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Section: Arts & Letters
Don’t Stand So Close to Burt
By Wendell Wild
Before his image was rehabilitated by the likes of Elvis Costello and Bill Frizzell, passing yourself off as a serious music fan if you happened to have a taste for Burt Bacharach was a little risky. The creator with lyricist Hal David of numerous top-forty hits by artists like Jackie DeShannon, Tom Jones and, of course, Dionne Warwick during the 1960’s and 70’s, Bacharach was, depending on whom you believed, either a turtleneck-wearing lightweight with an ear for unconventional chord changes, or one of the most inventive pop composers of his era. Part of the difficulty of knowing what to make of his music, however, has been figuring out just what era that is.
Bacharach was already playing piano in Kansas City dance bands as a teenager by the time he moved to New York to study music theory and composition with Darius Milhaud at the New School for Social Research. Discharged from the Army in 1952, he worked as accompanist and arranger for Steve Lawrence and Vic Damone before turning to songwriting, developing his craft as part of the Brill Building school where his first hit, “The Story of My Life”, was for the country artist Marty Robbins. But it is jazz that Bacharach has always identified as his first love, and he’s often cited the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who during bebop’s heyday he used to sneak into clubs to watch, as major influences on his own work.
It’s curious, then, that over the years it is to jazz that his music has translated least successfully. Versions of Bacharach’s work by artists like the Jazz Crusaders, Stanley Turrrentine, Nancy Wilson and, most recently, the Swedish vocalist Rigmor Gustafsson on her album Close To You, have resulted in music that does justice neither to the compositions nor the performers.
This is partly due to the fact that as primarily a singles artist Bacharach’s songs are so identified with the original recordings and artists that they are virtually uncoverable by anyone else. But it’s also about a fundamental difference between jazz and pop, particularly Bacharach’s brand of pop, historically squeezed in as it is between the generations of standards and rock. Contrasted with the songs of, say, Porter or Berlin—melodically and harmonically discursive, slow to unfold, lending themselves to the kind of exploration jazz is based on—a typical Bacharach song, with its choppy and truncated melodic lines and hyperactive rhythm changes, provides little footing for improvisation. The songs are by design so self-contained—so finished, in the manner of all radio-friendly pop—that all it really makes sense to do with them is what’s already been done, resulting in the unanticipated state of affairs where you’d rather hear Dionne Warwick singing them than, say, Sarah Vaughan.
Neither of whom Gustafsson is, by the way. Nor is she Astrud Gilberto, the singer to whom she’s frequently compared. Whereas Gilberto—who on her ethereally infectious recordings with Stan Getz helped create the market for suburban-hip which Bacharach tapped into—made a virtue of her unprepossessing vocal gifts, Gustafsson, who’s actually a better singer, hasn’t a clue how to make herself sound interesting. And the arrangements by the Jacky Terrasson Trio, featuring Terrason’s Herbie Hancock-like (or lite) solos, do little to make things better. In the liner notes Gustafsson describes Close To You as a humble tribute to the music of Bacharach and Warwick, when all it actually is is unecessary, and about the last thing either Bacharach or Warwick need for their surprisingly enduring music to be taken seriously.
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