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Andy Williams ... and MANY more! Best Burt albums 1. Her
All-Time Greatest Hits BONUS: Cal
Tjader Sounds Out Burt Bacharach
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This ain't no "lounge music." Burt Bacharach is one of America's most
"I think he could
be spoken about in "Burt Bacharach is one
of the great geniuses of American popular music... A trailblazer. A questioner.
An unbridled genius.... Bacharach's songs explode the expectations of what a
popular song is supposed to be. Advanced harmonies and chord changes with unexpected turnarounds
and modulations, unusual changing time signatures and rhythmic twists, often in
uneven numbers of bars. But he makes it all sound so natural you can't get it
out of your head or stop whistling it. Maddeningly complex, sometimes
deceptively simple, these are more than just great pop songs: these are deep explorations
of the materials of music and should be studied and treasured with as much care
and diligence as we accord any great works of art." By Jim Emerson There's no mistaking a Burt Bacharach tune. His melodic style, and his strikingly colored orchestrations, are so original and characteristic that you can tell you're hearing a Bacharach song within moments of laying ears on one. His familiar trademarks include those astounding (and much discussed) rapidly shifting time signatures and unexpected key changes, along with soaring, stop-and-start melodies that you feel probably shouldn't hang together, but do -- so demanding they still strike terror into the hearts of singers and instrumentalists the world over. But let's not forget those horns. They're marvelously sexy -- somehow muted and brassy, crisp and velvety, all at the same time. Nobody else gets a horn sound like Bacharach's. (Imagine the snap of biting into a juicy, Golden Delicious apple -- and then its flesh melting away in your mouth like creamy chocolate. That's Bacharach brass.) "Regardless of the style with which his songs are interpreted, you can hear
the distinctive way in which Burt put them together -- like the
interesting ways he modulates his music when you least expect it. Bacharach studied with French polytonal composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), who "attached extreme importance to melodic line, superimposing different keys to produce a polytonal texture characteristic of his style" (Larousse Encyclopedia of Music). And he claims to have been deeply influenced by Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe Suite, a strikingly atmospheric Impressionist piece featuring a huge orchestra, a wordless chorus for extra flavor, and a panoply of percussion, including a wind machine. (Two fabulous recordings of the full ballet, from which the Suite was adapted: a stunning digital disc by Charles Dutoit and Choir and Symphonie Orchestra of Montreal [RealAudio sample available via Amazon.com]; and an equally impressive late '70s performance by Pierre Boulez with the New York Philharmonic and the Camerata Singers.) In the liner notes to Rhino Records' The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection, Bacharach recalls Milhaud encouraging him to "let the melody shine through. 'It's nothing to be ashamed of,' he said." Bacharach never forgot. His melodic structures may be unconventional or oddly shaped, but they are unashamedly glorious. Bacharach can drop glittering two- or three-note tune fragments upon one another until he's built a gorgeous melody that surprises you because you didn't hear it coming. These little clusters of notes tease you, keep you guessing, and the overall shape of the melody doesn't become apparent until the last piece is dropped into place: The look or: But now I fill my
life up or even: Why do birds In each case, the space between each fragment creates both lyrical and melodic suspense. (The music and lyrics are so inseparably integrated that, if you remember the tune at all, you can summon up the musical effects by quoting the words -- whether Hal David's or Elvis Costello's.) So, Bacharach quickens your blood with gorgeous tunes, and keeps your pulse rate up with suspense on even the most romantic ballads. (Of course, there's also usually a tinge of melancholy or uncertainty underlying his romanticism, something that also keeps you listening, wondering what will happen next, and if, perhaps, the whole thing -- i.e., the lovers' relationship and the song itself -- will suddenly fall apart.)
On other occasions, Bacharach likes to string together repeated clips of notes, like quiet bursts of machine-gun fire, to create an irresistible hook -- as in the title statements of "I Say a Little Prayer for You" and "Always Something There to Remind Me," or the more blatantly insistent (and defiant) "Little Red Book." And, of course, the dramatic staccato opening of "Walk on By": If-you-see-me-walking-down-the-street It's as if the melody itself were breaking down, trying to catch its breath between sobs. Bacharach frequently caps off one of these incremental build-ups with a gusher of a phrase that provides an almost orgasmic release. To switch metaphors: It's like climbing, step-by-step, to the top of a tower and then suddnely leaping off and soaring through the air on a hang-glider. So, the protagonist of "This House is Empty Now" remembers the pictures that used to be on the walls. And, immediately following the section quoted above, he pours out his regrets in music that erupts like a sob: Do you recogniiiiiize the
face I love the way that last line drops in there; it feels abruptly cut off, incomplete -- but, when you think about it, once that's out, what else is there to say? Elvis Costello sings it as if he's suddenly caught himself giving voice to a thought too painful to put into words and has to quickly swallow his sob. (Could she have been unhappy even then and just never said anything?) Those three words -- not an accusation, but perhaps a terrible realization -- are nearly thrown away, but they may make for the saddest moment in the entire song. "This House is Empty Now" recalls effects Bacharach used 34 years earlier in the song's obvious predecessor, "A House is Not a Home," which begins with a quiet evocation of loneliness: A chair is still a chair ...and then throws open the floodgates, whereupon the grief spills out in torrents: But a chair is not a
house, and a house is not a home Bacharach alternates these kinds of long and short phrases to different effect in early songs such as "Magic Moments" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." In the former (the nimblest performance you'll ever hear from Perry Como) the verse lopes along with considerable momentum, as golden memories come tumbling gently forth: I'll never forget, the
moment we kissed, the night of the hayride The chorus is built around the title, each word delivered as if it were a line unto itself, with the first syllable drawn out and the second jauntily clipped. The feeling is of someone stepping back from the flow of remembrance for just a moment to contemplate and bask in the glow. "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (which became a hit even though it wasn't used in the movie for which it was composed: John Ford's "print the legend" western starring John Wayne, James Stewart and Lee Marvin) is done in the style of a larger-than-life, melodramatic western ballad, telling the story of a legendary black hat and the man who finally gunned him down. But even though it's almost a parody, it still has some distinctive Bacharach touches. The opening -- with its dissonant, country-fiddle intro -- still manages to surprise me, sometimes. The first line is followed by a portentious, two-note fragment that seems to leave you hangin'... until a variation on the opening phrase comes to the rescue: When Liberty Valance came
to town the womenfolk would hide Then the time-signature changes for a pair pair of rapid-fire phrases with drawn-out, ominous, "cliffhanger" notes: 'Cause the point of
a gun was the only law Bacharach's music is richly cinematic -- dramatic and colorful, with sudden shifts in rhythm, tempo, mood, and texture that feel like cuts between miniature "scenes." Songs like "Are You There (With Another Girl)," "Don't Make Me Over," and "Walk On By" are fully developed little movies unto themselves -- the latter a three-hankie melodrama! Bacharach won three Oscars -- for both song ("Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head") and score for 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and for song ("Arthur's Theme [Best That You Can Do]") for 1981's Arthur. It was director Alison Anders who teamed Bacharach and Elvis Costello on a song for her splendid, underrated portrait of the Brill Building era, Grace of My Heart -- and that song, "God Give Me Strength," led to a full-album collaboration two years later: Painted From Memory. "The Green Grass Starts to Grow" doesn't have the same kind of dramatic narrative as, say, "Here I Am" or "Anyone Who Had a Heart," but it's no less "cinematic." It starts off as a guitar, trombone, tack piano number, like slightly runaway Bavarian circus music -- all oom-pah and rinky-tink, sauerkraut and bratwurst -- and then, suddenly, the time signature shifts lightly into a breezy tempo and the circus just blows out of town: Slowly, the green grass
starts to grow That's the entire chorus. And, just as quickly, the sun disappears behind a gray cloud again and the wind changes from light and breezy to heavy and blustery. Bacharach seems to prefer making "short films" -- his songs -- to writing feature-length film scores. He didn't actually compose many movie scores, but he wrote scores of movie songs, from title-tune novelties ("The Blob," "What's New Pussycat?") to classic cinematic hits ("Alfie," "Casino Royale"), to first-rate mini-epics for now forgotten pictures, like "A House is Not a Home" and "The April Fools." The Burt Bacharach Collection includes these, as well as some lesser-known movie tunes such as "Fool Killer," "Promise Her Anything," "Nikki" (which became the theme for The ABC Movie of the Week on TV), and that other song from What's New, Pussycat?, "My Little Red Book." Jack Jones' Grammy-winning 1963 hit "Wives and Lovers" ("Hey, little girl..."), criticized even then for the sexist overtones in its lyric, was inspired by a movie (Wives and Lovers) that it wasn't in. But years later it was used with delightful irony in the female revenge comedy The First Wives Club, starring Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Bette Midler. And, of course, Burt himself made a memorable cameo appearance, playing piano on the open top of a double-decker sightseeing bus rolling down the Las Vegas Strip in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. (Also: Did you remember that the AMFAR anthem "That's What Friends Are For?" -- sung by Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Gladys Knight -- originally appeared under the end credits of Ron Howard's 1982 comedy Night Shift, starring Henry Winkler, Michael Keaton, and Shelley Long?) But those grand cinematic/melodramatic gestures are like occasional fireworks shooting across a moody, cloud-spackled sky. It's not just those infectious hooks, or those Hal David lyrics about heartbreak and renewal -- there's a real ache, a feeling of melancholy, in Bacharach's music that you just can't shake. I think that, above and beyond everything else, is what kept drawing me back to Bacharach when I was a kid in the '60s and early '70s. There was a worldliness, a sophistication, to this music that was definitely adult. It even came through, faintly, in those sterilized, cheer-ified Muzak versions that dripped out of hidden speakers at the supermarket, at the dentist's office, or even... in elevators. (To be truthful, I remember this stuff vividly in the grocery store and at the dentist's, but I don't recall being assaulted by so-called "mood music" in any Otis contraption.) As a kid hungry for (and definitley apprehensive about) Knowledge and Experience, these songs were like dispatches from the distant front, every bit as exciting and dangerous as the sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll songs I also loved from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and, a few years later, Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen. Radio in the '60s and '70s was, in retrospect, a wonderful, democratic kind of thing. It was car radio, transistor radio, portable radio. It was, long before the invention of the Walkman, the soundtrack to your life -- and, without headphones, it was a communal experience rather than an individual one. (I always hated the idea of headphones anywhere but at home.) We may all have been driven insane by the endless repetition of lousy songs ("Afternoon Delight") and obnoxious ads ("Sunday, SUNday, SUNDAY!!!"), but playlists were far more open and eclectic than they are today. After all, "pop music" just meant popular music, and I listened to stations that thought nothing of playing the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, Sinatra and the Stones, James Taylor and Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin and , Dionne Warwick and the Doors. In 1971, an LA DJ named Tom Clay put together a medley of Bacharach/David's "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and the pop "political" ballad, "Abraham, Martin, and John" and combined them with news broadcasts of socio-political upheaval, including the assasination of Bobby Kennedy in the kitchek of LA's Ambasador Hotel in 1968. The record became a #8 hit that summer, and Bacharach and "Flower Power" fused -- on the radio, at least. With the 1998 releases of Painted From Memory (the collaboration with Elvis Costello) and The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection, Bacharach's public profile was higher than ever. The whole "lounge music" revival that started in the early '90s (partially as a reaction to its musical antithesis, grunge) may have contributed to a nostalgic longing for the sophistication of Bacharach's music, but Bacharach's music never really belonged to that fad. Music, even great music, oftentimes has to go out of fashion for a while until it can resurface, unconnected to the era in which it was written or recorded, and be heard for what it really is. In this case: timeless. Bacharach is back. For good.
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(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance ...and MANY more!
My Favorite 1. Walk on By Ten more: 11. This Empty Place (Dionne Warwick) And another dozen: 21. I Just Don't Know What To Do
With Myself (Elvis Costello) |
