The American musician and composer Burt Bacharach died on Wednesday, at his home in Los Angeles, in the United States, at the age of 94, of natural causes, his publicist announced today.
The biggest name in popular music to come out of the United States during the second half of the 20th century, it was only matched by the likes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Carole King and a few others, as recalled in the Associated Press obituary. , which recalls his creations such as the songs “Walk on By”, “I Say a Little Prayer” or “This Guy’s in Love with You”.
Winner of eight Grammy Awards and three Oscars, he created songs for voices such as Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and others, his songs being covered by names ranging from Elvis Presley to the White Stripes.
An innovative musician, Burt Bacharach grew up on jazz and classical music and had little taste for rock when he got into it in the 1950s.
His sensibility often seemed more in line with Tin Pan Alley than Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and other later auteurs, but rock songwriters appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility.
“There’s this idea that he has easy songs. They might be nice to listen to, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try to play them. Try to sing them,” said Elvis Costello, co-writer of the “Painted from Memory” album. in 1998, in an interview given to the Associated Press in 2018.
Burt Bacharach triumphed in various forms of art, which earned him Grammy and Oscar awards, two of them in 1970, for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (“Two men and one destiny”) and for the song “The raindrops keep falling on my head.”
A frequent guest at the White House, both in the Republican and Democratic presidencies, the composer received the Gershwin Prize in 2012 from then-President Barack Obama, who had sung a few seconds of “Walk on By” during the campaign.
Married four times, it was with work that he established the most lasting ties. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to write “Alfie” and could spend hours honing a single chord.
Burt Bacharach began with melodies, strong but interspersed with shifting rhythms and surprising harmonics, due in no small part to his love of bebop and his classical education, especially under Darius Milhaud.
Bacharach was primarily a pop songwriter, but his songs became hits for country (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synth-pop (Naked Eyes) artists.
With the help of Elvis Costello, among others, he reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s.
Burt Bacharach recalled his childhood as an increasingly lonely boy, so uncomfortable with being a Jew that he provoked other Jews. His favorite book as a child was “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he soon moved to New York. His father was a columnist and his mother a pianist who encouraged his son to study music.
Although he was more interested in sports at the time, he practiced the piano every day after school, so as not to disappoint his mother.
Still underage, he would sneak into jazz clubs, using a fake ID, and listen to big names like Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.
“They were so incredibly exciting that I suddenly got into music like never before,” he recalled in his 2013 memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”
A poor student, Burt Bacharach managed to win a place at McGill University’s music conservatory in Montreal, where he wrote his first song.
Early in his career in the music business, he had little success as a songwriter, but became a popular arranger and accompanist, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames brothers, and Paula Stewart.
When a friend who had toured with Marlene Dietrich couldn’t make it to Las Vegas, he asked Bacharach to step in.
The young musician traveled the world with the German actress and singer, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who always told him at every show: “I would like to introduce you to the man, he is my arranger, he is my accompanist “. he’s my director, and i wish i could say he’s my composer. But that’s not true. He’s the songwriter of all… Burt Bacharach.”
Meanwhile, he had met his ideal songwriting partner, Hal David, with whom he produced his first best-seller, “Magic Moments,” sung in 1958 by Perry Como, and who accompanied him on many of his greatest hits.
Bacharach continued to work to the very end, vowing never to reform and always believing that a good song could make a difference.
Source: TSF
