Burt Bacharach has died, the genius of American pop

Mondo della musica in lutto: è morto a 94 anni il leggendario compositore americano Burt Bacharach. Lavorando con il paroliere Hal David, Bacharach ha scritto una lunga serie di canzoni di successo, molte delle quali per Dionne Warwick. Tra i suoi grandi successi si ricordano “The Look Of Love”, “What The World Needs Now Is Love”, “Walk On By”, “Alfie”, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”, “Do You Know The Way to San José”. Bacharach, vincitore di Grammy, Oscar e Tony, ha anche contribuito a scrivere le colonne sonore di di film come “Arturo” e “Ciao Pussycat”.

Il maestro americano è morto mercoledì nella sua casa di Los Angeles per cause naturali. Negli ultimi 70 anni, solo Lennon–McCartney, Carole King e una manciata di altri hanno rivaleggiato con il suo genio per canzoni orecchiabili ma sempre sofisticate, che sono rimaste eseguite, suonate e cantate ancora molto tempo dopo essere state scritte.

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.

Burt Bacharach non svende la sua arte al sogno americano fatto di certezze e conquiste, piuttosto disvela una nuova dimensione musicale, sfumata, illusoria, spirituale. Anela a ricatturare una innocenza perduta, persa in sua identità a-storica priva di un apparente legame con i suoi tempi. Non è il voler raccontare certo melieu sociale, quello della middle class americana in bilico tra ansie e minacce e voglia di sicurezze, che preoccupa l’ebreo tedesco Burt, ma qualcosa di più inquietante e profondo e indefinibile da riportare sul pentagramma. Come cime tempestose e cuori di tenebra in perpetuo conflitto lottano per la loro sopravvivenza, così il turbine di flussi emotivi bacharachiani miscela schegge di vita dove gioia e dolore indissolubilmente si legano. Come la saudade brasiliana, il suo segreto risiede nel capire e accettare l’insoddisfazione perenne insita nel vivere, il “mal du vivre”, sublimandolo in arte musicale. Facendo profonda l’ambiguità ed elevando l’ambivalenza su vette vertiginose, è riuscito a creare una gamma di mood espressivi ai tempi ancora poco esplorati nella pop music. I suoi magistrali accordi, sempre fluttuanti tra tonalità maggiori e minori, sprigionano il fascino discreto della caducità dell’esistenza. Dietro l’apparente giocosità (tonalità maggiori) del suo sound si cela e svela lentamente l’alito morboso (tonalità minori) che tutto deve perire.

Questo è Burt Bacharach, l’uomo che, come ricorda Vigorito, “con il fruscio di un battito d’ali di farfalla ha fatto atterrare sugli anni 60 i suoi capolavori e ha inondato il mondo occidentale con torrenti di lacrime di gioia”. E riuscendo nella più difficile delle alchimie. Perché dietro quei ritornelli zuccherosi, quelle orchestrazioni falsamente lievi e ottimistiche c’è “il suono dei giovani cuori e delle anime vulnerabili, delle loro lacrime e delle loro risate, dell’amarezza della realtà e del sollievo dei sogni, di chi vive in questo complicato, vertiginoso mondo moderno.

(Dalla monograph di Claudio Fabretti e Fabio Pierangeli)

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