Burt Bacharach

Bacharach is George Gershwin meeting Duke Ellington in the nascent pop music scene. While the two aforementioned artists fused classical music with the blues-jazz tradition, Bacharach went further, blending both components with the popular musical as well, thereby broadening its horizons and perspectives. In this guise, Bacharach stands as the first anomalous genius of "pop", an unmodern, unflashy genius, a man of few words and little rock instinct, too handsome and bourgeois to cause a stir in the America of the 50s and 60s that was ablaze with the new gospel 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 music and words built with real craft, songs that were actually far more complex than they sounded. Bacharach made them look easy, but they weren't. He'd pushed songwriting toward new, exciting frontiers, with an innovative use of words, rhythms and melodies."

The greatness of Bacharach's music unlocks arcane emotions, light and yet unsettling at once, carried by the lightness of his unique and unmistakable Bacharach-esque touch. There isn't a pop, rock or jazz musician who hasn't bowed to his talent: from Frank Zappa, who admired his sophistication, to Brian Wilson, who named him 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 separate tribute albums with the same title ("What The World Needs Now"), and to a roster of musicians so wide-ranging that naming them all would be impossible: Rem, Elvis Costello (with whom he would produce the towering Painted From Memory), Mark Hollis, Diana Krall, Stereolab, Luther Vandross, Love, Oasis, White Stripes, Pretenders, Laura Nyro, Belle and Sebastian, Cardinal, Divine Comedy, Kyoto Jazz Massive, Isaac Hayes, whose sensational cover of "Walk On By" on the album Hot Buttered Soul deserves a special mention, and which was curiously also covered in post-punk form by Stranglers on the EP packaged with 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 written off as mere muzak, easy listening, at least until the explosion of lounge music in the Nineties effectively rehabilitated Bacharach for a new, dazed generation of music lovers: NME in 1996 called him a "Lounge Wizard", Mojo in 1998 described him as "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".

Much of the contemporary critical establishment genuinely struggled to grasp the professionalism of this great craftsman, a man who had literally invented a new way of writing the pop song, effectively composing what I would call the "chamber pop sonata".

Where Phil Spector worked through slow accumulation and layering of sound to reach a song's ideal climax (the famous Spector Wall of Sound), Bacharach worked with a rapier's precision, through a slow and painstaking process of arranging and producing: "A perfectionist, we drove each other crazy," Hal David would say in 2003.

Bacharach's musical adventure began within the Fordist, factory-style production system of the Brill Building, in the heart of Manhattan. Its mechanical, reproductive, repetitive nature was skilfully balanced by incredible artistic creativity, backed by a rare melodic gift. At the time, the Brill Building's factory-like approach was stigmatized as part of the industry-apparatus, deemed too inauthentic for the rock values then taking shape.

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 having to deal with every second lieutenant. No one was spared." And indeed it was a period of compromise and frustration for the young Burt ("I worked really badly in New York and wrote some truly banal songs"), and even his compositional output from that time still feels anonymous: "It was as if that material had been written by someone else," Michael Ancliffe would write.

Another factor that paralyzed critics for a long time was the apparent complexity and sophistication of his musical writing, alien to rock and very academic, which offered little "linguistic" foothold to an entire generation of illiterate rock musicians with no musical training behind them. As his muse Dionne Warwick puts it: "You'd practically need a course in music theory to handle his scores."

But if anything, these are laughable accusations when it comes to musical art, comparable to those leveled in the same years at the new Motown sound, dismissed as too "slick". Gordy's aesthetic and Bacharach's aesthetic are, in some ways, comparable (just listen to the Supremes' cover of "This Guy's In Love With You" alongside the Temptations to see what I mean): great professionalism, great arrangements and great melodies. A freshness of sound that remains intact to this day.

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.

Bacharach, who had already learned to play piano, cello and drums as a child, had drawn on the French Impressionists (Ravel, Debussy) and the post-Impressionists Poulenc, Satie and Milhaud (essentially the French music hall, with its cabaret leanings) all the way through to Berg and Webern, for his classical training. Living in Kansas City and New York, he then discovered and absorbed rhythms from 1940s bebop jazz (the sacred trinity of Monk-Gillespie-Parker). From the cerebral rigor of minimalist-electronic avant-garde (Cage, Stockhausen) he instead picked up a disciplined approach to recording. Then, tired of the highbrow, he turned to the lowbrow, to the orchestral pop with the almost-too-perfect sound of Ray Conniff.

At the Brill Building, thanks to Wolpin, Bacharach will meet Hal David, who would become his longtime lyricist. The r'n'b formula of his early years hadn't produced any artistically significant results: rock'n'roll wasn't the path to follow. He would have to wait until 1962 for his "turning point", but not before shaking off the negative yet formative experience, under the artistic direction of Mitch Miller, at the Brill Building.

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, is released unnoticed as the b-side of "And I Never Knew" on a single by Tommy Hunt, a black r'n'b singer. Two years later, completely rearranged and with 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 this? 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 aesthetics. We could say we're looking at a historic b-side on a par with, say, the Beatles' "Rain". Here we already find the traits typical 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 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 develop the whole of his enormous creative potential, because - as he himself explained to Hubert Saal in 1970 - "you can have a fantastic song, but a poor arrangement or production will always ruin it".

We have reached a historical phase in which the dichotomy between high art and low art is definitively shattered and reconciled to heights unthinkable for the time: remember that these are the years straddling the '50s and '60s, 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 the likes of Cage, Stockhausen and LaMonte Young, but he's also aware of their limited popular appeal, given the inherent difficulty of listening to their music. By modernizing one of the most banal yet at the same time most complex subjects to tackle - the discourse of love in its infinite facets - Bacharach would bring about the turning point of enormous popular success in the years to come. It's not a new theme - the entire Tin Pan Alley story was built on the love song - but it's the new way of producing the sound that would create the legend. A legend fuelled by the essential contribution of another figure: Dionne Warwick. Capable of handling both the rhythmic-harmonic complexities 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") and the expressive demands of conveying complex feelings, Dionne turned out to be the perfect voice for the duo's songs: "I used to give her suggestions. Not anymore. I know that whatever she does will always be a gem", Bacharach would say of her.

Reach Out: pop's new Arcadia

Bacharach's first album, "Hit Maker!", was released in 1965. It went unnoticed in the US, while achieving considerable commercial success in Britain, and featured as session men the future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. It already contained the masterpieces "Walk On By", "A House Is Not A Home" and "Anyone Who Had A Heart". The arcadian sensibility of this new pop couldn't go unnoticed by British listeners, always so receptive to nostalgic and romantic states of mind. However, its complex emotional layers, supported by a perfect formal balance, would be fully realized only on his second work, the intimate masterpiece "Reach Out" (October 1967). This is its story.

In 1967 Bacharach signed a record deal 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 "sonic policy" pursued by the duo. A&M Records catered to an audience of listeners with little interest in the psychedelic rock that was then in full bloom, and more inclined towards classic, adult listening. The 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 records.

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.

We know little about the orchestral musicians who took part in the album's various recording sessions (they were never credited on the album), but we do know that the session of 18 July 1967 featured a substantial string section, made up of two cellists (Raphael Kramer and Frederick Seykora), two violists (Allan Harshman and Robert Ostrowsky) and no fewer than nine violinists (Erno Neufeld, Anatol Kaminsky, Marvin Limonick, Nathan Kapoff, Alexander Murray, Joseph Stepansky, Leonard Malarsky, Sam Freed, George Kast). They were all professional orchestral musicians already established with various orchestras, including those of Henry Mancini, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, and some of them would later also work in pop music with groups such as the Monkees (on "In The Birds The Bees And The Monkees", 1968) and with Frank Zappa (Leonard Malarsky on "Lumpy Gravy", 1969). On this date, from eight in the evening until midnight, "Are You There", "I Say A Little Prayer", "What The World Needs Now" and two versions of "The Windows Of The World" were recorded.

Among the likely trumpet players who took part in the album's sessions, the big names circulating are Dominic Spera, Warren Leuning and Marvin Stamm. I would also add Herb Alpert and his trumpet, already used for the soundtrack of the film "Casino Royale". It's also highly likely that Dionne Warwick's aunt, Cissy Houston (Whitney's mother), took part as a vocalist.

For putting together the material to include on the album, Bacharach drew almost entirely on material already written earlier with Hal David - old "semi-hits" and works that hadn't fully worked out for him, such as the album he produced for Dionne Warwick, "The Windows Of The World" (1967). He would rearrange them so thoroughly as to transform them into a very different sound and mood, with such meticulous attention to detail that it's astonishing to compare the different productions.

We can certainly notice this "reworking" in the choice of slower, softly jazz-tinged tempos, where they had been fast and more soul-inflected in Dionne's versions. We also notice a less intrusive use of the orchestra, which no longer takes on the leading role it had in Warwick's recordings, but instead becomes more of a rhythmic support, since the melodic and harmonic work is now carried out by individual solo instruments - piano, hammond organ and trumpet above all.

We also notice a greater focus on sound than on words, which are often either removed entirely or relegated to a supporting choral role. Burt himself would say he was little interested in the linguistic aspect of words, preferring instead to work with their phonetic use.

You can clearly sense the intention to give far greater substance to previously composed material. “Reach Out,” along with the subsequent work “Make It Easy On Yourself,” would become the missing links between the Pet Sounds of Beach Boys and Randy Newman's “Sail Away.” In Skip Heller's sharp observation, these are the two forgotten records that link “the teenage symphonies to the God” to Newman's more mature songwriting. But it could just as easily be the link to Carole King's Tapestry or Tom Waits's “Closing Time.”

As the title suggests, Burt reaches out, perhaps struck by this new spatio-temporal dimension, wanting to attain the Out, his own personal shining, that indefinable quid that would become the hallmark of his music. In this Out, an unreachable utopian place of the soul, lies all his allure.

He manages to give thematic coherence to his solo project by subtly tying all the songs to a single theme, the universal one of love. The songs on “Reach Out” are indeed “tiny love stories,” mini-fragments of possible film screen tests, open-ended endings with a bittersweet aftertaste.

The “cinematic” cover of “Reach Out” 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. We see the protagonist in various stages of assembling the sonic material: writing, conducting, listening, singing, producing. In these fragments, some intact, others torn, we find the nuances of his extraordinary melodies: instant emotions imprinted in the air like those of his beloved Ravel, Debussy and Satie, reinterpreted in a pop classicism “skipping along Burt-style.”

It is certainly the great mastery he achieved in the art of composition and arrangement that now allows him to explore new paths.

The eleven tracks of “Reach Out,” with their bizarre and sudden shifts in rhythm, tempo and mood, reveal this path of childlike wonder: even as adults, one must have kept the Out alive to grasp its greatness.

Reach Out For Me, first recorded by Lou Johnson in 1963, was later included on the 1964 album “Make Way For Dionne Warwick.” What we hear now is a “different” piece: slightly jazzed up, with Bacharach's piano replacing Dionne's voice and the closing trumpet prominently featured, it already reveals the full mastery of the balanced arrangements achieved by the American composer. Female voices and that graceful touch of exoticism emerge and interlock perfectly.

Alfie was written in '66 for the film of the same name directed by Lewis Gilbert, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 19th Cannes Film Festival. Sung by Cher, with an arrangement by Bono, in the States, while in the UK it featured Cilla Black's voice, it would ultimately enter legend thanks to Dionne Warwick's vocal performance on her album “Here Where There Is Love.” Here it becomes a purely instrumental piece, much more powerful, with production work notably more pronounced than on “Here Where There Is Love,” amid gorgeous “bouncing” samba-bossa rhythms and a lush orchestral bed of strings interwoven with Burt's fluid pianism and the dominant trumpet unfolding the wonderfully melancholic melody. Even without the support of David's lyrics, the psychological subtlety of the instrumental captures well the ambiguous character of the film's protagonist “Alfie,” a Michael Caine torn between libertine-libertarian urges and a longing for normality.

Bond Street, known as “Home James, Don't Spare The Horses,” for the “Casino Royale” soundtrack and b-side of the “Alfie” single.

The Hammond beat is prominently featured, played by the legendary Paul Griffin (session man for, among others, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, and Steely Dan's “The Royal Scam,” “Aja” and “Gaucho”), backed by samba rhythms and the ever-precise orchestra, it's a gem still capable of getting whole generations shaking their hips today in frenzies of snobbish London shopping.

Are You There (With Another Girl) already sung by Dionne Warwick on her album “Here I Am” and released as a single in December 1965.

The track in its single version would have a considerable impact: the orchestral crescendo, repeated twice, would pave the way for Beatles's “A Day In The Life.” Here too the piece is thoroughly reworked and slowed down in tempo. The Hammond organ, replacing the piano, the trumpet and the orchestra blend together with the usual mastery. Needless to say, the arrangement is as ever perfect, clean, harmonious — it's the same out from before, now turned into a celestial sphere.

What The World Needs Now Is Love is, in its melodic simplicity and its direct message, free of frills and false modesty, of a devastating beauty. A hopeful anthem for souls that have remained innocent. Before the Beatles' “All You Need Is Love,” the Bacharach-David duo wrote “What The World Needs Now Is Love” in 1965.

I picture Burt at the piano, backed by the rhythm section of bass and trombone, introducing the melody. The chords are assertive, perhaps even too much so, for an irritated muted trumpet that makes its entrance, whispering out the melodic theme. A saxophone comes in support, conversing with the trumpet, and celesta sounds herald the orchestra, now at work building dreamy, suspended atmospheres. With wonderful polyrhythmic echoes of snare drums and soft brushes caressing the drumheads in the background, here is Dionne calling on the Lord to grant the most precious gift, 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 final, almost desperate 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 is already the legend of legends, lounge ante-litteram.

If humanity has rediscovered Love, then here's what it looks like: mesmerizing, fleeting as the gaze of Ursula Andress ("...the melody came from just watching Ursula"). Burt strips it of lyrics, as was his original intention, letting the music speak for itself amid wonderful echoes of bossa-nova guitar with trumpet, hammond organ, and orchestra trading off the melodic theme. In just over two minutes, we find one of the most ineffable subjects laid bare, one it's futile to talk about 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 very first one ever! Already recorded in 1964 by Dionne Warwick, it seems to have inspired "A House Is Not A Motel" by Love, on the album "Forever Changes". Certainly Arthur Lee's Love had already covered a Bacharach tune ("My Little Red Book"), and their orchestral pop, with its lavish deployment of horns and strings steeped in Latin jazz and classical flavors, owes not a little to Burt and the A&M sound.

Here too the song is completely rearranged, taking on an entirely different spirit and length. Bacharach's piano and his almost crooner-like vocal delivery, which dominates the scene for a good half of the song before the orchestrated finale, send the piece soaring to heights of pure yearning. If the Love glimpsed in "The Look Of Love" is potentially fleeting and painful, here it's intimate, melancholy, "pure soul music". It's the eternal story of fleeting, unfulfilling brothel love, with Hal David outdoing himself, 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 song, 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 your ears.

I Say A Little Prayer is another immortal classic from the Bacharach-David duo. Unhappy with the rushed arrangement for Dionne's album "The Windows Of The World", perfectionist Burt had a very clear idea of the sound he wanted for his recordings — and it's likely he never quite found it for this song!

The song, as sung by Warwick, is like "Every Breath You Take" turned inside out into something positive: David's lyric aspires to a total, all-consuming love ("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 as an instrumental, stripped of the era's protest-song lyrics, it loses a bit of its bite and impact. With a piano intro reminiscent of a music box and the inevitable trumpet, the listen is perhaps more satisfying in the bucolic Judy Collins version, all played out through atmospheric nuances with a beautiful acoustic guitar underneath, which Dionne Warwick gave to her self-titled 1967 album.

Lisa is another lyrical gem, and also the only new song included on the album. In just a few verses, the melancholy story of this modern heroine unfolds. Whether her name is real (Lisa could be Holly Golightly, aka Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's") or fictional, Lisa is a delicate tale of unattainable love, arranged to the rhythm of a modern waltz.

Lisa, an unattainable woman, so beautiful and famous that she intimidates her lovers, lives a non-life, lost in a beauty that cuts her off from everyone and everything. She experiences the success of being "an inaccessible star in the sky". The song rhetorically wonders: "How can anyone so beautiful be mine, love?".

Lisa seeks the consoling success of the public as a surrogate for the love she never had. And while her public life seems to give her all that sought-after attention, her private life turns out to be empty and full of loneliness. The line between the two verses, later picked up again in the finale ("How can anyone so beautiful be mine love, so unloved?"), is ambiguity turned into art: Lisa, unable to love and unloved, becomes a symbolic figure for all of humanity yearning for love.

Message To Michael masterfully closes out the album. With a sturdier country-bluesy arrangement, the unexpected touch, the instrumental reaches great heights when a sax suddenly appears (our bluebird protagonist) to unfurl the melody, well supported by the orchestra. Here too we have a bittersweet love story, with the woman in love asking her bluebird ("Kentucky Bluebird", the song's original title in Marlene Dietrich's version) to carry her message to Michael so he'll come back to her and give up his failed singing career down in New Orleans, "and even though his dreams of fame fell through to me he will always be a star". The anguish of loss is so strong that the woman in love lets slip some truly tear-jerking words: "When you find him please let him know rich or poor, I will always love him so".

And so, with this masterpiece, Bacharach reaches, at nearly forty, after a long and arduous journey, his artistic maturity. His music is no longer just about churning out hits or the odd 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 envelops the listener in its immediacy, only to leave behind a strange aftertaste of suspended feelings, ranging from joy to utter despondency.

By deepening ambiguity and raising ambivalence to dizzying heights, he would create a whole range of expressive moods still largely unexplored in pop music at the time. His masterful chords, forever floating between major and minor keys, radiate the quiet, discreet charm of life's transience. Behind the apparent playfulness (major keys) of his sound lurks and slowly reveals itself the morbid breath (minor keys) reminding us that everything must perish.

Bacharach doesn't sell out his art to the American dream of certainties and conquests; instead he unveils a new musical arcadia, hazy, illusory, spiritual. He yearns to recapture a lost innocence, adrift in an ahistorical identity seemingly untethered from its times. It's not the wish to depict any particular social milieu — that of the American middle class caught between anxieties, threats and a craving for security — that preoccupies the German Jew 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 survival, so the whirlwind of Bacharach-esque emotional currents blends shards of life in which joy and pain are indissolubly bound together. Like Brazilian saudade, its secret lies in understanding and accepting the perennial dissatisfaction inherent in living, the "mal du vivre", sublimating it into musical art.

His subsequent output would be entirely built on these coordinates, still reaching creative peaks on albums such as "Make It Easy On Yourself" in 1969 and on the other masterpiece, the self-titled "Burt Bacharach" from 1971.

Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer, would immortalize "Reach Out" forever with this poem, printed as an introductory note on the album's back cover:

If you love not tall pines which touch the beginnings of the sky

If you have never yearned to leap a mailbox, nor longer

To join the street urchins in a game of tag

If you have not sighed and smiled beyond your mind as

Sleep creeps out of the abstract and carries you into its endless night

If violins and cellos harpsichord and piano trumpets,

Flutes and sounds of rippling scales have never lightened your spirit

If Alfie did not become so much a name, more a lonely island of song in a sea of human sadness.

If cool water too long out of reach has never quenched your thirst

If love comes second or you come first,

If you have never walked without a destination nor flown without a sense of marvel

If you have known neither pain nor sorrow nor wept for the joy of release.

If a baby is not a person until it knows your name

If your heart has not leapt nor your senses quivered as the conductor’s baton taps the music stand

If you have not stared at a pretty girl in a vacuum in time across a crowded room and prayed she knew

If you believe that the essence of a man and his music can adequately be caught and conveyed within an album liner note…

Then it is likely that the entrapment of music between these covers is not for you and, though it is sad, you should walk on by.

Burt Bacharach, shy, young, handsome, courteous, New Yorker son of a journalist, married to an actress, is more relevantly, a fiery complex ingredient in the exciting cauldron of the musical sixties.

Put down by no one, whether peers or followers, put on by nothing, whether fame or wealth; put off by neither pressure nor competitor, Bacharach is a very special man.

He bestrides, like Gulliver, the warring worlds of the Establishments’ “Academy Award system-from whom he has wrought two Oscar nominations for Alfie & What’s new pussycat” – and the contemporary Top Forty scene where the buying power lies in the hands of very young.

It is effortless to praise him because he has done so much, so widely and so well.

Marlene Dietrich doted on him as her arranger and conductor, adores him as a man.

From Hollywood to NY, across Europe and the British Isles in military camps and in brutally sophisticated nightclubs, he built upon his formal training as a pianist by adding technique and style and charm.

As songwriter, he decided to create tunes people could hum, and by now, few singers anywhere in the world haven’t’ sung them. On this album, his first for A&M Records, with whom he has a close and vastly rewarding relationship, he has written, arranged, assembled all eleven songs, conducted the orchestra and produced the entire album, and because he knows there is nothing you can do that can’t be done, he has played piano on all of the tracks and sung one of them. This one is called “A house is not a home”, and it is something else.

So is Burt Bacharach.

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02/05/2010