The Burt Bacharach Discussion Forum

Although a few of the tracks from Tony Hatch's purely instrumental album from 1971 of a dozen Bacharach and David classics have featured on here from time to time over the years, I don't think it's been posted before in its entirety. The composer dubbed 'Britain's Burt Bacharach' by the music press in the 1960s for making the arrangement/orchestration an integral part of his songs (Downtown, Call Me, Where Are You Now, Colour My World, Don't Sleep In The Subway, I Couldn't Live Without Your Love, etc, etc) is particularly adept at writing for brass instruments and this is especially evident in his arrangements for Do You Know The Way To San Jose, This Guy's In Love, Walk On By and The Look Of Love. While I don't think that all the arrangements work as well as those with perhaps one or two that were less than inspired, it never ceases to be an interesting listen for the simple reason that it's not very often that you get to hear one major popular composer pay tribute to another in this way.

One of the numbers not on the album is Wives And Lovers and I have an LP by Tony Hatch from the mid-60s that includes his version of it with vocals by an all-male singing group. Listening to his jazzy arrangement that features solos for flugelhorn and tenor sax just makes me wish that he'd recorded a non-sung version for his Bacharach album.

I remember being very underwhelmed the first time I heard Tony Hatch's Bacharach album back in the 70s. I can't remember what exactly I was expecting but perhaps I was hoping that "Britain's Burt Bacharach" could have produced something a bit more adventurous and less bland and which contained more of his own stamp as an arranger in the orchestrations. Hearing it again fifty years later I do hear more of Hatch's stamp as an arranger on the album, particularly in his brilliant writing for brass, and I'm now much better disposed towards it.