Burt Bacharach, New York-raised music legend, dies at 94

Burt Bacharach, an extraordinarily gifted and popular composer who admired the whimsical arrangements and unforgettable melodies of “Walk on By”, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and dozens of other hits, has died at the age of 94.

Grammy, Oscar and Tony Bacharach winner died Wednesday at home in Los Angeles of natural causes, publicist Tina Brausam said on Thursday. The musical legend grew up in the Kew Gardens area of ​​Queens and graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1946.

Over the past 70 years, only Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a few others have rivaled his genius for instantly catchy songs that were sung, played and hummed long after they were written.

He had a string of Top 10 hits from the 1950s to the 21st century, and his music could be heard everywhere from movie soundtracks and radio to home stereos and iPods, be it “Alfie” and “I Say a Little Prayer” or ” I’ll never fall in love again” and “This guy is in love with you.”

Dionne Warwick was his favorite translator, but Bacharach, usually in tandem with lyricist Hal David, also produced top-notch material for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, and many others. Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Frank Sinatra were among the countless artists who covered his songs, and more recent artists who sang or sampled him included the White Stripes, Twista and Ashanti. Only “Walk On By” was covered by everyone from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to the British punk band The Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

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Bacharach was both an innovator and a scumbag, and his career seemed to run parallel to the rock era. He grew up with jazz and classical music and had little taste for rock when he entered the business in the 1950s. His sensibility often seemed more like Tin Pan Alley than Bob Dylan, John Lennon and other writers who came later, but rock composers appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility.

“The short version of it is that it has something to do with light listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album Painted from Memory with Bacharach, told the Associated Press in 2018. “It may be nice to listen to these songs, but there is nothing easy about them. Try to play them. Try to sing them.”

The Songs of Bacharach & Costello box set is due out March 3rd.

He has triumphed in many art forms. He was an eight-time Grammy winner, an award-winning Broadway composer for Promises, Promises, and a three-time Oscar winner. In 1970, he won two Academy Awards for the score to the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and for the song “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (with David). In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carol Bayer Sager, won for “The Best You Can Do,” the theme from Arthur. His other film scores included What’s New, Kitty?, Alfie, and the 1967 James Bond parody Casino Royale.

Bacharach was well rewarded and well connected. He was a frequent visitor to the White House, whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat. And in 2012, Barack Obama presented him with the Gershwin Award for singing a few seconds of “Walk on By” during a campaign speech.

In his life and in his music he stood apart. Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn used to joke that the smiling, wavy Bacharach was the first composer he knew who didn’t look like a dentist. Bacharach was a “swinger”, as such men were called in his time, whose numerous affairs included actor Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965 to 1980, and Sager, his wife from 1982 to 1991.

Married four times, he established his strongest ties to work. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to write “Alfie” and could spend hours tweaking a single chord. Sager once remarked that Bacharach’s routine had essentially remained the same—only the wives had changed.

It all started with melodies – strong, but interspersed with changing rhythms and amazing harmonics. He attributed much of his style to his love of bebop and his classical education, especially under the tutelage of Darius Milhaud, the famed composer. He once played for Milhaud a piece for piano, violin and oboe, which had a melody that he was ashamed to write, since 12-point atonal music was in vogue at the time. Milhaud, who liked the piece, advised the young man, “Never be afraid of the melody.”

“It was a big confirmation for me,” Bacharach recalled in 2004.

Bacharach was essentially a pop composer, but his songs became hits for country artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synthpop (Naked Eyes). He attracted a new generation of listeners in the 1990s with the help of Costello and others.

Mike Myers recalled hearing the sultry “Look of Love” on the radio and quickly found inspiration for his Austin Powers retro spy comedies, in which Bacharach made cameo appearances.

In the 21st century, he was still experiencing new possibilities, writing his own lyrics and recording with rapper Dr. Dre.

He was married to his first wife Paula Stewart from 1953 to 1958 and married a fourth time to Jane Hansen in 1993. According to Brausam, he was survived by Hansen, as well as his children Oliver, Raleigh and Christopher. He was preceded by the death of his daughter by Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.

Bacharach knew the very heights of recognition, but he remembered himself as a lonely, growing, short and shy boy who did not like being a Jew so much that he even mocked other Jews. His favorite book as a child was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; he related to the sexually impotent Jake Barnes, believing himself to be “socially impotent”.

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri but soon moved to New York. His father was a syndicated columnist and his mother was a pianist who encouraged the boy to pursue music. Although he was more interested in sports, he practiced the piano every day after school, not wanting to disappoint his mother. While still underage, he sneaked into jazz clubs with a fake ID and listened to greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

“They were so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden I was into music like never before,” he recalled in his 2013 memoir, Anyone with a Heart. “What I heard in these clubs turned my head.”

He was a poor student, but he managed to enter the music conservatory at McGill University in Montreal. He wrote his first song at McGill and listened to Mel Torm’s “A Christmas Carol” for months. Music could also have saved Bacharach’s life. He was drafted into the army in the late 1940s and was still on active duty during the Korean War. But officers in the US soon learned of his abilities and wanted him around. When he did go abroad it was in Germany, where he wrote orchestrations for a recreation center at a local military base.

After being fired, he returned to New York and tried to get into the music business. At first he had little success as a songwriter, but became a popular arranger and accompanist, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames brothers and Stuart, his future first wife. When a friend who was touring with Marlene Dietrich was unable to perform in Las Vegas, he asked Bacharach to intervene.

The young musician and the ageless singer quickly hit it off, and Bacharach traveled the world with her in the late 1950s and early 60s. During each performance, she introduced him in a big way: “I want you to get to know this man, he is my arranger, he is my accompanist, he is my conductor, and I would like to say that he is my composer. But this is not true. He is a composer for everyone… Bert Bacharach!”

In the meantime, he met his ideal songwriting partner, David, who was as businesslike as Bacharach was fickle, so at home that he left every night at 5 to catch the train and return to his family on Long Island. Working from a tiny office in the famous Brill Building on Broadway, they released their first million copies of “Magic Moments”, sung in 1958 by Perry Como. In 1962, they spotted the Drifters’ backing vocalist, Warwick, who had “a special grace and elegance,” Bacharach recalled.

The trio released hit after hit. The songs were as difficult to record as they were easy to listen to. Bacharach liked to experiment with time signatures and arrangements, for example “Walk on By” featured two pianists, but their performances were slightly out of sync, giving the song a “bumpy feel” as he wrote in his memoirs.

Bacharach and David’s partnership ended in the disastrous failure of the musical remake of 1973’s Lost Horizon. Bacharach became so depressed that he isolated himself in his country house in Del Mar and refused to work.

“I didn’t want to write with Hal or anyone else,” he told AP in 2004. He also didn’t want to fulfill the obligation to record Warwick. She and David both sued him.

Bacharach and David eventually reconciled. When David died in 2012, Bacharach praised him for writing lyrics “like a miniature film”.

Meanwhile, Bacharach continued to work, vowing never to retire, always believing that a good song could make a difference.

“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something, if it’s good, evokes emotions you may not have experienced before,” he told AP in 2018. you have a desire to do something like that.”