Burt Bacharach died Wednesday at the age of 94, and while the deaths of popular artists usually occasion some accounting of their contributions, his contribution to popular music was incalculable. But by the numbers, he worked with well over a thousand artists ranging from Dionne Warwick to Elvis Costello, had 73 top 40 hits, and received three Academy Awards for his movie themes, which included “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “Arthur’s Theme.” He won six Grammys, which like every preceding metric, seems like an insufficient number given his overwhelming talent and how much of a fixture he was in popular music for so long.
Born in 1928, he was raised in New York, where his father was a former pro football player turned syndicated columnist and his mother was an amateur musician and painter. As a teenager, Bacharach was famous for sneaking into New York’s jazz clubs in the 1940s where he saw many now-legendary but then up-and-coming jazz greats. It would probably be impossible to overstate this as a formative experience, as his career was defined by his ability to bring jazz harmony into the otherwise limiting confines of the three-minute pop song.
After high school, Bacharach served in the Army where he began performing and arranging for dance bands. It was also in the Army where he first met and worked with Vic Damone, the crooner frequently compared to Frank Sinatra who would go on to have a modestly successful career. In 1956, Bacharach got
