Burt Bacharach - Pop's New Arcadia

Burt Bacharach is the pathos within American noise.

(Albert Goldman)

In the fleeting yet golden world of pop music, few insiders can lay claim to the status of genius. Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, and Phil Spector are certainly geniuses who managed to carry and transcend the fleeting adolescent dream of the "pop" song into art. And by art here we mean not mere escapism, but emotional and spiritual knowledge striving to find "a gravitas", "a fullness", within the cramped space of the few minutes that make up the "pop song". But if we had to pick the one who, more than anyone, glorified the art of beauty, of intimate, modest introspection, of the depth of the greatest and smallest emotions magically brought together, we'd choose Burt Freeman Bacharach, the mystic Jewish explorer lost in the Shangri-La of his own Lost Horizon.

Bacharach is George Gershwin meeting Duke Ellington within the emerging pop music. While the two aforementioned figures welded classical music to the blues-jazz tradition, Bacharach went further, also joining those two components to popular music, thereby broadening its horizons and prospects. In this role, Bacharach stands as the first anomalous genius of "pop", a genius who was far from modern and far from flashy, not very talkative and not very rock, too handsome and bourgeois to be able to cause a stir in that 1950s-60s America inflamed by the new creed of rock'n'roll — in his own way an anti-hero who carried the pop song down new roads. As Robin Platts rightly puts it: "...simple emotions were translated into artfully constructed music and words, songs that were actually far more complex than they sounded. Bacharach made them seem easy, but they weren't. He had pushed songwriting toward new, exciting frontiers, with an innovative use of words, rhythms and melodies".

Bacharach is one of the greatest geniuses of American popular music. His songs exceed the expectations of what a pop song should be. Advanced harmonies, chord mutations with unpredictable modulations, sudden rhythm changes... But he makes it all seem so natural that you don't even notice, and you can't help but whistle along.

(John Zorn)

Never be ashamed to write a melody you can whistle.

(Darius Milhaud to Burt Bacharach)

The greatness of Bacharach's music unlocks arcane emotions, light and at the same time unsettling, with the lightness of his unique and unmistakable bach-arachian touch. There isn't a pop, rock or jazz musician who hasn't bowed to his talent: from Frank Zappa, who admired his sophistication ("before him, very little had been done in American pop in the realm of bitonal and polytonal harmonies", he would acknowledge), to Brian Wilson, who named him as his favorite songwriter, to Steely Dan ("Walter Becker and I were huge fans of Burt's records, they influenced us deeply", Donald Fagen would reveal to Melody Maker in 1993), to Stan Getz and McCoy Tyner, who each recorded a separate tribute album with the same title ("What The World Needs Now"), and to a host of musicians so disparate that listing them all would be impossible: Rem, Elvis Costello (with whom he would produce the immense "Painted From Memory"), Mark Hollis, Diana Krall, Sterelolab, Luther Vandross, Love, Oasis, White Stripes, Pretenders, Laura Nyro, Belle and Sebastian, Cardinal, Divine Comedy, Kyoto Jazz Massive, Isaac Hayes, whose extraordinary cover of "Walk On By" on the album "Hot Buttered Soul" must be mentioned, and which was curiously also covered in a post-punk version by the Stranglers on the Ep attached to the 1978 album "Black & White"... the list really would be endless.

John Zorn would say of him in the liner notes to "Great Jewish Music": "Burt Bacharach is one of the great geniuses of American popular music. His songs exceed the expectations of what a pop song should be. Advanced harmonies, chord mutations with unpredictable modulations, sudden rhythm changes... But he makes it all seem so natural that you don't even notice, and you can't help but whistle along".

For years his music was relegated to mere muzak, easy listening, at least until the lounge music boom of the Nineties, which in effect also rehabilitated Bacharach for a dazed new generation of music lovers: Nme in 1996 described him as a "Lounge Wizard", Mojo in 1998 called him "A gentleman who prefers diminished sevenths", and Q in 1996 went so far as to portray him as "a man imprisoned in music's metaphorical lift for years". In reality, a bit of timely research would have revealed that in Bacharach's makeup there was never any room for easy listening. Starting with the crucial lessons of the French master Darius Milhaud, a friend of Erik Satie and member of Les Six, who counted among his students figures such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass and Iannis Xenakis. Not exactly regulars of elevator music. But it was Milhaud himself who gave Bacharach the decisive piece of advice: "Never be ashamed to write a melody you can whistle". He would take it to heart for the rest of his life.

But it's also hard to find another pop hitmaker who studied under Henry Cowell and fed on Ravel and the jazz of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. Much of the contemporary critical establishment genuinely struggled to grasp the professionalism of this great craftsman, the man who literally invented a new way of writing the pop song, effectively composing what we might call the "chamber pop sonata". Where Phil Spector works through slow accumulation and layering of sound to reach a song's ideal climax (the famous Spector Wall of Sound), Bacharach works with a foil, through a slow and exhausting process of arrangement and production: "A perfectionist, we used to drive each other crazy," Hal David would say in 2003.

I just wanted to go out in the street and play ball like everyone I knew. I lived in Forest Hills, I was Jewish but I didn't want anyone to know it. I was too short for a girl to even notice I was alive. And while I could have found myself by really learning to play the piano, there was nothing in the world I hated more than that instrument.

(Burt Bacharach)

Manhattan transfer

Born in Kansas City in 1928 to Irma and Bert Bacharach, descendants of a family of German Jews, young Burt (called Happy at home to avoid confusion with his father) was an insecure, almost maladjusted kid: legend has it he was a nerd avant la lettre, with braces on his teeth and a bottle of Listerine always on hand for emergency gargling. He had a taste for jazz and an immoderate passion for twelve-tone music. But his early drive wasn't marked by any sacred calling. It was his mother, a painter and failed singer, who pushed him into piano lessons with the zealous Miss Rose Raymond, starting at age 8. But he wanted nothing to do with it: "I just wanted to go out in the street and play ball like everyone I knew," he would recall. "I lived in Forest Hills, I was Jewish but I didn't want anyone to know it. I was too short for a girl to even notice I was alive. I read 'Fiesta' and went around with a name like Happy. And while I could have found myself by really learning to play the piano, there was nothing in the world I hated more than that instrument."

A fraught relationship with music, then. But with a few fixed points. Like Debussy. Or that Ravel score - the Suite No. 2 for orchestra from the ballet "Daphnis et Chloé" - which he used to read on the sly during Spanish classes in college. Burt studied music - piano and cello - at McGill University and the Mannes School of Music. But his real infatuation was jazz: at 15, fake ID in hand, he snuck into the clubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan, and it was there that Dizzy Gillespie struck him like lightning onto the path of the staff. He became especially passionate about the be-bop of the '40s (Parker, Gillespie, Monk), whose rhythms he would go on to study in depth, but also the orchestral pop of Henry Mancini and Ray Conniff, and bossa nova.

If two people are making love, you shouldn't get out of bed to write down what's ringing in your head and say: "The G goes to flat, not to A minor. It works, baby."

(Burt Bacharach)

His first steps, in the 1950s, saw him as pianist, arranger and conductor of the group accompanying Marlene Dietrich in her shows. It would be that eternal German diva herself who certified his transformation from self-conscious adolescent into charming man: "He embodied everything a woman could want. He was caring and sensitive, gallant and brave, strong and sincere," the muse of "Lili Marlene" would recall in her autobiography. No flirtation, at least not with her, but a relationship made of attentive care. Bacharach himself would tell of the day he caught the icy Marlene washing his t-shirt and tennis socks, when they were together in Las Vegas for a series of concerts.

Their partnership would last until 1965, although Bacharach - as he would candidly admit - never actually liked Dietrich's songs. That experience, however, would prove invaluable for his later work as a composer. As for his reputation as a tireless tombeur de femmes, no one would ever doubt it again. His marriage to actress Paula Stewart lasted from 1953 to 1958. In 1965 he married blonde Angie Dickinson, the American actress famous for her legendary legs, with whom he would split in 1981. Between divorces, there were flings with top model Slim Brandy. Then new vows, with his collaborator Carole Bayer Sager, and, from 1993, a fourth marriage, to Jane Hanson. But the one constant love affair, bordering on obsession, would always be music, to the point that one day he joked about it: "If two people are making love, you shouldn't get out of bed to write down what's ringing in your head and say: 'The G goes to flat, not to A minor. It works, baby.'"

At the Brill Building it was like being in the army and dealing with every second lieutenant. No one was spared.

(Burt Bacharach)

The song factory

His musical adventure began in the Fordist, production-line corporatism of the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway, between 49th and 53rd Streets, in the heart of Manhattan. The mechanical, reproductive, repetitive nature of the place was skillfully balanced by incredible artistic creativity, backed by a rare melodic gift. At the time, the Brill Building factory was stigmatized as part of the industry-apparatus, too inauthentic for the rock canons that were taking shape in those years.

If, on one hand, the Brill Building really was a production line churning out songs to be sold like bars of soap, on the other hand the explosion of new recording technologies allowed its "workers" to push pop's language to levels of ambition never before explored. Commercial demands and artistic ones eventually found a healthy way to coexist. Among these "workers", besides Bacharach — who joined the Brill Building in the summer of 1956 for Eddie Wolpin's Famous-Paramount Music — we must at least mention other legendary names, such as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Phil Spector, Paul Simon, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Laura Nyro.

As Bacharach would put it: "It was like being in the army and dealing with every second lieutenant. No one was spared." And indeed it was a period of compromises and frustrations for young Burt ("I worked really badly in New York and wrote some truly banal songs"), and even his compositional material still feels anonymous: "It was as if someone else had written that material," Michael Ancliffe would write.

During that period he began writing numerous songs, including "Baby It's You" (Shirelles), "Please Stay" (Drifters), "Tower Of Strength" (Gene McDaniels). And he managed to land a couple of hits, such as "The Story Of My Life" - the first big hit for the David & Bacharach duo - recorded by Marty Robbins and destined to climb to No. 15 on the charts thanks to its whistled hook, followed by "Magic Moments", which, entrusted to Perry Como's crooner voice, earned the first gold record certified by the RIAA (established that very year, 1958).

You'd practically need a music course to know how to handle his scores.

(Dionne Warwick)

Another factor that long paralyzed critics was the apparent complexity and sophistication of his musical writing, alien to rock and distinctly academic, which offered little "linguistic" foothold for a whole generation of illiterate rock musicians with no musical training behind them. As his muse Dionne Warwick put it: "You'd practically need a music course to know how to handle his scores." Because Bacharach's music is packed with innovations: the complexity of the time signatures, so different from the "usual" 4/4 common in pop music (12/8, 6/8 and so on abound), often varying even within the same song (the extreme case being "Promises Promises", with time changes every two bars, to the delight of singers and performers alike). Not to mention the "strange" chords - diminished and so on - and the "lush" arrangements, which nevertheless always retain a lightness and elegance.

In short, these are laughable accusations when it comes to musical art, comparable to those leveled in the same years at Motown's new sound, dismissed as too "slick". Two musical aesthetics, Gordy's and Bacharach's, in some ways comparable (just listen to the Supremes and Temptations cover of "This Guy's In Love With You" to realize it): great professionalism, great arrangements, great melodies. A freshness of sound that still remains intact today.

This mutual "linguistic misunderstanding" later eased once rock managed to work through that "compositional complexity", adapting it with its own means to its own needs. As rock evolved out of rock'n'roll, it did indeed draw inspiration from literature, film and painting, but it also had to — and wanted to — look to and learn from classical music, jazz and contemporary music, so as not to feel "linguistically" and "psychologically" less equipped.

Having already learned to play piano, cello and drums as a child, as we have seen, Bacharach drew on the French Impressionists (Ravel, Debussy) for his "classical" training, then the post-Impressionists Poulenc, Satie, Milhaud (essentially French music hall with a cabaret flavor), all the way up to Berg and Webern. Living in Kansas City and New York, he then discovered and absorbed rhythms from 1940s be-bop jazz (the sacred trinity of Monk-Gillespie-Parker). From the cerebral minimalist-electronic avant-garde (Cage, Stockhausen) he instead picked up a rigor of execution. Then, tired of the highbrow, he turned to the lowbrow, to the orchestral pop - at times almost too perfect in sound - of Ray Conniff.

At the Brill Building, thanks to Wolpin, Bacharach would meet Hal David, who would become his longtime lyricist. A fruitful partnership built on perfect complementarity: while Bacharach crafted complex harmonizations and chords for his music, David had the skill to instantly capture the sound of words with flexible, immediate lyrics. As Mauro Ronconi writes, "Bacharach and David had two completely different personalities, the former a romantic optimist, the latter a disenchanted man bordering on cynicism. It was precisely from two such opposite characters that the distinctive element of their work would emerge, namely the contrast between the lightness of the music and the disillusioned, realistic lyrics."

The r'n'b formula of his early days hadn't produced any artistically significant results: rock'n'roll was not the path to follow. Bacharach would therefore have to wait until 1962 for his "turning point", but only after shaking off the negative yet formative experience of the Brill Building, under the artistic direction of Mitch Miller.

I used to give Dionne suggestions. Not anymore. I know whatever she does will always be a gem.

(Burt Bacharach)

The maestro and his muses

In 1962, the song "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", with Bacharach conducting the orchestra, Phil Ramone as sound engineer and production by Leiber and Stoller, was released unnoticed as the B-side of "And I Never Knew" on the single by Tommy Hunt, a black r'n'b singer. Two years later, completely rearranged and featuring a breathtaking vocal performance by Dusty Springfield, it would reach number three on the UK charts: "Who wouldn't have wanted to sing a song like that? He was a writer who was profoundly changing the sound of pop music", Springfield herself would later recall.

The song would become the first true manifesto of the duo's musical poetics and aesthetic. We can rightly call it a historic B-side on a par with the Beatles' "Rain", just to give an idea. Here we already find the typical traits of the duo's later work: an ennui, an adult malaise no longer adolescent, which, starting from Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", would lead us to Frank Sinatra's "Man Alone".

His work as conductor for Marlene Dietrich (begun in 1958 and continuing until 1965) paved the way for Burt's great experiments with chords (his famous suspended chords) and arrangements, and for the actual construction of the new pop song.

Now having full control over the arrangements and the production side of the sound, Bacharach would finally unleash all of his enormous creative potential, because - as he himself explained to Hubert Saal in 1970 - "you can have a terrific song, but a poor arrangement or production will always ruin it."

We have now reached a historical moment where the dichotomy between high art and low art is definitively shattered and reconciled to heights unthinkable for the time: let's remember these are the years straddling the Fifties and Sixties, when the lack of communication between high (avant-garde) and low (popular music) was sharp and clearly defined. Bacharach knows and admires the work of figures like Cage, Stockhausen, LaMonte Young, but he's also aware of their limited popular appeal, due to the intrinsic difficulty of listening to their music. By modernizing one of the most banal yet, at the same time, most complex themes to tackle - the discourse of love in its infinite facets - Bacharach would bring about the turning point toward the great popular success of the years to come. It's not a new theme - the whole story of Tin Pan Alley was built on the love song - but it's the new way of producing the sound that would create the legend. A legend that would be fueled by the essential contribution of another figure: Dionne Warwick, the black pearl with a voice of filigree and a melancholy timbre, raised singing gospel in church with her aunt Cissy Houston. Born Warrick, she would forever keep the surname with the typo that appeared on the cover of her first single, "Don't Make Me Over", the splendid sentimental ballad crafted for her by the David-Bacharach duo. Their fateful meeting took place during a 1962 recording session in which Dionne was singing backup for the Drifters on "Mexican Divorce". Able to handle both the rhythmic-harmonic difficulties of Bacharach's compositions (just notice the ease with which she slips from 5/4 to 4/4 and then into 7/8 in "Anyone Who Had A Heart", her second hit) and the expressive demands of conveying complex feelings, Warwick turned out to be the perfect voice for the duo's songs: "I used to give her suggestions. Not anymore. I know whatever she does will always be a gem", Bacharach would say of her.

It would be above all in 1964, with "Walk On By" (initially the B-side of "Any Old Time of The Day"), that Dionne would establish herself as a world star and supreme muse of the man from Kansas City. "Walk On By" indeed condenses all the genius of Bacharach as composer and arranger, starting with that sly, vaguely bossa nova rhythm, underpinned by an acoustic guitar, with Warwick's gospel-tinged voice - extremely elegant phrasing, flawless intonation, excellent vocal range - bursting in over the piano's chimes, and the strings, initially relegated to the background, swelling up before receding again, while the chorus comes to life amid the disorienting punctuation of flugelhorn. A masterpiece for music as a whole, destined, as noted, for an unstoppable string of covers.

"The Look Of Love" was the most erotic thing that could be sung by a white English girl in 1967.

(Luca Sofri)

From then on, Dionne Warwick would retain a kind of birthright over the songs written by the David-Bacharach duo. In his "The Book of Love", Giampiero Vigorito imagines her as "a flamingo of an unknown breed, flying lightly as it glides between colored silks". Nothing captures better than this image what Burt Bacharach's greatest muse represented. Not the only one, though. Claiming a seat at the right hand of the divine Dionne is, at the very least, Dusty Springfield, the white queen of soul, an icon of vocal style and British fashion, with an impact on UK culture comparable to that of a Dalida in France or a Mina in Italy. Blonde, heavily kohl-eyed, with a deeply sensual voice, Springfield was the first to sing the famous "The Look Of Love", later dubbed "the most erotic thing that could be sung by a white English girl in 1967" (Luca Sofri), as well as the aforementioned "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", the velvety "Wishin' And Hopin'" (UK No. 6 in 1964), which had previously found no luck with Warwick as the B-side of "This Empty Place", and many other songs penned by the duo.

And while the pantheon of Bacharach-esque interpreters obviously cannot do without Aretha Franklin, who took "I Say A Little Prayer" to the top of the charts, a mention is also owed to Jackie DeShannon, another sensual, enchanting voice and one of the earliest female singer-songwriters of rock'n'roll, boasting a rather impressive pedigree (over the years she would work with Marianne Faithfull, Jimmy Page, Randy Newman, the Byrds, and would also write "Bette Davis Eyes"). It was blonde Jackie who first sang "What The World Needs Now Is Love", the moving 1965 ballad that remains among the most beloved in the entire Bacharach & David catalogue.

"'Little Red Book' was the one time I tried to write rock'n'roll, and it was a total disaster, together with Manfred Mann. They had trouble understanding my harmonies and chord changes. It was a complete flop. Three years later, Love changed the melody, which I didn't like, changed the chords, which I didn't like, and turned it into a hit... which I liked very much!".

(Burt Bacharach)

The hook of love

But Bacharach also wants to step into the spotlight on his own, sitting at the piano and playing his own hits. His debut album, Hit Maker! Burt Bacharach Plays His Hits, came out in 1965 and featured, as session men, future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.

Several masterpieces are already present, albeit still in search of their full definition, with the vocal parts entrusted to the sensual whispers of three vocalists – Barbara Moore, Gloria George and Margaret Stredder – gathered under the moniker The Breakaways (a sort of British equivalent of the Blossoms). But their contribution rarely holds up against the later versions of the same songs delivered by genuine interpreters.

"Walk On By", for example, appears here in an almost entirely orchestral version, with a few vocalizations thrown in, and sounds far less captivating than the version immortalized by Dionne Warwick's voice; and yet it still amazes for that enveloping melodic openness, brushed by the strings and punctuated by the piano's chimes. The equally majestic "A House Is Not A Home" suffers from somewhat redundant arrangements: it would find more fitting clothing in its later recorded incarnations, but it already overflows with that sense of contrite melancholy that would turn it into a monument.

The ravishing harmonies of "Anyone Who Had A Heart" (recorded for the Italian market by Petula Clark under the title "Tutti quelli che hanno un cuore") unfold in a trail of velvety horns and aching strings, with sudden music-hall-like orchestral surges. It is instead a trumpet that carves out the melodic line of "Don't Make Me Over" – another gem destined for better fortune (it would be Warwick's first single) – with the strings swelling a somewhat dated backdrop with pathos. The track where the vocalists' velvety sensuality perhaps comes through most is "Wives And Lovers", with its melodic ups and downs in 5/4 time, already sent by Jack Jones to No. 14 on the charts and reprised here in an almost lounge key.

The album also includes both sides of a single released that same year: "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and its more successful B-side (UK No. 4) "Trains And Boats And Planes", marked by a distorted electric piano and a steady forward motion that mimics the feeling of travel.

It's already clear, however, that with Bacharach even the crumbs are gold: take, for instance, the seemingly inconsequential little tune of "Blue On Blue" and project it forward into a nightclub of the 2000s: it would magically reappear, sampled and revitalized in electronic guise, in a gorgeous song by Royksopp ("So Easy").

Hit Maker! went almost unnoticed in the US, while achieving considerable commercial success in Britain. The arcadian sensibility of this new pop sound could hardly go unnoticed by British listeners, always so receptive to nostalgic, romantic states of mind.

That same year Bacharach worked on the soundtrack for Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat, the first film scripted by Woody Allen, with a star-studded cast including Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider and Allen himself. The title, however, is the only legacy of would-be star Warren Beatty: it was the joking phrase he used to answer the phone with (!).

"It was the one time I tried to write rock'n'roll, and it was a total disaster! – Bacharach would recall – We went into the studio with Manfred Mann, a British rock band of the time, but they had trouble understanding my harmonies and chords. It was a complete flop. Three years later a band from Southern California, Love, changed the melody, which I didn't like, changed the chords, which I didn't like, and turned it into a hit... which I liked very much!". He was referring specifically to "Little Red Book", an uptempo number that was actually far from negligible, with a snarling edge that Love would have no trouble turning into a garage-rock anthem. The whirlwind of "What's New Pussycat", entrusted to Tom Jones's booming crooning, throws open the curtain on a sweeping, Broadway-style musical number, while "Here I Am" (later reinterpreted by Warwick) delivers some dreamy, pre-lounge, sunset-cocktail atmospheres.

Far less noticed, on the other hand, was the subsequent soundtrack written by Bacharach and David for After The Fox, a 1966 Italian-British comedy starring Peter Sellers and directed by Vittorio De Sica. The idea of marrying the American maestro's sumptuous pop orchestrations with folksy miniatures that seem to exhume somewhat stereotyped Italian tunes doesn't fully convince, while the main theme is handed to the Hollies, with semi-comic spoken interludes by Sellers, resulting in an effect that's not exactly irresistible. Everything else – the airiness, the melodic grace, the lightness of touch – is, of course, still very much there.

But the main project the composer from Kansas City is working on is a new album, in which his complex emotional layers, supported by a perfect formal balance, would be fully realized. And the prelude to it is a new record deal.

Lord, we don’t need another mountain

There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb

There are oceans and rivers enough to cross

Enough to last till the end of time

(“What The World Needs Now”)

In Search of the Out

In 1967 Bacharach signed with A&M Records, founded by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. The label's logo featured a trumpet at the bottom, a distinctive sign of the duo's "sonic policy." A&M Records targeted listeners with little interest in the psychedelic rock then in full swing, and who leaned instead toward more classic, adult-oriented listening. Tijuana Brass, the Baja Marimba Band, the Sandpipers, Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66: this is how latin-exotica music rushed headlong into the "carnival" of commercial pop.

Bacharach found himself working no longer in claustrophobic, vertical Manhattan, but on the West Coast in Los Angeles, with its wide open spaces and sunny skies. The environmental and psychological friction between West and East Coast would prove to be a considerable source of creative inspiration for all the musician's subsequent work, with his frequent trips back and forth between the two coasts.

The first fruit of this new direction is the intimate masterpiece Reach Out, released in October 1967. Bacharach draws on material almost entirely already written with Hal David, old "near-hits" and works that hadn't quite come together for him, such as the album he produced for Dionne Warwick, "The Windows Of The World" (1967). He rearranges them so thoroughly that they're transformed in prodigious fashion, with slower, softly jazz-tinged tempos, and a less intrusive use of the orchestra, which becomes more of a rhythmic support, since the melodic and harmonic work is now carried out by individual solo instruments – chief among them piano, Hammond organ and trumpet. There's also more of a focus on sound than on words, which are often either removed entirely or relegated to a choral backing role. Burt wants to reach the Out, his own personal shining, that indefinable quid that would become the signature trait of his music. He succeeds in giving thematic coherence to his solo project by subtly binding all the songs to a single theme: the universal one of love. The songs on the record are in fact "small love stories," mini-fragments of possible film screen tests, open-ended endings with a bittersweet aftertaste.

The "cinematic" cover art is already a manifesto of his musical aesthetic and poetics, as well as a veiled homage to the famous cover of Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. The eleven tracks, with their bizarre and sudden shifts in rhythm, tempo and mood, reveal this path of childlike wonder: even as adults, one must have kept hold of the Out in order to grasp its greatness.

"Reach Out For Me," first recorded by Lou Johnson in 1963 and later included on the 1964 album "Make Way For Dionne Warwick," turns slightly jazzy here, with Bacharach's piano standing in for Dionne's voice and the closing trumpet prominently featured, as female voices and a graceful touch of exoticism emerge and lock perfectly into place. "Alfie," written in '66 for the Lewis Gilbert film of the same name, was performed by Cher with Bono's arrangement in the States, while in the UK it was sung by Cilla Black, before finally entering legend thanks to the vocal radiance of Warwick's version on her "Here Where There Is Love." Here it becomes a purely instrumental piece, far more powerful, with gorgeous "bouncing" samba-bossa rhythms and a lavish orchestral carpet of strings woven between Burt's liquid pianism and the dominant trumpet unfurling the wonderfully melancholic melody. Even without the support of David's lyrics, the psychological subtlety of the instrumental captures perfectly the ambiguous character of the film's Alfie, a Michael Caine torn between libertine-libertarian desires and a craving for normalcy.

In "Bond Street" – known as "Home James, Don't Spare The Horses," for the "Casino Royale" soundtrack – Paul Griffin's Hammond organ dominates, propped up by samba rhythms, with the ever-precise orchestra in support: a gem still capable of making entire generations shimmy today in fits of snobbish London-shopping frenzy. "Are You There (With Another Girl)," already sung by Warwick on her "Here I Am" and released as a single in 1965, is slowed down here, with the Hammond replacing the piano, and trumpet and orchestra merging together as masterfully as ever.

Already made immortal by the grace of the blonde Jackie DeShannon, "What The World Needs Now Is Love" deserves a chapter of its own. In its melodic simplicity and its direct, unashamed message, it possesses a devastating beauty. A hopeful anthem for souls that have remained innocent. Before the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love." The chords are bold, perhaps even too bold, for a muted trumpet that enters almost irritably, whispering out the melodic theme; a sax comes in support, dialoguing with the trumpet, while celeste tones herald the orchestra, now busy building dreamlike, suspended atmospheres. With wonderful polyrhythmic echoes of snares and soft brushes caressing the drumheads in the background, Dionne calls on the Lord to grant the most precious gift of all, that of Lost Love (“Lord, we don’t need another mountain/ There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb/ There are oceans and rivers enough to cross/ Enough to last till the end of time”). The emotional pathos rises, the rhythm turns jazzy, with the orchestra fully unfurled for the almost desperate final choral invocation “What the world needs now is love, sweet love/ no, not just for some/ oh, but just for every, every, everyone”.

"The Look Of Love" is another crystalline gem, one of those songs worth an entire career. An intro that's already the stuff of legend among legends, lounge ante-litteram. If humanity has rediscovered Love, then here is what it looks like: beguiling, fleeting as the glance of Ursula Andress ("…the melody came from just watching Ursula"). Burt strips it of lyrics, letting the music speak for itself amid gorgeous echoes of bossa nova guitar, with trumpet, Hammond and orchestra trading the melodic theme. In just over two minutes, we find revealed one of the most unspeakable subjects, about which it's pointless to talk, because "the look of love is saying so much more than just words could ever say."

"A House Is Not A Home" is one of Bacharach's masterpieces, so much so that it features his own emotional vocal performance, the first one ever. Already recorded in 1964 by Warwick, it's rearranged and extended here; Burt's piano and his near-crooner vocal, before the orchestrated finale, send the piece soaring to peaks of deep yearning. If the love glimpsed in "The Look Of Love" is potentially fleeting and painful, here it is instead intimate, melancholic, "pure soul music." It's the eternal story of fleeting, unfulfilling brothel love affairs, with Hal David outdoing himself by writing one of the finest lyrics ever: “Darling, have a heart/ Don’t let one mistake keep us apart/ I’m not meant to live alone/ Turn this house into a home/ When I climb the stair and turn the key/ Oh, please be there still in love with me”. Jazz musicians of the caliber of Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins have recorded this piece, which has by now become a jazz standard. For anyone who still believes Bacharach's music is "pure cheesy music," it's time to think again and open their ears.

"I Say A Little Prayer" is another immortal classic from the Bacharach-David duo. Unhappy with the rushed arrangement on Dionne's album "The Windows Of The World," perfectionist Burt had a very clear idea in his head of the sound he wanted for his recordings, and it's likely he never quite found it for this song: the piece, sung by Warwick, is essentially an "Every Breath You Take" turned positive: the love David's lyrics aspire to is total and all-consuming ("My darling, believe me for me there is no one but you…"). "The Windows Of The World," dominated by trumpet and sax, is perhaps the weakest track on the album: recorded here purely as an instrumental, without the protest-era lyrics, it loses a bit of its impact, with a piano intro reminiscent of a music box and the inevitable trumpet; the listening experience is perhaps more satisfying in the pastoral, Judy Collins-style version, built entirely on atmospheric nuances, with a lovely acoustic guitar in the background, given by Dionne Warwick for her 1967 album of the same name.

"Lisa," another lyrical gem, is also the only previously unreleased track on the album: in just a few lines it unfolds the melancholic story of this modern heroine, a delicate tale of unattainable love, arranged to a modern waltz rhythm. The songwriter rhetorically asks who could write about her: "How can anyone so beautiful be mine, love?" Lisa, unable to love and unloved, becomes a symbolic figure for all of humanity, yearning for love. "Message To Michael" closes the album masterfully, with a sturdier country-bluesy arrangement, an instrumental that reaches great heights when a sax suddenly appears to unfurl the melody, well supported by the orchestra.

With Reach Out, at nearly forty years old, after a long and arduous journey, Bacharach finds his artistic maturity. His music is no longer just about churning out hits or the occasional film score, but yearns for something more substantial. Having found a strong identity of his own, it has become like a precious Pandora's box. Drawing vital energy from obscure emotional games, more sensual and subtly erotic, it wraps the listener in its immediacy, only to leave behind a strange aftertaste of suspended feelings, ranging from joy to utter despondency.

It is precisely Reach Out and the follow-up Make It Easy On Yourself that stand as the missing links between the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" and Randy Newman's "Sail Away." As Skip Heller astutely observed, these are the two forgotten records that connect "the teenage symphonies to God" to Newman's more mature singer-songwriter craft. But it could just as easily be the link to Carole King's "Tapestry" or Tom Waits's "Closing Time."

Bacharach has the unmistakable touch of a master of the musical comedy; it's as though his songs sing, speak and dance all at once.

(Jack Roll, Newsweek, 1968)

From Hollywood to San Jose

That same year, 1967, as we've seen, Bacharach also turns up on the soundtrack of the 007 film Casino Royale (with "The Look Of Love" sung by Dusty Springfield and the instrumental title track courtesy of Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass), as well as on that of the tv-movie On the Flip Side.

Bacharach and David also team up with Broadway producer David Merrick for the 1968 musical Promises, Promises, inspired by Billy Wilder's comedy "The Apartment" from eight years earlier, with Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray. It will yield two new hits: the radiant title track (turned into "Promesse... promesse..." by the duo Dorelli-Spaak in the Italian-language version of the musical) and the tender "I'll Never Fall In Love Again", both destined for Dionne Warwick. The latter, in particular, is a small compendium of Bacharach-ian melodic genius, with its contrite mood of a love come to an end, exploding into cosmic melancholy through the orchestral sweep of brass and strings. It's countered by lyrics that sardonically recall the episode of the pneumonia Burt contracted: "What do you get when you kiss a girl/ You get enough germs to catch pneumonia". A string of cover versions would also help preserve over time the magic of this other small, great masterpiece of pop craftsmanship. "Bacharach has the unmistakable touch of a master of musical comedy; his songs seem to sing, talk and dance all at once", Jack Roll would write in Newsweek the day after the show's opening.

But the new, enormous success for the Bacharach-David duo arrives in 1969 with another soundtrack, the Oscar-winning score for the western Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, directed by George Roy Hill.

In just 26 minutes of music, the golden duo of American pop churns out a string of marvels, starting with the evergreen "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head". Turned down by Bob Dylan, to whom it had initially been offered, it would go on to win the Oscar for Best Song in the version by American singer B.J. Thomas. With its loose-limbed swagger and its glorious odd-time rhythms, "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" is the epitome of Bacharach-ian lightness, wedded to arrangements of great refinement — the acoustic guitar intro, the brushed drums, the disarming sounds of ukulele and tack piano, the trumpet thrusts in the busy finale — and to a melody that "catchy" barely does justice to. It's the pop song par excellence, destined to be hummed forever. Whether you like it or not.

But the soundtrack also stands out for several fine instrumental themes — the infectious overture "The Sundance Kid", the languid bossa nova "Not Goin' Home Anymore" (set on the road between Rio de Janeiro and the West), the vaudeville of "The Old Fun City", the Morricone-esque "Come Touch the Sun" (with a trumpet solo evoking the dusty epic of "Once Upon a Time in the West"). And then there's the swinging "South American Getaway", built entirely around an assortment of male and female vocalizing that again brings to mind the work of masters like Morricone and Umiliani.

The moment is ripe, in other words, to keep pulling the threads of this renewal of the light-song, which fuses melody and arrangement into a single body, blending Tin Pan Alley and the jazz of Cole Porter, Broadway musicals and Hollywood cinematic scenarios. The album that would distill this alchemy with renewed effectiveness is Make It Easy On Yourself (1969), a collection of eleven songs as fresh and light as butterfly wings, yet steeped in an inescapable melancholic aura. Everything is measured with care and refinement: the rhythmic patterns, the instrumental phrasing, the tenderness of the modulations, the sudden breaks, the shades of the arrangements. Because — as Mauro Ronconi reminds us — "for him, pop too, like jazz or blues, demands a rigor that goes beyond mere respect or reverence".

From the musical "Promises, Promises" five tracks are recovered: the title song, an even more soulful and relaxed "I'll Never Fall In Love Again" (performed by Warwick), "Knowing When To Leave" (top-shelf smooth-music, straddling the line between melodrama and baroque pop), "Wanting Things" and "Whoever You Are I Love You", another foray into lounge languor charged with sensuality, to be sipped slowly, like a glass of vermouth.

Bacharach's music continues to thrive prodigiously within an exquisitely delicate interlocking of odd tempos and meters, as if all the infinite shades of jazz were magically reassembled inside the seemingly simple shell of the pop song. And once again glimpses of boundless melancholy open up for the listener, as in the formidable "Make It Easy On Yourself", already dragged into the upper reaches of the charts by Jerry Butler (1962) and by the Walker Brothers (who also took it to No. 1 in the UK), and now reverently handed back to Warwick's divine voice, journeying toward celestial melodic peaks within a frame of elegiac impressionism. Legend has it, instead, that Warwick herself was quite doubtful about taking on "Do You Know The Way For San Jose?". That new marvel of atmospheric grace and exotica avant la lettre had, she felt, lyrics that were too simple: "It felt like singing a nursery rhyme — Dionne would recall — I told the guys: 'I'm not a little girl anymore, I'm known all over the world; do I really need to sing this stuff?' They insisted, they said it would be a hit. Hal David in particular was set on it: he was very attached to San Jose because he'd spent his early days of Navy service there". Luckily for us, Dionne eventually agreed, forever tying her nightingale voice to that score of endless nostalgia and spellbound wonder suspended over the roads of California.

"Any Day Now" — already covered by Chuck Jackson, Alan Price and his majesty Elvis Presley — shines anew in its organ-driven orchestration, but just as irresistible are the more romantic ballads ("She's Gone Away", "This Guy's In Love With You") and the instrumental metamorphoses of "Pacific Coast Highway", a pop-jazz number made gripping by its constant tempo shifts.

Bacharach's new pop Arcadia is a captivating "musical novel" — as Vigorito calls it — that lights up Broadway theaters and triumphant tours, that resounds with "love songs as shiny and chrome-plated as the hood of a Corvette", with soundtracks and musicals, with tuxedoed orchestras and exceptional chanteuses. But behind the velvety, seductive sheen of the songs lies the bitterness and unease of a man, of a generation held hostage by new anxieties, of an American society desperately searching for its lost innocence.

I have to step away from the piano to understand what I actually have in my hands, because if I stay there I can't see the horizontal perspective. You have to look at everything horizontally and understand what happens from that point of view. And then go back to the keys, put things in order, write them down, look them over again.

(Burt Bacharach)

The horizontal perspective

It's clear by now, then, that Bacharach is no mere hit-making machine, but rather an accomplished composer who happened to lend his talents to pop music. Even his method of writing is unconventional. "I have to step away from the piano to understand what I actually have in my hands — he would recall — I've always done it that way: I leave the piano, sit in an armchair and listen to what's happening in my head. I can even hear the harmonization. But I have to get away from the keyboard, because if I stay there I can't see the horizontal perspective. You have to look at everything horizontally and understand what happens from that point of view. And then go back to the keyboard, put things in order, write them down, look them over again".

With this same compositional obsessiveness he also puts together another masterpiece album, the self-titled Burt Bacharach from 1971, full of great songs and daring arrangements. Never had easy listening — if it can still be called that — been so complex, so full of rhythm changes and disarming sonic choices, and yet, at the same time, so soft and so irresistibly appealing.

What's truly astonishing is the new version of a song from a decade earlier, "Wives And Lovers", spectacular in its boldly jazzed-up guise, with horns polished to a shine, lightning-fast solos in sequence, and a closing vocal turn by Bacharach himself. The gorgeous "(They Long To Be) Close To You" – already passed through the voices of Richard Chamberlain, Dionne Warwick and the Carpenters (who won a Grammy Award for it) – is here skillfully slowed down and turned into a draining emotional romance, with its piano glissando and its dreamlike celestial melodies, the kind that will keep raining down forever over countless sentimental film sequences. The orchestral pop of "All Kinds Of People", steeped in soul fragrances, sweeps you along and seduces with the rhythm of a Broadway musical, while the instrumental suite "And The People Were With Her" transports you to a poolside cocktail party at sunset, with its lounge moods, its strings and its jazzy trumpets.

Opening the tracklist is "Mexican Divorce", the song that led to the fateful encounter with Warwick (then a backing singer for the Drifters), and which here comes back to life in all its exotic allure and Latin fragrance. And while the hazy piano textures of "The April Fools" (from the film of the same name) betray a slightly dated symphonism, "One Less Bell To Answer" brings back all the majesty of soul through the voice of a powerhouse icon like Cissy Houston (yes, Dionne Warwick's own aunt). Bacharach, however, always remains at center stage, and he even takes the opportunity for one of his rare (and, truth be told, less than memorable) turns at the microphone: on "Hasbrook Heights", though, his shy crooning hits the mark and adds charm to a song made entirely of whispers, horns and pop caresses.

Among the most touching moments of the album, and of the whole Bacharach saga, is "Nikki", dedicated to his daughter, who suffered from Asperger's Syndrome and was fated for tragedy (she would die by suicide in 2007). For her, Burt writes an airy instrumental, with delicately tinted strings and an angelic choir into which a saxophone weaves its way, sketching a melody of childlike innocence. The original lyrics, written by Hal David for the sung version of the piece, would try to condense all the tenderness in the world for such a fragile creature.

Yet another testament to the composer's talent, Burt Bacharach is also, and above all, a supreme showcase for his genius as an arranger, moving between jazz harmonies, syncopated patterns, irregular phrasing, shifting rhythms and unpredictable modulations. An essential gem for anyone who loves Pop spelled with a capital P.

"Lost Horizon" was a disaster, an embarrassing experience. I hated that film.

(Burt Bacharach to NME)

The time of divorces

At the very peak of his art, however, the Kansas City hitmaker starts to see his world begin to crack. The annus horribilis is 1973. Bacharach and David are hired to write the score for Lost Horizon, a remake of the 1937 film of the same name. It will be their Waterloo. Not only does the picture turn out to be a colossal flop, but the soundtrack also stirs up a storm, even sparking a legal dispute between the composer and the lyricist. The breakup of the storied duo that had launched his career would also lead Dionne Warwick, with great bitterness, to end her collaboration with Bacharach and David, a partnership that had placed no fewer than 33 hits on the charts between 1962 and 1971.

"It was a disaster, an embarrassing experience. I hated that film", Bacharach would confess a few years later to NME. The end of his partnership with David (briefly patched up only in 1975, for Stephanie Mills' second album, "For The First Time") ushers in the darkest period, at least commercially, for the American composer.

Seemingly minor, and certainly unlucky, his albums of the 1970s nonetheless add new ideas and musical solutions to the repertoire of a composer who remained ever skilled at crafting the ideal sonic frame for his songs.

Bacharach still sits at the piano for the ten tracks of Living Together (1973), but seems more inclined to break free of commercial conventions, chasing after sophisticated, elusive arrangements. And yet the songs remain the main course. The sugary bossa nova of "Something Big" only lacks Warwick's voice to repeat the success of "San Jose", while Dionne's aunt, Cissy Houston, duets with Tony Middleton amid the soul sinuosity of "I Come To You", and the "cursed" theme from "Lost Horizon", revisited here in an extended, dreamy version, proves it deserved a better fate — as does another piece drawn from that ill-fated soundtrack, "Living Together, Growing Together", already a hit when given to the Fifth Dimension and here enriched with refined vocal harmonies.

There's no shortage, either, of the usual Broadway-style settings (the instrumental "Long Ago Tomorrow"), jazzy inflections (the other piece, "Monterey Peninsula") and Mantovani-style orchestral hooks ("Walk The Way You Talk"), making for an album that surely ranks among the most underrated in his output.

The harshness of rock had torn apart every notion of elegance, branding it as vacuous and reactionary. Easy listening had by then been relegated to music for washed-up old playboys, their clothes soaked in cologne, driving gloves on for the sports car, a fresh-from-the-dentist smile and a permanent tan.

(Giampiero Vigorito, “The Book Of Love”)

Another seemingly minor album, Futures (1977) is the first work released after the "split" with David, replaced by lyricists of real standing like Norman Gimbel, Neil Simon and James Kavanaugh, while behind the console is once again Phil Ramone, producer of Reach Out. The result is some of the most complex and layered pieces in Bacharach's output. The hitmaker's immediacy is gone; the light touch remains, but now in service of compositions where beauty is sublimated into more abstract harmonic structures, where emotions are almost internalized, imploded amid open expanses of horns and strings. It is the closest muzak has ever come to the avant-garde – forgive the oxymoron. Elsewhere (AMG) it's filed under "underground adult contemporary", and the label fits rather well. Backing up the Kansas City piano man is a handful of excellent singers, such as Jamie Anders (who lends her precious vocalizing to "When You Bring Your Sweet Love To Me"), Joshie Armstead (featured on four tracks) and Peter Yarrow, who warms up the smooth canvas of "The Young Grow Younger Every Day". There's a touch of self-indulgence, even narcissism, in the soft instrumental weave of "Another Spring Will Rise", but there's also that dense knot of melancholy that remains the beating heart of Bacharach's art.

With the unshakeable optimism embodied even by his own cover image – a Bacharach pictured in unusual skiing gear inside a cable car – the American composer rides out the 1970s, sacrificing fame on the altar of his own creative freedom and forging a new model of song, one capable of transcending the decades and standing the test of time.

Even further removed from any commercial ambitions is Woman (1979), the album recorded in collaboration with the Houston Symphony Orchestra. It's the distillation of a four-hour-long session held on November 2, 1978 at Jones Hall in Houston, Texas, based on a project originally conceived by Bacharach and Michael Woolcock.

Mostly instrumental, steeped in hushed jazzy and baroque pop atmospheres, with brass and strings in fine form, the album features vocal performances from Carly Simon ("I Live In The Woods"), Libby Titus ("Riverboat") and Sally Stevens ("There Is Time").

In this triumph of jazzy curves and funky grooves, one can glimpse, held up to the light, the precious melodic filigree of Bacharach's world — though somewhat sacrificed to the lavishness of the arrangements and dulled by sheer craftsmanship.

That same year, 1979, brought another soundtrack, for the film Together? (the American remake of the Italian "Amo non amo" starring Jacqueline Bisset, directed by Armenia Balducci). A little romantic story to which Bacharach lent his seductive jazzy scores, enlisting vocal contributions from Michael McDonald, Jackie DeShannon and Libby Titus, and bringing in Paul Anka to write the lyrics. But it would prove another flop, especially for the film, and the soundtrack would pay the price, quickly going out of print before being reissued in Japan in 2012 and in the US in 2014.

Closing out a difficult, controversial decade, full of fresh musical ideas but also of bitterness, came the end of his marriage to Angie Dickinson. Paradoxically, though, this latest divorce would also spark a small rebirth for Bacharach, who, having found a new wife in singer-songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, would also make her his lyricist, filling the cumbersome void left by the breakup of his partnership with Hal David.

If you can't talk a woman into bed after she's heard one of Burt's songs, she just wasn't worth it.

(Noel Gallagher)

The Coolfather of Pop

The Seventies hadn't left Bacharach's music unscathed. As Vigorito recalls, "the harshness of rock had torn apart every notion of elegance, dismissing it as vacuous and reactionary" and "easy listening was by then relegated to music for washed-up old playboys, their clothes soaked in cologne, driving gloves on for the sports car, a freshly-whitened dentist's smile and a permanent tan".

Bacharach's songs were thus tolerated with a sneer, as "fossils of a bygone era". And yet, slowly but inexorably, a rediscovery of that music was beginning to take shape — music that was not merely "a Martini to sip while christening the new air-conditioning unit at the villa" or "the trick for turning yet another backyard barbecue into a jet-set soirée atop a Manhattan penthouse". A resurgence that would also affect the commercial fortunes of his songs.

What soundtracks took away, soundtracks would give back. If the flop of Lost Horizon ushered in a decade of failures and rifts, it was the film "Arthur" (1981) that would bring Burt Bacharach's name back into the charts. Thanks to an instant classic like "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)", which would send the previously unknown Christopher Cross to glory — he co-wrote the song along with Bacharach, Bayer Sager and Peter Allen (Liza Minnelli's ex-husband, who starred in the film alongside Dudley Moore). It was reportedly Allen who came up with the famous refrain line "When you get caught between the moon and New York City", while his plane was attempting to land at New York's JFK airport. A classic, timeless slow-dance ballad, with its airy strings and romantic melody, "Arthur's Theme" would win both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 1982.

The Bacharach-Bayer Sager partnership would produce other hits like "Heartlight" (Neil Diamond), "Making Love" (Roberta Flack), "On My Own" (Michael McDonald with Patti LaBelle), all marked by exquisite arrangements and orchestral touches, and, above all, the most memorable of them all: "That's What Friends Are For" (1985). Not so much for the song itself — an honest, saccharine-heavy ode to friendship — but because it would seal the artistic reconciliation with Dionne Warwick after more than a decade. The Black diva had, in fact, already reappeared alongside the Maestro two years earlier on the theme for the TV series "Finder Of Lost Loves", then with songs like "Love Power", "Take Good Care Of You And Me", "Stronger Than Before" — but it would be above all with that chart-smashing power ballad — originally performed by Rod Stewart on the soundtrack to "Nightshift", and then reprised for Warwick alongside Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Gladys Knight — that the historic partnership would return to the spotlight (the song would raise over three million dollars for the fight against AIDS).

The definitive seal on a truly unique relationship would come in 1990 with the essential "Dionne Warwick Sings The Bacharach & David Songbook", a collection of 22 stellar interpretations of as many hits by the American duo.

Hardly comparable, in intensity and melodic genius, to the triumphs of his golden age, Bacharach's songs of the Eighties nonetheless show a solid ability to adapt to the times, confirming a "craftsmanship" that had by then become a registered trademark of pop, in the noblest sense of the term. His mythos was further cemented by his concerts, often alongside prestigious orchestras, performed around the world.

Meanwhile, the artistic and romantic union with Carole Bayer Sager would also soon come to an end: after the separation, in 1993 Bacharach would marry (for the fourth time!) Jane Hanson.

Filling the void of another period of scant artistic inspiration came — almost unexpectedly — the rediscovery of the music of previous decades by new generations (including musicians), fascinated in particular by the lounge sounds of the Fifties and Sixties, which underwent a sweeping rediscovery and reappraisal throughout the Nineties, from the trip-hop of Portishead and co. to the lullabies of Belle & Sebastian, right up to the new wave of Britpop. But, looking more closely, the shadow of the Bacharach sound — that irresistible blend of strings and soft piano phrasing, enriched by jazz suspensions and the velvety rhythms of bossa nova — had already been hovering for some time over the most refined English pop, from the Eighties new-cool days of Style Council, Sade, Matt Bianco and Everything But The Girl (with a marvelous "Alfie" reinterpreted by Tracey Thorn), to the sophisti-pop of Prefab Sprout, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, Blow Monkeys, Aztec Camera and Deacon Blue (who in 1990 released a fine EP featuring 4 Bacharach covers). A tribute sustained over time by a wealth of cover versions, from Naked Eyes' "(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me" (one of the Maestro's own favorites) to Ash and Divine Comedy's "Make It Easy On Yourself", from the Cranberries' "(They Long To Be) Close To You" to the astonishing "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" by the White Stripes, prophets of the 2000s rock revival (complete with a sultry video directed by Sofia Coppola, starring a smouldering Kate Moss as a lap-dancer). Cinema, too, joined this Bacharach-flavored new wave: from "American Beauty" to "Forrest Gump", via "Big Fish" and arthouse cult films like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (Gilliam), the American composer's songs have (once again) begun flooding the big screen.

These and many other tributes have crowned him the Coolfather of pop. At the same time, the American composer's creative spark has been reignited. Thanks above all to a new, intriguing collaboration alongside one of the most refined and eclectic songwriters of the post-punk era: Elvis Costello.

When the song really takes off, Burt shifts into a gear I don't know. The result is that sense of darkness and doubt that's present even in his sunniest songs, and it's what makes his music timeless.

(Elvis Costello)

 Paintings of the Rebirth

Why would a forty-something "rock" musician who wrote his most famous hits in the Eighties and Nineties suddenly team up with a composer in his sixties who, during those very same years, was considered unpresentably kitsch? (Can you picture a fan of Costello and the Attractions whistling "Raindrops Are Falling On My Head" right after spinning "Everyday I Write The Book"?)

In truth, the collaboration is far less random than it might seem. Starting with his covers of "Please Stay" and "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", Costello had already shown his admiration for Bacharach's melodic orchestrations. The two first met during the recording sessions for "Spike" in 1989. Bacharach came away with a positive impression of Elvis, and when the producers of the film "Grace Of My Heart" (loosely inspired by the story of Carole King) asked him to write a song for the soundtrack, he jumped at the idea of doing it together with the bespectacled Englishman. The two began working in quick sessions at the Atlantic Studios, and the results soon paid off. "God Give Me Strength" became a worldwide hit, even winning a Grammy Award. It didn't take long to do the math: together they could create something important, a whole album of new songs.

Words and vocals by Elvis Costello, arrangements and orchestrations by Burt Bacharach: Painted From Memory (1998) is an unusual, fascinating summit meeting aimed squarely at reviving the golden age of the Brill Building and the noblest form of pop craftsmanship. The record's tonal signature is heavily shaped by Bacharach: in the end, more than 70 musicians were enlisted to play a range of instruments worthy of a symphony orchestra. Twelve tracks tackling the same small, enormous everyday matters: love, vulnerability, uncertainty, loneliness... all filtered through a slight detachment, much as happens in real life.

On "What's Her Name Today?" the alchemy reveals its more or less secret formula: Bacharach's classicism welcomes Elvis's pop voice, cross-pollinating without either losing its nature. The master embraces his most talented pupil over the weeping piano notes of the title track, torn open by swells worthy of the most emphatic Broadway. And the pupil isn't afraid to outdo the master when he calls in the former mad organist Steve Nieve to dictate the keyboard rhythm of "The Sweetest Punch".

A well-crafted game, then, which on "The Darkest Place" brings together intimate orchestrations, soul choirs and slight jazz digressions, seasoned with a honeyed, pitch-perfect voice. It's a rich, cultured sound, tremendously sexy in its ever-present melancholy, blaring with trumpets on "Toledo" (with horns straight out of Herb Alpert's "Casino Royale"), a vibrato-laden psychodrama on "This House Is Empty Now".

An acoustic miracle of mounting lyricism, "I Still Have That Other Girl" is a towering performance from Costello on a song that unites an apparently simple melody with an orchestration and arrangement that send shivers down the spine. Amid romantic soul harmonies ("Such Unlikely Lovers"), old-fashioned chamber ballads ("My Thief") and Broadway horns ("The Long Division"), Bacharach's keys seem to temper Costello's melodrama, lending an old-fashioned pop flavor streaked with jazz among the raindrops of "Tears At The Birthday Party".

It's a splendidly out-of-time way of making music, and yet Painted From Memory comes across as fresh, ripened through two rich and refined careers, exploding in the jazzy finale of "God Give Me Strength", the lament of a betrayed lover immersed in a riot of strings and brass, crowning one of the most successful collaborations of recent decades.

Used to technically flawless, often rather cold singers, Bacharach found himself, with Costello, having to reckon with a rougher but far more alive and warm performer, capable of letting the "blood, sweat and tears" of real feeling show through. A style that's more impulsive and immediate than Bacharach's crystalline melodies, but at the same time closer to contemporary sensibility. "I contributed to writing the music too, but when the song really takes off, especially in the main theme, Burt shifts into a gear I don't know" Costello would later acknowledge. "The result is that sense of darkness that's in his music and that I recognize in my own; there's that sense of doubt even in his sunniest songs, and it's what makes his music timeless."

Painted From Memory was met with great critical enthusiasm and performed very well on the charts, despite reservations from PolyGram, who would have preferred a jazzier record made with Bill Frisell. The Sweetest Punch (Universal Classic, 1999) was indeed later released, reinterpreting Painted From Memory in a jazz vein, featuring Frisell's guitar talent and Cassandra Wilson's voice. Meanwhile, the two new heroes of pop took their songs on the road across the US.

I won't spend a happy day

till you're back in my arms

("Nikki")

The Wounded Lion

While taking on cameos in various film and TV productions, including all three Austin Powers movies, he arranges "Here I Am" for R&B icon Ronald Isley (a No. 1 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop chart) and keeps gifting songs to promising new performers (in 2005 it's "Trouble", written for jazz singer-pianist Chiara Civello), but Bacharach doesn't give up releasing albums under his own name. In 2005 comes the surprising At This Time. After sixty years of love songs, the American composer turns his attention to outrage at the state of the world, tackling social and political themes for the first time, themes born out of the disorientation and unease of an America still reeling from the bloodbath of September 11th.

A proudly démodé record, full of long instrumental suites, 60s lounge sounds and hazy electronics, but also the usual catchy melodies and some genuine new collaborators: from Rufus Wainwright, who bursts in with his unmistakable crooning to declaim Hamlet-like doubts over the hypnotic loop of "Go Ask Shakespeare" ("Life is a tale that makes no sense/ I don't know, go ask Shakespeare"), to Elvis Costello, who embellishes the lovely "Who Are These People" with his rasping voice, all the way to Dr. Dre, the hip-hop guru who contributes a few drum loops capable of updating the maestro's retro toolkit, still unmistakable with its trademark piano, horns and strings. And it's Bacharach himself who picks up the microphone with his thin, aging crooner's voice to make the elegy of "Where Did It Go?" – almost in tears – even more heartbreaking.

The frequent abandonment of the song format, however, somewhat distorts the essence of the Bacharach sound, not helped either by lyrics that are rather rhetorical and conventional, like the ones co-written with Tonio K. ("There was a song, I remember, that said 'what the world needs now...' – he sings, quoting himself at the album's opening – Where is the love, where has it gone, who broke our hearts? We need to know. Where are the dreams we knew? Please explain it to us").

In short, it's hard to recognize the tuxedoed master of ceremonies of "What The World Needs Now" in the casually dressed indignado (as pictured on the cover) of a record that comes across as a commendable yet misguided attempt at youthfulness, from a man who was already old-fashioned as a young man, in the same way as the charm of his songs. But the most perceptive listeners won't miss the sincerity of this cry of pain, this anti-war song from the most unpredictable of protest singers.

Surprisingly, At This Time would go on to win the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album, while a year later its author would be honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bacharach's life, however, was marked by a devastating blow. On the morning of January 4, 2007, the body of his daughter Nikki was found lifeless in her Los Angeles apartment. "Suicide by suffocation with a plastic bag inflated with helium" – the cold verdict of Mike Feiler, the Ventura County coroner. "The girl committed suicide in a quiet and peaceful way to escape the devastation inflicted on her brain by Asperger's Syndrome. She loved kittens and earthquakes, meteor showers and science, cloudless skies and sunsets, and she loved Tahiti. She was one of the most beautiful creatures on earth, and now she is in a white light, at peace" – so read the heartbreaking statement issued instead by Bacharach together with his ex-wife Angie Dickinson. And the words Hal David gave to the sweet ballad "Nikki" come back to mind: "I won't spend a happy day till you're back in my arms." Tragically fateful and prophetic.

Hal David himself would pass away, following a heart attack, in Los Angeles in 2012. Together with Bacharach, he had put 39 records on the charts over 10 years. The lyricist behind immortal songs like "I Say A Little Prayer", "Walk On By", "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", "Anyone Who Had A Heart", "Alfie", "(They Long To Be) Close To You", "Make It Easy On Yourself", "The Look Of Love" and many others had also written "We Have All The Time In The World" (Louis Armstrong) together with John Barry. It's almost impossible to imagine Bacharach's music without his lyrics, and indeed there would be no shortage of moved tributes to his former partner throughout the countless concerts given by the Kansas City-born composer around the world: his two years of sold-out shows in Australia would be collected in Burt Bacharach Live At The Sydney Opera House With The Sydney Symphony, while Burt Bacharach Live (2008) stands as his first proper live album.

On my tombstone I'd like a simple sentence to be written: "He tried to be a good person."

(Burt Bacharach)

A reckoning of loves, sorrows, successes and failures would come in 2013 with the autobiography "Anyone Who Had A Heart" (Harper Collins, 2013), in which Bacharach would tell his story for the first time. It included touching confessions: "I've never wanted to read the letter Nikki left me before she died, even though I always keep it with me" – he would reveal – "because I already know what's written in it". Then, speaking of himself again, almost like a will, he would say: "Life has been very good to me. In a way, I'm glad to give something back for what I've received. On my tombstone I'd like a simple sentence to be written: 'He tried to be a good person'."

Yet despite a staggering track record – 73 hits in America and 52 in England, three Oscars, six Grammys, not to mention countless other awards, including the Recording Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award, which in 2009 called him "the greatest living composer of music" – Bacharach never stopped putting himself on the line, engaging with new generations.

In 2011 he records When Ronan Met Burt with Ronan Keating (frontman of Boyzone), reaching third place on the English charts; in 2015, with his A House Is Not A Home Tour, at the venerable age of 87, he even takes the stage at Glastonbury Festival, one of the great shrines of world rock, in front of a crowd of ecstatic young fans. "It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime occasions," he would comment, "I think it's because my songs have had the good fortune to cross generations."

Facelifts aside, his face is lined with wrinkles as well as the scars of life, his body just slightly bent by time, but the Lord of American pop is still there: seated at the piano, head bowed over the keys, surrounded by his supple singers and his flawless orchestras, recently joined by his very young son Oliver on keyboards. And he still moves us. Today, just as he did sixty years ago.

Bacharach's songs have the sound of young hearts and vulnerable souls, of their tears and their laughter, of the bitterness of reality and the relief of dreams, of those who live in this complicated, dizzying modern world.

(Giampiero Vigorito, “The Book Of Love”)

The Sound of Young Hearts

Burt Bacharach never sold out his art to the American dream of certainties and conquests; instead, he unveiled a new musical dimension, hazy, illusory, spiritual. He yearns to recapture a lost innocence, misplaced within an a-historical identity with no apparent ties to its times. It's not a desire to depict any particular social milieu - that of the American middle class caught between anxieties, threats and the craving for security - that preoccupies the German-Jewish Burt, but something more unsettling, deeper and harder to define, which he sets down on the stave. Like stormy peaks and hearts of darkness locked in perpetual conflict, fighting for their survival, so the whirlwind of Bacharachian emotional currents blends shards of life in which joy and sorrow are indissolubly bound together. Like Brazilian saudade, his secret lies in understanding and accepting the perennial dissatisfaction inherent in living, the "mal du vivre", sublimating it into musical art. By deepening ambiguity and raising ambivalence to dizzying heights, he managed to create a range of expressive moods that were still largely unexplored in pop music at the time. His masterly chords, forever hovering between major and minor keys, release the discreet charm of the transience of existence. Behind the seeming playfulness (major keys) of his sound lurks, slowly revealing itself, the morbid breath (minor keys) reminding us that everything must perish.

This is Burt Bacharach, the man who, as Vigorito recalls, "with the rustle of a butterfly's wingbeat brought his masterpieces crashing down on the 1960s, flooding the western world with torrents of tears of joy". And he did so by pulling off the most difficult of alchemies. Because behind those sugary refrains, those orchestrations that feigned lightness and optimism, lies "the sound of young hearts and vulnerable souls, of their tears and their laughter, of the bitterness of reality and the relief of dreams, of those living in this complicated, dizzying modern world".

Burt Bacharach died at his home in Los Angeles on 8 February 2023. He was 94, and almost up until his last day he kept thinking up, playing and singing music all over the world.

Bibliography

Serene Dominic – Burt Bacharach – Song By Song (Schirmer Trade Books, 2003)

Giampiero Vigorito – The Book Of Love (Coniglio, 2008)

Roberto Valentino – Non solo canzonette: l’arte del “dubbio” di Burt Bacharach (2013)

A House Is Not A Homepage | The Music of Burt Bacharach

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