Burt Bacharach, legendary composer of pop songs, dies at 94

By Associated Press

NEW YORK: Burt Bacharach, the singularly gifted and well-liked composer who delighted hundreds of thousands with the quirky preparations and unforgettable melodies of “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and dozens of different hits, has died at 94.

The Grammy, Oscar and Tony-winning Bacharach died Wednesday at dwelling in Los Angeles of pure causes, publicist Tina Brausam stated Thursday.

Over the previous 70 years, solely Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a handful of others rivaled his genius for immediately catchy songs that remained carried out, performed and hummed lengthy after they had been written. He had a run of high 10 hits from the Fifties into the twenty first century, and his music was heard in all places from film soundtracks and radios to dwelling stereo programs and iPods, whether or not “Alfie” and “I Say a Little Prayer” or “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “This Guy’s in Love with You.”

Dionne Warwick was his favourite interpreter, however Bacharach, often in tandem with lyricist Hal David, additionally created prime materials for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and plenty of others. Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra had been among the many numerous artists who coated his songs, with newer performers who sung or sampled him together with White Stripes, Twista and Ashanti. “Walk On By” alone was coated by everybody from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to the British punk band the Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

Bacharach was each an innovator and reversion, and his profession appeared to run parallel to the rock period. He grew up on jazz and classical music and had little style for rock when he was breaking into the enterprise within the Fifties. His enchantment usually appeared extra aligned with Tin Pan Alley than with Bob Dylan, John Lennon and different writers who later emerged, however rock composers appreciated the depth of his seemingly old school sensibility.

“The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album “Painted from Memory” with Bacharach, stated in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press. “It may be agreeable to listen to these songs, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”

A field set, “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” is because of come out March 3.

He triumphed in lots of artwork varieties. He was an eight-time Grammy winner, a prize-winning Broadway composer for “Promises, Promises” and a three-time Oscar winner. He obtained two Academy Awards in 1970, for the rating of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and for the track “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (shared with David). In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, gained for “Best That You Can Do,” the theme from “Arthur. His other movie soundtracks included “What’s New, Pussycat?”, “Alfie” and the 1967 James Bond spoof “Casino Royale.”

Bacharach was well-rewarded and well-connected. He was a frequent visitor on the White House, whether or not the president was Republican or Democrat. And in 2012, he was offered the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama, who had sung just a few seconds of “Walk on By” throughout a marketing campaign look.

In his life, and in his music, he stood aside. Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn favored to joke that the smiling, wavy-haired Bacharach was the primary composer he ever knew who didn’t appear to be a dentist. Bacharach was a “swinger,” as they known as such males in his time, whose many romances included actor Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965-80, and Sager, his spouse from 1982-1991.

Married 4 instances, he shaped his most lasting ties to work. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to put in writing “Alfie” and would possibly spend hours tweaking a single chord. Sager as soon as noticed that Bacharach’s life routines primarily stayed the identical — solely the wives modified.

It started with the melodies — robust but interspersed with altering rhythms and stunning harmonics. He credited a lot of his model to his love of bebop and to his classical schooling, particularly beneath the tutelage of Darius Milhaud, the famed composer. He as soon as performed a chunk for piano, violin and oboe for Milhaud that contained a melody he was ashamed to have written, as 12-point atonal music was in vogue on the time. Milhaud, who favored the piece, suggested the younger man, “Never be afraid of the melody.”

“That was a great affirmation for me,” Bacharach recalled in 2004.

Bacharach was primarily a pop composer, however his songs grew to become hits for nation artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues performers (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synth-pop (Naked Eyes). He reached a brand new era of listeners within the Nineties with the assistance of Costello and others.

Mike Myers would recall listening to the sultry “The Look of Love” on the radio and discovering quick inspiration for his “Austin Powers” retro spy comedies, through which Bacharach made cameos.

In the twenty first century, he was nonetheless testing new floor, writing his personal lyrics and recording with rapper Dr. Dre.

He was married to his first spouse, Paula Stewart, from 1953-58, and married for a fourth time, to Jane Hansen, in 1993. He is survived by Hansen, in addition to his kids Oliver, Raleigh and Cristopher, Brausam stated. He was preceded in loss of life by his daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.

Bacharach knew the very heights of acclaim, however he remembered himself as a loner rising up, a brief and self-conscious boy so uncomfortable with being Jewish that he even taunted different Jews. His favourite guide as a child was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”; he associated to the sexually impotent Jake Barnes, relating to himself as “socially impotent.”

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, however quickly moved to New York City. His father was a syndicated columnist, his mom a pianist who inspired the boy to check music. Although he was extra serious about sports activities, he practiced piano day-after-day after faculty, not desirous to disappoint his mom. While nonetheless a minor, he would sneak into jazz golf equipment, bearing a pretend ID, and listen to such greats as Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

“They were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before,” he recalled within the memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” printed in 2013. “What I heard in those clubs turned my head around.”

He was a poor pupil, however managed to realize a spot on the music conservatory at McGill University in Montreal. He wrote his first track at McGill and listened for months to Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song.” Music additionally might have saved Bacharach’s life. He was drafted into the Army within the late Forties and was nonetheless on energetic responsibility throughout the Korean War. But officers stateside quickly realized of his items and needed him round. When he did go abroad, it was to Germany, the place he wrote orchestrations for a recreation heart on the native army base.

After his discharge, he returned to New York and tried to interrupt into the music enterprise. He had little success at first as a songwriter, however he grew to become a well-liked arranger and accompanist, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers and Stewart, his eventual first spouse. When a pal who had been touring with Marlene Dietrich was unable to make a present in Las Vegas, he requested Bacharach to step in.

The younger musician and ageless singer shortly clicked and Bacharach traveled the world along with her within the late Fifties and early ’60s. During every efficiency, she would introduce him in grand model: “I would like you to meet the man, he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer. But that isn’t true. He’s everybody’s composer … Burt Bacharach!”

Meanwhile, he had met his preferrred songwriter companion — David, as businesslike as Bacharach was mercurial, so domesticated that he would go away every night time at 5 to catch the prepare again to his household on Long Island. Working in a tiny workplace in Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building, they produced their first million-seller, “Magic Moments,” sung in 1958 by Perry Como. In 1962, they noticed a backup singer for the Drifters, Warwick, who had a “very special kind of grace and elegance,” Bacharach recalled.

The trio produced hit after hit. The songs had been as difficult to report as they had been straightforward to listen to. Bacharach favored to experiment with time signatures and preparations, akin to having two pianists play on “Walk on By,” their performances simply barely out of sync to offer the track “a jagged kind of feeling,” he wrote in his memoir.

The Bacharach-David partnership ended with the dismal failure of a 1973 musical remake of “Lost Horizon.” Bacharach grew to become so depressed he remoted himself in his Del Mar trip dwelling and refused to work.

“I didn’t want to write with Hal or anybody,” he advised the AP in 2004. Nor did he wish to fulfill a dedication to report Warwick. She and David each sued him.

“Burt’s transition is like losing a family member. These words I’ve been asked to write are being written with sadness over the loss of my Dear Friend and my Musical Partner,” Warwick wrote in an announcement Thursday. “On the lighter side we laughed a lot and had our run ins but always found a way to let each other know our family like roots were the most important part of our relationship.”

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

Meanwhile, Bacharach saved working, vowing by no means to retire, at all times believing {that a} good track might make a distinction.

“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he advised the AP in 2018. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”

NEW YORK: Burt Bacharach, the singularly gifted and well-liked composer who delighted hundreds of thousands with the quirky preparations and unforgettable melodies of “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and dozens of different hits, has died at 94.

The Grammy, Oscar and Tony-winning Bacharach died Wednesday at dwelling in Los Angeles of pure causes, publicist Tina Brausam stated Thursday.

Over the previous 70 years, solely Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a handful of others rivaled his genius for immediately catchy songs that remained carried out, performed and hummed lengthy after they had been written. He had a run of high 10 hits from the Fifties into the twenty first century, and his music was heard in all places from film soundtracks and radios to dwelling stereo programs and iPods, whether or not “Alfie” and “I Say a Little Prayer” or “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “This Guy’s in Love with You.”

Dionne Warwick was his favourite interpreter, however Bacharach, often in tandem with lyricist Hal David, additionally created prime materials for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and plenty of others. Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra had been among the many numerous artists who coated his songs, with newer performers who sung or sampled him together with White Stripes, Twista and Ashanti. “Walk On By” alone was coated by everybody from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to the British punk band the Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

Bacharach was each an innovator and reversion, and his profession appeared to run parallel to the rock period. He grew up on jazz and classical music and had little style for rock when he was breaking into the enterprise within the Fifties. His enchantment usually appeared extra aligned with Tin Pan Alley than with Bob Dylan, John Lennon and different writers who later emerged, however rock composers appreciated the depth of his seemingly old school sensibility.

“The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album “Painted from Memory” with Bacharach, stated in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press. “It may be agreeable to listen to these songs, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”

A field set, “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” is because of come out March 3.

He triumphed in lots of artwork varieties. He was an eight-time Grammy winner, a prize-winning Broadway composer for “Promises, Promises” and a three-time Oscar winner. He obtained two Academy Awards in 1970, for the rating of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and for the track “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (shared with David). In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, gained for “Best That You Can Do,” the theme from “Arthur. His other movie soundtracks included “What’s New, Pussycat?”, “Alfie” and the 1967 James Bond spoof “Casino Royale.”

Bacharach was well-rewarded and well-connected. He was a frequent visitor on the White House, whether or not the president was Republican or Democrat. And in 2012, he was offered the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama, who had sung just a few seconds of “Walk on By” throughout a marketing campaign look.

In his life, and in his music, he stood aside. Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn favored to joke that the smiling, wavy-haired Bacharach was the primary composer he ever knew who didn’t appear to be a dentist. Bacharach was a “swinger,” as they known as such males in his time, whose many romances included actor Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965-80, and Sager, his spouse from 1982-1991.

Married 4 instances, he shaped his most lasting ties to work. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to put in writing “Alfie” and would possibly spend hours tweaking a single chord. Sager as soon as noticed that Bacharach’s life routines primarily stayed the identical — solely the wives modified.

It started with the melodies — robust but interspersed with altering rhythms and stunning harmonics. He credited a lot of his model to his love of bebop and to his classical schooling, particularly beneath the tutelage of Darius Milhaud, the famed composer. He as soon as performed a chunk for piano, violin and oboe for Milhaud that contained a melody he was ashamed to have written, as 12-point atonal music was in vogue on the time. Milhaud, who favored the piece, suggested the younger man, “Never be afraid of the melody.”

“That was a great affirmation for me,” Bacharach recalled in 2004.

Bacharach was primarily a pop composer, however his songs grew to become hits for nation artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues performers (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synth-pop (Naked Eyes). He reached a brand new era of listeners within the Nineties with the assistance of Costello and others.

Mike Myers would recall listening to the sultry “The Look of Love” on the radio and discovering quick inspiration for his “Austin Powers” retro spy comedies, through which Bacharach made cameos.

In the twenty first century, he was nonetheless testing new floor, writing his personal lyrics and recording with rapper Dr. Dre.

He was married to his first spouse, Paula Stewart, from 1953-58, and married for a fourth time, to Jane Hansen, in 1993. He is survived by Hansen, in addition to his kids Oliver, Raleigh and Cristopher, Brausam stated. He was preceded in loss of life by his daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.

Bacharach knew the very heights of acclaim, however he remembered himself as a loner rising up, a brief and self-conscious boy so uncomfortable with being Jewish that he even taunted different Jews. His favourite guide as a child was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”; he associated to the sexually impotent Jake Barnes, relating to himself as “socially impotent.”

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, however quickly moved to New York City. His father was a syndicated columnist, his mom a pianist who inspired the boy to check music. Although he was extra serious about sports activities, he practiced piano day-after-day after faculty, not desirous to disappoint his mom. While nonetheless a minor, he would sneak into jazz golf equipment, bearing a pretend ID, and listen to such greats as Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

“They were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before,” he recalled within the memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” printed in 2013. “What I heard in those clubs turned my head around.”

He was a poor pupil, however managed to realize a spot on the music conservatory at McGill University in Montreal. He wrote his first track at McGill and listened for months to Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song.” Music additionally might have saved Bacharach’s life. He was drafted into the Army within the late Forties and was nonetheless on energetic responsibility throughout the Korean War. But officers stateside quickly realized of his items and needed him round. When he did go abroad, it was to Germany, the place he wrote orchestrations for a recreation heart on the native army base.

After his discharge, he returned to New York and tried to interrupt into the music enterprise. He had little success at first as a songwriter, however he grew to become a well-liked arranger and accompanist, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers and Stewart, his eventual first spouse. When a pal who had been touring with Marlene Dietrich was unable to make a present in Las Vegas, he requested Bacharach to step in.

The younger musician and ageless singer shortly clicked and Bacharach traveled the world along with her within the late Fifties and early ’60s. During every efficiency, she would introduce him in grand model: “I would like you to meet the man, he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer. But that isn’t true. He’s everybody’s composer … Burt Bacharach!”

Meanwhile, he had met his preferrred songwriter companion — David, as businesslike as Bacharach was mercurial, so domesticated that he would go away every night time at 5 to catch the prepare again to his household on Long Island. Working in a tiny workplace in Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building, they produced their first million-seller, “Magic Moments,” sung in 1958 by Perry Como. In 1962, they noticed a backup singer for the Drifters, Warwick, who had a “very special kind of grace and elegance,” Bacharach recalled.

The trio produced hit after hit. The songs had been as difficult to report as they had been straightforward to listen to. Bacharach favored to experiment with time signatures and preparations, akin to having two pianists play on “Walk on By,” their performances simply barely out of sync to offer the track “a jagged kind of feeling,” he wrote in his memoir.

The Bacharach-David partnership ended with the dismal failure of a 1973 musical remake of “Lost Horizon.” Bacharach grew to become so depressed he remoted himself in his Del Mar trip dwelling and refused to work.

“I didn’t want to write with Hal or anybody,” he advised the AP in 2004. Nor did he wish to fulfill a dedication to report Warwick. She and David each sued him.

“Burt’s transition is like losing a family member. These words I’ve been asked to write are being written with sadness over the loss of my Dear Friend and my Musical Partner,” Warwick wrote in an announcement Thursday. “On the lighter side we laughed a lot and had our run ins but always found a way to let each other know our family like roots were the most important part of our relationship.”

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

Meanwhile, Bacharach saved working, vowing by no means to retire, at all times believing {that a} good track might make a distinction.

“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he advised the AP in 2018. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”