Burt Bacharach, a uniquely talented and well-known composer who charmed millions with the unique arrangements and enduring melodies of “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and dozens of other songs, has passed away at the age of 94.
What was the Burt Bacharach Death Cause? How he died?
The Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award-winning Burt Bacharach passed away on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home from natural causes.
Only Lennon-McCartney, Carole King, and a select few others have come close to matching his ability for writing instantly memorable songs that continue to be played, sung, and hummed decades after they were created. This is true throughout the past 70 years. From the 1950s to the 2000s, he had a string of top 10 successes, and his songs—whether “Alfie” and “I Say a Little Prayer” or “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “This Guy’s in Love with You“—could be heard on radios, movie soundtracks, home stereo systems, and iPods.
Dionne Warwick was his favorite performer, but Bacharach also wrote excellent songs for a wide range of other artists, frequently working with lyricist Hal David. Numerous musicians, including Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra, have covered his songs. More contemporary artists who have done so include White Stripes, Twista, and Ashanti. Everyone from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to the British punk band the Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper covered the song “Walk On By” alone.
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Bacharach’s career seems to parallel the rock period while yet being both innovative and retro. He had little interest in rock music when he was first starting out in the 1950s because he had grown up listening to jazz and classical music. Although his appeal frequently seemed to be more in line with Tin Pan Alley than with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and other later-emerging artists, rock composers valued the depth of his apparent retro sensibility.
In a 2018 interview with The Associated Press, who collaborated with Bacharach on the 1998 album “Painted from Memory,” said of Bacharach, “The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening.” These tunes may be enjoyable to listen to, but they are everything but simple. Try giving them a go. Consider singing them.
The Songs of Bacharach & Costello, a box set, will be released on March 3.
He excelled in a variety of artistic mediums and even on the racetrack.
He was a three-time Oscar winner, an eight-time Grammy winner, and a prize-winning Broadway composer for “Promises, Promises.” For the music to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and for the song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” he won two Academy Awards in 1970. (shared with David). He and his then-wife, Carole Bayer Sager, who wrote the song “Best That You Can Do,” received the award in 1982 for it. His other film soundtracks includes the 1967 James Bond parody “Casino Royale,” “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “Alfie.”
Bacharach received good pay and had many connections. Whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican, he frequently visited the White House. And in 2012, Barack Obama, who had performed a little segment of “Walk on By” at a campaign appearance, gave him the Gershwin Prize.
He was unique in both his life and his music. Sammy Cahn, a fellow songwriter, used to quip that Burt Bacharach was the first songwriter he had ever met who didn’t have dentist’s teeth. Bacharach was a “swinger,” as such men were known in his era. Among his numerous relationships were marriages to actress Angie Dickinson from 1965 to 1980 and Sager from 1982 to 1991.
He was married four times and developed his strongest bonds at work. He spent three weeks crafting “Alfie” and could spend hours fine-tuning a single chord since he was a perfectionist. Sager reportedly remarked that while Bacharach’s women changed, his daily activities remained largely same.
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It started with the melodies, which were powerful but also punctuated by shifting rhythms and unexpected harmonics. He attributed much of his personal style to his love of bebop and his classical background, particularly the guidance of renowned composer Darius Milhaud. When 12-point atonal music was popular at the time, he once performed a composition for piano, violin, and oboe for Milhaud that had a tune he felt embarrassed to have created. Never be terrified of the melody, Milhaud told the young guy after hearing the work.
Bacharach remembered that as a “wonderful affirmation for me” in 2004.
Although Bacharach was primarily a pop songwriter, his songs were successful for a variety of musical genres, including country (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross), and synth-pop (Naked Eyes). In the 1990s, with the aid of Costello and others, he attracted a new generation of listeners.
Mike Myers recalled hearing Bacharach’s seductive “The Look of Love” on the radio and being instantly inspired to write his throwback spy comedies “Austin Powers,” which featured Bacharach appearances.
He continued to break new ground in the twenty-first century by co-writing the lyrics and recording with the rapper Dr. Dre.
From 1953 to 1958, he was wed to his first wife, Paula Stewart. In 1993, he wed Jane Hansen for the fourth time. His children Oliver, Raleigh, and Cristopher, as well as Hansen, are still alive, according to Brausam. His daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach, died before him.
While growing up, Bacharach recalled himself as a loner, a small, self-conscious youngster who was so unhappy with being Jewish that he even teased other Jews. Bacharach knew the very pinnacles of fame. He identified with the sexually impotent Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” as a child because he considered himself to be “socially impotent.”
Despite having his birth in Kansas City, Missouri, he immediately relocated to New York City. His mother, a pianist, urged the youngster to pursue music studies. His father was a syndicated journalist. Even though he preferred sports, he practiced the piano every day after school because he didn’t want to let his mother down. He would sneak into jazz clubs as a minor with a phony ID to hear legends like Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie.
In his 2013 memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” he recalls, “They were just so immensely amazing that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before.” The sounds I heard in those clubs made me turn around.
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Despite his dismal academic performance, he was able to enroll in McGill University’s music conservatory in Montreal. At McGill, he composed his first song and spent months listening to Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song.” Bacharach’s life might have also been saved by music. He was still serving in the Army during the Korean War after being recruited into it in the late 1940s. But as soon as they discovered his talents, American police wanted him around. When he eventually traveled abroad, it was to Germany, where he composed orchestrations for a relaxation center on a nearby military base.
He went back to New York after being released from the military and tried to make it in the music industry. Although he initially had little success as a songwriter, he rose to fame as an arranger and accompanist, traveling with Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers, and Stewart, who would become his future first wife. He requested Bacharach to fill in for a friend who had been travelling with Marlene Dietrich when she was unable to attend a performance in Las Vegas.
The young musician and ageless singer hit it off right away, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bacharach traversed the world with her. She would formally introduce him to the audience before each performance, saying, “I would like you to meet the man, he’s my arranger, accompanist, conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer. However, that is untrue. Burt Bacharach is the composer that everyone loves!
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David, who was as businesslike as Bacharach was erratic and so domesticated that he would leave each night at 5 to take the train back to his Long Island family, was the ideal composer partner he had found in the meanwhile. They created their first million-seller, “Magic Moments,” sung by Perry Como in 1958, while working in a cramped office in Broadway’s renowned Brill Building. They discovered Warwick, a Drifters backing singer, in 1962. According to Bacharach, Warwick possessed a “really unusual kind of grace and beauty.”
The trio consistently turned out hits. The tunes were difficult to record yet simple to listen to. Bacharach enjoyed experimenting with time signatures and musical arrangements. For example, in the song “Walk on By,” he had two pianists play, their performances slightly out of time to give the song “a jagged kind of vibe.”
The disastrous failure of a musical adaptation of “Lost Horizon” in 1973 marked the breakup of the Bacharach-David duo. Bacharach’s depression led him to isolate himself at his holiday home in Del Mar and stop working.
He told the AP in 2004 that he “didn’t want to write with Hal or anybody.” Also he didn’t want to record Warwick as promised. He was sued by both her and David.
Burt’s transition resembles the death of a family member. In a statement released on Thursday, Warwick said: “These words I’ve been requested to write are being penned with sadness over the passing of my Dear Friend and my Musical Partner. On a lighter note, despite our disagreements and frequent laughter, we always managed to communicate that our shared familial roots were the most significant aspect of our connection.
David and Bacharach eventually made amends. Bacharach commended David for composing lyrics “like a tiny movie” before his death in 2012.
Bacharach continued to work in the meanwhile, pledging never to retire and always thinking that a good song could change the world.
In 2018, he told the AP that “music soothes the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before.” If you’re able to accomplish it and have it in your heart to do something like that, it’s a very powerful thing.
