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Burt Bacharach, 1928-2003
That Fatal Mailing List #92
There’s not a lot of creative giants left who you could say have done truly unimpeachable work–that is to say, work that has withstood the test of time, endured the changing vagaries of fashion, and remained just as indelible as it was the day it was made.
Burt Bacharach is one of those giants, who passed away today at the age of 94 but leaves behind a body of work full of songs that robots will be humming under their computerized breath ten thouand years from now when we’re all long gone from this planet. Via the BBC’s reporting on his death:
It was a style inspired by his tutor, French jazz musician Darius Milhaud.
"His observation was: Never be ashamed of something that's melodic, one could whistle," Bacharach recalled, having met the composer while studying at California's Music Academy of the West in the 1940s.
"So that was a valuable lesson I learned from him. Never forgot that one. Never be afraid of something that you can whistle."
Because Bacharach’s greatest gift was melody, his songs will never really fall from fashion. You can hear them in their original 1960s incarnation, urbane and sophisticated arrangements; you can hear them covered by soul artists, country artists; they can be sucked into whatever production fad is the order of the day, from 80s synths to 2020s AI-generated bleeps and bloops.
EC is scheduled to open his ten-night residency at New York’s Gramercy Theater tonight; it’s likely this will influence the set list somewhat. I can only imagine how hard it must be to lose such a close creative collaborator. Of course, their 1998 album Painted From Memory is scheduled to be re-released in March as part of a box set, The Songs of Bacharach and Costello, which also includes live cuts and unreleased collaboration between the two.
Rest in peace, Burt; at 94 years old, it was a long life well-lived.
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