Word: bacharachs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reputation. But with the music's more ambitious players looking for ways to broaden jazz's sonic palette after a decade dominated by neotraditionalism, strings are back (the hipster vogue for lounge music probably hasn't hurt). The boomlet began with last year's McCoy Tyner recording of Burt Bacharach tunes--an appropriate enough context--and continues with new albums by Wynton Marsalis and the 29-year-old Puerto Rican-born tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, both on Columbia. Marsalis' record, The Midnight Blues: Standard Time Vol. 5, is his first standards album since 1991 (despite the title, it's only...
...series also testifies to the stream of musical performers who haven't heard the form is dead. Why isn't there a new show each year for Martin Short, who wowed Encores! audiences in Burt Bacharach's Promises, Promises? Occasionally a supreme thrush like Judy Kuhn, Judy Kaye, Rebecca Luker, Faith Prince, Debbie Gravitte or Kristin Chenoweth gets a cushy job on Broadway, but few new shows give these beguilers a chance to wrap their pipes around classic pop. Encores! does (though it pays just $700 a week for stars and chorus boys alike). "I love the concept," says Williams...
Both because of and despite such associations, Bacharach, 69, is currently enjoying greater popularity than at any other time since his heyday in the 1960s and early '70s, when, working against the rock grain, he was responsible for dozens of Top 40 hits, including surprisingly nuanced adult-oriented love songs for performers like Gene Pitney, Dusty Springfield and, his greatest vessel of all, Dionne Warwick. The current renaissance--Bacharach's last big hit was 1985's That's What Friends Are For--began a few years ago, with the explosion of interest in so-called lounge music, especially in Britain...
...fact, Hollywood has been Bacharach's biggest promoter. The songwriter serves as a veritable totem of retro-cool in Mike Meyer's Austin Powers, in which Bacharach does a cameo singing behind a candelabraed piano that sits atop a Las Vegas tourist bus. His music is featured even more prominently--even if he isn't--in the Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding, providing for a younger generation the same kind of romantic charge, simultaneously nostalgic and bracingly fresh, that George Gershwin gave when he was rediscovered by the disco generation two decades ago in Woody Allen...
Unlike Gershwin, Bacharach, perhaps because he worked in pop-rock and pop-soul idioms, has not been taken seriously by devotees of the Great American Songbook. But Tyner's album, along with another new CD (Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach) produced by avant-garde composer and klezmer enthusiast John Zorn and featuring a number of musicians with jazz leanings from New York's Downtown school, makes the case that Bacharach's melodies are worthy of being standards. Tyner says he's "shocked" that more jazz musicians haven't taken them...