Burt's Eighth Notes

The Look Of Love at BAM this week

Mark Morris Dance Group in The Look Of Love. Photo by Christopher Duggan.

Last week, I played The Look Of Love with the Mark Morris Dance Group in Tucson, AZ and Seattle, WA. The songs are by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the music is arranged by Ethan Iverson, and the choreography is by Mark Morris.

This week, we bring the piece to New York for the first time. Mark Morris Dance Group will be presenting The Look Of Love at BAM from Wednesday, March 20 to Saturday March 23. For those interested, tickets are still available, but I’m told they soon may not be.

The Look Of Love takes just over an hour to play, and is comprised of 14 classic Bacharach-David tunes. The band, with Ethan Iverson on piano, Simòn Willson on bass, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet (the great Nadje Noordhuis was subbing for Jonathan this week), myself on drums, Clinton Curtis and Blaire Reinhard Perrin on background vocals, and Marcy Harriell on lead vocals, got to another level recently. The score is really starting to cohere and sing out.

Mark and Ethan have been working on this music since before the pandemic, and The Look Of Love premiered in Santa Monica in 2022. I’ve had a lot of time to live with it, but it seems only now am I able to bring out the deeper possibilities of Bacharach’s music, Iverson’s arrangements, and Morris’s choreography. I’m starting to connect with the emotion of Bacharach’s rhythms.

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In the early Sixties, when the bossa nova traveled north from Brazil and entered the American bloodstream, it became a new way of projecting cool. Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “The Girl From Ipanema” with Brazilian innovator Milton Banana on drums, must be the track that sums up the moment. Here, the bossa isn’t just cool, it’s also sexy, glamorous, and fun.

The bossa nova pattern and its almost-straight eighth note quickly became a part of the toolkit of Black jazz musicians. What we now call a boogaloo is, in part, a bossa nova— see Billy Higgins on Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” from 1963. Ethan’s recent Substack post is a helpful look at the early blend of American jazz and Brazilian bossa nova.

A year before, Quincy Jones had composed “Soul Bossa Nova”, using the same accents that Higgins used on “The Sidewinder”, to communicate the essential Swinging Sixties feeling. Folks my age know “Soul Bossa Nova” as the theme song to Austin Powers, which shows just how successful Jones’s piece is at conjuring the era.

That slightly-swung bossa is the base for many of Bacharach’s most memorable, best-loved music— “I Say A Little Prayer”, “Always Something There To Remind Me”, “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”, others. But in his hands, that sensual and enchanting Brazilian beat is infused with longing, heartbreak, and bleak honesty.

To Burt Bacharach, the bossa nova is a beat of surface charm and sub rosa melancholy.

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The big technical challenge of playing The Look Of Love has been distilling the drama and power of Bacharach’s fully-orchestrated and meticulously arranged three-minute pop singles into arrangements for female vocalist and piano trio. Bacharach had a full studio orchestra for color and contrast, whereas we have only our fearless trumpeter and brilliant background singers.

On “Are You There (With Another Girl)”— see the YouTube link above— Bacharach’s rising and falling melody perfectly mirrors the mounting jealousy and paranoia of the singer; in the instrumental interlude (featuring tympani, strings and brass), it feels like her mania briefly gets the better of her. I believe the drummer on the original recording is Gary Chester.

This is masterful work— Chester is as precise as a classical player in the verses, but opens up and swings the band during the instrumental. His expertise is what ties all the elements of the track together, which, of course, is the drummer’s job. All respect to Gary Chester.

Bacharach’s arrangement has the drumset making frequent entrances and exits, perfectly mirroring the song’s story. But when I tried this with Mark and Ethan, it just didn’t work. My choice of emulating Gary Chester was simultaneously too complex (entrances and exits) and too simple (a copy of the record).

So what do I do?

Thankfully, there is no final answer— l change what I play at every performance, sometimes a lot, sometimes a tiny bit. It all depends on the sound of the room, the feel of the pit, the energy of the night, Marcy’s voice, and a million other factors.

Throughout the show, I have to play strong enough that everyone in the pit can hear the tempo and feel the song, but not too strong, since we don’t use amps or monitors. I could easily overwhelm voices and un-amplified bass and piano if I’m not careful.

Above all, the drums in The Look Of Love send out energy, spontaneity, and creativity, so that the band and the dancers, who are laser-focussed on every note we play, are inspired. If I’m stale and too predictable, everybody feels it. But if I vary too much, the identity of the song gets lost, and I’m just flailing, experimenting when I should be communicating.

It’s delicate, but last week, I was able to more consistently find a balance. Here’s what I discovered— it’s all about the eighth notes. I just focussed on those, and suddenly the songs revealed themselves as they never had. I’d cracked the code: just play the eighth notes and Bacharach will break your heart.

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There are the dancers and the choreography, there is the band and the arrangements, and there is the audience. But finally, there are the songs, which is what brought Mark Morris and Ethan Iverson to this project, what brings us all to the show. The Look of Love is, ultimately, all about the songs.

After playing the 14 songs in The Look Of Love for a week, everything starts looking and sounding different. For all their Sixties sunniness and AM radio sheen, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s tunes plumb the depths of human loneliness and report what they find. How can music be simultaneously joyful and sad? How did music this complex become so popular, and how do the songs camouflage their complexity so artfully? How much other music on this level is hiding in plain sight? What’s it all about, Alfie?