With his crystal-clear melodies, Burt Bacharach, who died Feb. 8 in Los Angeles at the age of 94, was one of the most divisive composers in popular music. For his critics, often rock’n’roll fundamentalists, his name is associated with easy listening, which refers to the music of international hotel elevators and lobbies. Inappropriate expression, moreover, for Bacharach, because his production, certainly “easy” and pleasing to the ear, is of a rare complexity. For his admirers, he will remain as a pop genius, especially in the country where this American was a prophet: the United Kingdom.
Five essential titles
There is a third category, those who simply don’t know who he was. Five titles will suffice to identify it, their tune immediately coming to the mind of the reader: Don’t Make Me Over, Walk On By, I Say a Little Prayer, Anyone Who Had a Heart et Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. This great couturier, born on May 12, 1928, wore his models badly. Euterpe had endowed him with all the gifts except singing. His voice being impossible and out of tune, he turned to performers, his preference being for women, chief among them Dionne Warwick.
” And I could write a song half as good as ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, I’d die happy”, Noel Gallagher, Oasis
The adulation or rejection of which he was the object changed radically over time: his songs, which accompanied the carefree hedonism of sixties, passed for the height of old-fashionedness with the punk generation, with the notable exception of the Stranglers, who in 1978 delivered a version of Walk on By like the Doors. Tanned all year round under his tuxedo, irritating with his eternal smile of sparkling whiteness, this Gatsby became a parental vestige, before benefiting from a spectacular rehabilitation in the 1990s. His portrait thus reappeared on the cover of Definitely Maybe (1994), the debut album by Oasis, whose frontman Noel Gallagher said: “If I could write a song half as good as ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart”, I would die happy. »
A tear of melancholy
A song only among more than 500 left by Bacharach. As with the greatest composers, his mark is immediately recognizable: light melodies like champagne bubbles, always with a tear of melancholy, subtle harmonic progressions in diminished seventh and ninth chords, stunning changes of keys and meters . Insensitive to the fury of rock’n’roll, Bacharach acts under the influence of jazz, bossa-nova and its percussion. His orchestrations generally include a conducting piano, silky or emphatic strings, swaying brass, without forgetting his signature, the gimmick of trumpet, or more precisely of flugelhorn. Sometimes replaced by an offhand whistle, hands in pockets. An air of Bacharach must be whistled in the shower.
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