{"id":71823,"date":"2023-02-10T08:27:59","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T13:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=71823"},"modified":"2023-02-10T08:27:59","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T13:27:59","slug":"burt-bacharach-sophisticated-jewish-hitmaker-of-the-60s-and-70s-dies-at-94","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/burt-bacharach-sophisticated-jewish-hitmaker-of-the-60s-and-70s-dies-at-94\/","title":{"rendered":"Burt Bacharach, sophisticated Jewish hitmaker of the \u201960s and \u201970s, dies at 94"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL<\/p>\n<p>(JTA) \u2014 Songwriter Burt Bacharach,&nbsp; who with his longtime lyricist Hal David turned out a&nbsp; string of hits in the 1960s and \u201970s \u2014 including \u201cAlfie\u201d and \u201cRaindrops Keep Fallin\u2019 On My Head\u201d \u2014 died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_71824\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-scaled.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-71824\" class=\"wp-image-71824 size-medium lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-300x204.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"204\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-300x204.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-1024x695.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-768x521.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-1536x1043.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-2048x1390.jpg 2048w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/204;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-71824\" class=\"wp-image-71824 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-300x204.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"204\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-300x204.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-1024x695.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-768x521.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-1536x1043.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/02-09-2023-Bacharach-David-2048x1390.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-71824\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Composer Burt Bacharach (left) and lyricist Hal David hold Oscars they won for &#8220;Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head&#8221; at the Academy Awards, April 7, 1970. (Bettmann\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Bacharach and David, both Jewish New Yorkers, also wrote a host of songs that made Dionne Warwick a megastar, such as \u201cWalk on By,\u201d \u201cDo You Know the Way to San Jose\u201d and \u201cI Say a Little Prayer.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The duo came to fame while working in the Brill Building \u2014 a Midtown Manhattan mecca for music publishing that housed a slew of Jewish songwriters, including the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But unlike their peers, who wrote for the burgeoning teen market, their songs were marked by a certain elegance and romance that drew more on the Great American Songbook and Broadway than rock \u2018n\u2019 roll.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Fittingly, the pair collaborated with Broadway producer David Merrick on the 1968 musical \u201cPromises, Promises,\u201d which yielded two hits, including the title tune and \u201cI\u2019ll Never Fall in Love Again.\u201d That show too had a strong Jewish pedigree: The book by the legendary playwright Neil Simon was based on the 1960 film \u201cThe Apartment,\u201d written by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond.<\/p>\n<p>Bacharach grew up in Forest Hills, Queens; his father was a journalist and his mother an amateur musician. He recalled in his 2013 autobiography, \u201cAnyone Who Had a Heart,\u201d written with Robert Greenfield, that \u201cno one in my family ever went to synagogue or paid much attention to being Jewish.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>And yet Jonathan Freedman, author of \u201cKlezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity,\u201d told the New York Jewish Week in 2013 that what made Bacharach\u2019s music Jewish was his \u201cwild play with time signatures; he is to time signatures what [George] Gershwin is to chord changes.\u201d He called Bacharach \u201creally audacious and experimental,\u201d an example of what he sees Jewish artists doing as they \u201center popular forms and make them their own.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bacharach was also the first composer to be featured in the experimental jazz musician John Zorn\u2019s late-1990s \u201cGreat Jewish Music\u201d series; in the CD\u2019s jacket notes, Zorn thanks him for not changing his name and points out that Bacharach is \u201cone of the great geniuses of American popular music \u2014 and he\u2019s a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the 1970s Bacharach split with David and Warwick and entered into a new collaboration \u2013 and third of four marriages \u2013 with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, another Jewish New Yorker. Their best-known song was the AIDS fund-raising anthem \u201cThat\u2019s What Friends Are For.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Bacharach remained busy nearly to the end of his life, with his later activity including collaborations with the rock star Elvis Costello. He won seven Grammy awards in all, the latest in 2006 for his pop instrumental album \u201cAt This Time.\u201d In 1983, at the height of the British \u201cNew Wave\u201d in rock, a synth-pop version of the then 20-year-old Bacharach-David song \u201c(There\u2019s) Always Something There to Remind Me\u201d by Naked Eyes climbed into the Billboard Top Ten.<\/p>\n<p>Bacharach would eventually reunite with Warwick and with David. In 2012, 40 years after they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and shortly before David died at age 91, Bacharach and David received the Library of Congress\u2019 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song \u2014 named for the Jewish composer to whom Bacharach had long been compared.<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" \/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"Email\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Burt%20Bacharach%2C%20sophisticated%20Jewish%20hitmaker%20of%20the%20%E2%80%9960s%20and%20%E2%80%9970s%2C%20dies%20at%2094\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":71824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,19],"tags":[12890,8790,8795,8788],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71825,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71823\/revisions\/71825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}