![]() ![]() ![]() He employed still more rubato in the title theme to the film Alfie (1966). ![]() With Make it Easy On Yourself, a British No 1 for the Walker Brothers in 1965, Bacharach came as close as a composer of popular music can to embracing the techniques of opera: a majestic opening, reflective recitative, an elegaic, extended melodic line, and stylistic curlicues such as drawing the single word “through” over no fewer than nine grace notes. Cilla Black’s version reached No 1 in the UK. With its recurring changes of time signature, restlessly shifting between five and four beats to the bar, nervy underlying triplets, and Hal David’s lyrics, with their sense of searing loss, the song – unwittingly, perhaps – caught the popular mood at a disturbing time in American history. Of all the many landmark numbers in the Bacharach songbook, perhaps none is more defining of its moment than Anyone Who Had a Heart, first recorded by Dionne Warwick and reaching the charts in January 1964, a couple of months after the Kennedy assassination. “What, no suspension on the fifth? No seventh? I couldn’t do it.” Frank Sinatra once joked that Bacharach “writes in hat sizes. “I just wouldn’t be able to write a song in three chords, simple vanilla G majors and that stuff,” he explained. The result, as his style matured, was Bacharach’s distinctive musical stamp of unexpected rhythms, flourishes, switches of time signatures and a rich harmonic palette which offered many more possibilities than the pedestrian formats usually employed in Tin Pan Alley. At the same time, he was listening to the popular sounds of 1940s bandleaders such as Harry James and the Dorsey brothers jazz, bebop in particular, appealed to him, too. They were carried by Latin rhythms and soaring strings, counterpointed by muted trumpet and elegiac piano.Ĭlassically trained, Bacharach fashioned a musical style that drew on the work of 20th-century French composers like Poulenc and Satie, and studied under Darius Milhaud, another member of the group known as Les Six, and whose musical vocabulary also proved influential. These were heavily orchestrated, unconventional and complex, often with many changes of metre. ![]() Each song was a mini-drama laced with pathos and regret, with Warwick’s agile grace matched to Bacharach’s sleek arrangements. Their sophisticated sound was perfect for an era that aspired to effortless glamour.īacharach and David were older than chart rivals like Lennon and McCartney, and their musical roots were in jazz and Broadway shows. The singer with whom they were most closely identified was Dionne Warwick, for whom they wrote hits including Walk On By, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, Anyone Who Had a Heart and Trains and Boats and Planes. Their successes were legion, and included songs such as Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head and I Say a Little Prayer. Burt Bacharach, who has died aged 94, formed, with Hal David, the most accomplished American songwriting team since George and Ira Gershwin David supplied the deceptively simple lyrics, Bacharach the piquant, angular and often complex melodies and lush arrangements. ![]()
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