Allyson Briggs‘Promises, Prayers, and Raindrops: Allyson Briggs Sings Burt Bacharach’Algos MusicMy favorite “kiss-this-guy” moment — involving a misheard lyric that was so far off the mark it was actually funny — was with a friend of mine who somehow thought that Burt Bacharach and Hal David had written a song titled, “Do You Know the Way to Sanity?” Thankfully, Allyson Briggs, who opens her intriguing new album with that 1968 classic, sings it clearly and convincingly enough that no one could fail to recognize the proper title, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”Bacharach, who died last year at the age of 94, consistently said that his first influence had been a jazz great, Dizzy Gillespie. This makes sense, as the young pianist and aspiring composer came of age at the same moment as the Bebop Revolution. Yet at the pinnacle of his influence 20 years later, a better comparison might have been with Thelonious Monk. Like Monk — and unlike most writers of the great jazz standards and American Songbook — Bacharach’s tunes are rather specific as to what can and can’t be done with them. As I once said of Monk’s work, Bacharach’s compositions come with their own instruction manual.For her Bacharach songbook album, the singer and bandleader taps into an important aspect of the late Maestro’s oeuvre. During the mid- to late ’60s, when Bacharach and his longtime lyricist David had hits by various artists on the chart at least every month if not every week, he was interacting with two other unique pop music auteurs, in Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes. The three of them shared some fascinating ideas, particularly in terms of new uses for the human voice in contemporary pop. Granted that Mr. Alpert’s Tijuana Brass was primarily instrumental, but Bacharach and Mr. Mendes made a point of using voices in an instrumental way. Mr. Mendes’s band, Brasil ’66, had two superb female vocalists who were not presented as singers in the traditional sense, but who blended into the rest of the band in a way that Bacharach and David were already doing with their own productions. By the time that Bacharach and David created their classic Broadway musical “Promises, Promises,” in 1969, they were even incorporating vocalists into the orchestra — a trick that Stephen Sondheim picked up in “Company” (1970).Following those precedents, “Promises, Prayers, and Raindrops” is more about the band than the singer herself. Ms. Briggs launched the album at Birdland recently with her group, Fleur Seule, which specializes in what she calls “retro jazz” with an international flair. Both in live performance and on the album, Ms. Briggs embraces the surface-y side of Bacharach, more Dionne Warwick than Aretha Franklin, more Andy Williams than Tony Bennett. The voice is blended carefully into the mix of the group, which is testament to the lyric-writing brilliance of the late David, in that his words and ideas could be communicated or understood even when the vocals weren’t performed, recorded, or mixed in a traditional way. Ms. Briggs shows that you don’t even necessarily need the English language to get Bacharach and David’s point. One major highlight is a duet with a theater singer, Julie Benko; together, they recreate the team’s 1969 Oscar-winning song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” as translated into Yiddish and into the girl-girl harmony idiom by the Barry Sisters. It’s now known as “Trop’ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop,” and the meaning is no less apparent even as it leans heavily into the legendary charm of Minnie and Clara Bagelman as channeled by Ms. Briggs and Ms. Benko.The album mostly includes the usual suspects, Bacharach and David’s biggest hits and most famous tunes, like “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “The Look of Love,” and “Walk On By,” but there are a few ringers. Among the latter are some numbers with lyrics by others from before and after the glory years of Burt and Hal, such as one early slice of Bacharachiana in the 1957 “Uninvited Dream,” which served as a single for Peggy Lee. “Wenn Ich Mir Was Wünschen Dürfte” commemorates Bacharach’s personal and professional relationship with Marlene Dietrich, and was actually written by her most famous earlier musical director, Friedrich Hollaender. Also welcome are what might be the composer’s two biggest post-1970 hits, “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” and “That’s What Friends Are For,” both with texts by Carole Bayer-Sager, his then-wife. Ms. Briggs and Fleur Seule most agreeably bring them into the sonic universe of late ’60s Bacharach-David. It’s evident that her surface-y approach doesn’t work as well on a profoundly poetic text like “Alife,” but at Birdland at least she compensated with a “bonus” track, “Windows on the World.” This 1967 number might be considered a protest song, with lines like, “Ev’rybody knows when boys grow into men / They start to wonder when their country will call.” Ms. Briggs announced that this might be the start of a second Bacharach project. In her album notes, she tells us, “I have never met a person who could sit still listening to Burt Bacharach!” Speaking personally, I could add that I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t feel better about everything this world has to offer after listening to Bacharach and David. Their music is what the world needs now.
