starting in 1958, Bacharach additionally toured with legendary German-born actress and singer Marlene Dietrich as her conductor, arranger and pianist.
“We traveled the world together,” he advised The Times of London in 2000. “And though she could be hard on those who worked for her, she was very generous to me.”
Though his songs helped kind the soundtrack of a tumultuous period, Bacharach’s music was largely apolitical till late in life, when his songs started referring to college shootings, the 9/11 terror assault and racial intolerance. He mentioned as he appeared backward, he realized that a few of his earlier songs — “What the World Needs Now” and “The Windows of the World,” to call two — had been possible a response to the Vietnam War.
In 2016, Bacharach wrote “Dancing With Your Shadow,” a tribute to his daughter Nikki, who struggled with Asperger’s syndrome and took her personal life in 2007. The tune was recorded by Sheryl Crow. That identical yr, Bacharach scored the soundtrack of the award-winning movie “A Boy Called Po,” the story of an overworked father making an attempt to take care of an autistic son.
In 2018, Bacharach and Cuban musician Rudy Perez wrote and recorded “Live to See Another Day,” which raised cash for the Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit that works to guard kids from gun violence. The subsequent yr, he launched “Blue Umbrella,” a five-song collaboration with Grammy-winning author Daniel Tashian.
Bacharach is survived by his spouse, Jane Hansen; and two kids, Oliver and Raleigh.
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(McLellan is a former Times employees author.)
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