Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, report producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the Nineteen Sixties distilled that decade’s temper of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his house in Los Angeles. He was 94.
His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the loss of life. No particular trigger was given.
A die-hard romantic whose mature type may be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and lengthy, angular melodies of late-Nineteenth-century symphonic music with trendy, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the ensuing combination with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized subtle hedonism to a era of younger adults solely a few years older than the Beatles.
Because of the excessive gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote along with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, throughout an period of confrontation and social upheaval, they have been typically dismissed as little greater than background music by listeners who most popular the laborious fringe of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter style. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David group ranks excessive in the pantheon of pop songwriting.
Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the film “Casino Royale”), “This Guy’s in Love With You” (a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert), and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet journey, sports activities vehicles and glossy bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and carried out his 1965 tune “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 film “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s atmosphere of the early James Bond movies. He additionally made cameo appearances in its two sequels.
Mr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote a few of his personal phrases. But his major collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music writer’s workplace in 1957. The group’s creative chemistry solidified in 1962, starting with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted younger gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.
Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had discovered the uncommon vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely tough melodies, with their tough time signatures and prolonged asymmetrical phrases.
The creative synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick outlined the voice of a younger, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane type was the speedy forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the center and late Nineteen Sixties.
Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David labored in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they’re ceaselessly lumped along with the youthful writers in the so-called Brill Building college of teenage pop, like the groups of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they not often wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their extra subtle songs have been nearer in type to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter requirements like “Begin the Beguine.”
Mr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He received two Academy Awards for greatest tune: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His authentic rating for the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops” (a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas), received an Oscar for greatest authentic rating for a nonmusical movement image. And the Bacharach-David group conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”
Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 movie about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan company, “Promises, Promises” was certainly one of the first Broadway reveals to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that very same yr, it presaged the period of the pop musical.
“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy however fiendishly tough title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. (Two of its forged members received, however the present itself didn’t. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” misplaced in the best-musical class to the far more conventional “1776.”) It was efficiently revived on Broadway in 2010.
With success each in Hollywood and on Broadway, in addition to a high-profile movie-star spouse, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the Seventies not simply a hit songwriter however a glamorous star in his personal proper. It appeared as if he might do no improper. But that quickly modified.
In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the rating for the film musical “Lost Horizon,” tailored from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy movie of the similar identify. The film was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to develop stale, break up up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.
Reflecting on his break up with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.”
A New Partnership
Mr. Bacharach endured a number of fallow years, private in addition to skilled — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over lengthy earlier than they divorced in 1981 — however skilled a business resurgence in the Nineteen Eighties via his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982.
Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their business peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for tune of the yr. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 film “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s final main hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.
Burt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach, was a nationally syndicated columnist and males’s trend journalist who moved his household to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mom, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach, was an novice singer and pianist who inspired him to examine music. He discovered cello, drums and piano.
While nonetheless underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz golf equipment and have become smitten with the trendy harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which might exert a enormous affect on him.
After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at a number of faculties, together with McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. Among his lecturers have been the composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he performed piano, labored as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist.
He grew to become the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured together with her for 2 years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the Fifties included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 grew to become his first spouse. (They divorced in 1958.)
All the parts of Mr. Bacharach’s type coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and organized himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the preparations emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the affect of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.
Among the different artists who had hits with the group’s songs have been Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”) and the fifth Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.
A Reunion
After the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach labored predominantly as a live performance performer, conducting his personal instrumental suites and singing his personal songs in an easygoing voice with a slim vary. He periodically launched solo albums, of which the most formidable was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental tune cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these data had a negligible business affect.
Time ultimately healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s break up with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick (most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For”) and later with Mr. David (for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early Nineties). He discovered his biggest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush Nineteen Eighties remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” remodeled them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias embellished with florid gospel melismas.
He married Jane Hansen, his fourth spouse, in 1993. She survives him, together with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, dedicated suicide in 2007.
In his 60s, Mr. Bacharach discovered himself regarded with awe by a youthful era of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs of their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 movie “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based mostly on the lifetime of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on a complete album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), organized and performed by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credit.
A monitor from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” received a Grammy for greatest pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s profession; he would win yet one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named greatest pop instrumental album, in addition to a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008.
The Bacharach-David group was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly earlier than Mr. David died at age 91, the two acquired the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.
Mr. Bacharach remained in the public eye till the finish. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop manufacturing constructed on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based mostly on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a transient Broadway run in 2003.) As not too long ago as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was nonetheless writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer.
In 2013, Mr. Bacharach started collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the tv author and producer Chuck Lorre on a stage musical based mostly on the “Painted From Memory” album but additionally together with new songs. That undertaking by no means got here to fruition, though a few of the new materials ended up on Mr. Costello’s latest albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” undertaking is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that additionally contains Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for launch subsequent month.
Looking again on his profession in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach instructed that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”
“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was additionally a performer, he famous, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”
“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.