American musician and composer Burt Bacharach died of natural causes at home in Los Angeles, United States, on Wednesday at the age of 94, his public relations department announced on Wednesday.
The biggest name in popular music to come out of the United States in the second half of the 20th century, he only had peers in figures like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Carole King and a few others, as stated in the Associated Press obituary , which recalls his creations such as the themes Walk on, I say a little prayer or This man is in love with you.
Burt Bacharach was known for romantic and melancholy ballads that crossed the line between jazz and pop.
The pianist was born on May 12, 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri, and studied composition at several American universities.
Winner of eight Grammys and three Oscars, he created songs for voices like Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and others, with his themes being the target of versions with names ranging from Elvis Presley to the White Stripes.
An innovative musician, Burt Bacharach grew up listening to jazz and classical music and had little taste for rock when he got into it in the 1950s.
His sensibility often seemed more in tune with Tin Pan Alley than Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and other later authors, but rock songwriters appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility.
“There’s this idea that he has easy songs. They might be fun to hear, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try to play them. Try to sing them,” says Elvis Costello, co-writer of the album “Painted from memories”. by 1998, in an interview given to the Associated Press in 2018.
Burt Bacharach has triumphed in various art forms, earning him Grammy and Oscar awards, two of which were in 1970, for the score to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (“Two Men and a Destiny”) and for the song “Raindrops Remain fall on my head.”
A frequent White House guest during both the Republican and Democratic presidencies, the composer was awarded the Gershwin Prize in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama, who sang a few seconds of “Walk on By” during the campaign. had sung.
Married four times, it was with work that he built the most lasting ties. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to write “Alfie” and spent hours tuning a single chord.
Burt Bacharach started with melodies – strong, but interspersed with shifting rhythms and startling harmonics – and owes his style largely to his love of bebop and his classical training, especially under the tutelage of Darius Milhaud.
Bacharach was primarily a pop songwriter, but his songs became hits for country artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues artists (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross), and synthpop (Naked Eyes).
With the help of Elvis Costello, among others, it reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s.
Burt Bacharach recalled his childhood as a lonely boy growing up, so uncomfortable with being Jewish that he provoked other Jews. Her favorite book as a child was “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he soon moved to New York. The father was a columnist and the mother a pianist who encouraged her son to study music.
Although he was more interested in sports at that time, he practiced piano every day after school so as not to disappoint his mother.
Still a minor, he sneaked into jazz clubs, with a fake ID, and listened to big names like Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.
“They were so incredibly exciting that I was suddenly exposed to music in a way I had never been before,” he recalled in his 2013 memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”
Burt Bacharach, a poor student, managed to get a place at the music conservatory of McGill University 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 sideman, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames brothers, and Paula Stewart.
When a friend who had toured with Marlene Dietrich couldn’t make a Las Vegas show, he asked Bacharach to step in.
The young musician traveled the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the German actress and singer who always played him in every show: “I would like to introduce you to the man, he is my arranger, he is my accompanist , is my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer. But that’s not true. He’s everybody’s composer… Burt Bacharach”.
In the meantime, he had met his ideal songwriting partner, Hal David, with whom he produced his first bestseller “Magic Moments”, sung by Perry Como in 1958, and who went on to accompany him on many of his greatest hits.
Bacharach kept working to the end, vowing never to reform and always believing that a good song could make a difference.
Source: DN
