Popular musician and composer Burt Bacharach in recording studio - 1975. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd. Burt Freeman Bacharach (12, 1928 – February 8, 2023) was an American composer, songwriter, record producer, and pianist who is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential figures of 20th-century popular music. Starting in the 1950s, he composed hundreds of pop songs, many in collaboration with lyricist Hal David. Bacharach's music is characterized by unusual chord progressions and time signature changes, influenced by his background in jazz.
Bacharach's music is characterized by unusual chord progressions, influenced by jazz harmony, with striking syncopated rhythmic patterns, irregular phrasing, frequent modulation, and odd, changing meters. He arranged, conducted, and produced much of his recorded output.[109] Though his style is sometimes called easy listening, he expressed apprehension regarding that label, as some of his frequent collaborators did. According to contributor Mark Voger, "It may be easy on the ears, but it's anything but easy. The precise arrangements, the on-a-dime shifts in meter, and the mouthfuls of lyrics required to service all those notes have, over the years, proven challenging to singers and musicians." Bacharach's selection of instruments included flugelhorns, bossa nova sidesticks, breezy flutes, tack piano, molto fortissimo strings, and cooing female voices.[108] According to editors of The Mojo Collection, it led to what became known as the "Bacharach Sound". Bacharach explained: I didn't want to make the songs the same way as they'd been done, so I'd split vocals and instrumentals and try to make it interesting ... For me, it's about the peaks and valleys of where a record can take you. You can tell a story and be able to be explosive one minute, then get quiet as kind of a satisfying resolution. While he did not mind singing during live performances, he sought mostly to avoid it on records. When he did sing, he explains, "I [tried] to sing the songs not as a singer, but just interpreting it as a composer and interpreting a great lyric that Hal [David] wrote."When performing in front of live audiences, he often conducted while playing piano, as he did during a televised performance on The Hollywood Palace.[
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Keywords: 20th-century, artist, bacharach, burt, composer, conduct, conducts, david, gold, hal, music, musician, orchestra, pianist, platinum, popular, producer, record, recording, session, singer, song, songwriter, studio
