🎵 AotW Burt Bacharach and The Houston Symphony: Woman (A&M SP-3709)

Burt Bacharach and The Houston Symphony
Woman

A&M SP-3709
Released 1979

Japan CD: UICY-75218, POCM-2056


Track list:

S I D E • O N E

Summer of '77
Woman
Riverboat - (vocal: Libby Titus)
Magdalena

S I D E • T W O

New York Lady
There Is Time - (vocal: Sally Stevens)
The Dancing Fool
I Live In The Woods - (vocal: Carly Simon)

The music for this album was recorded live in one four-hour session November 2, 1978 at Jones Hall, Houston, Texas

Burt Bacharach And The Houston Symphony Orchestra - Woman

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The complete album:

 

[Harry]

As I was listening to this album, I looked it up here and found no AOTW thread for this one. Is it because we haven't done the 37xx series?

Anyway, here it is. It's an interesting album that requires one to not look for any hit material, but just to sit back and enjoy the sounds. From what I understand, Sally Stevens was also a vocalist on the "South American Getaway" track on the BUTCH CASSIDY soundtrack.

I have a promo copy of the LP, and digitally it's contained on the SOMETHING BIG box set.

 

[Bobberman]

I have New York lady on The 1987 Classics compilation and I always Enjoyed that track too bad it isn't available for download id purchase it

 

[Mike Blakesley]

It also came out as a Japanese CD release. I have a copy of it that way.

Some of the songs on this one are indispensible for me - my favorites are "New York Lady" and "There Is Time." The trumpet solos are outstanding on both songs.

Sally Stevens is indeed on "South American Getaway," and she is one of the trio of vocalists on the song "No One Remembers My Name" from the Futures album.

 

[Michael Hagerty]

This is a tough one. I like Burt, and I have no problem with big stretches toward more “important” music (see Claus Ogerman and Joe Jackson in my collection). But I’ve never been able to just put this one on and let it play.

When it came out, I was programming KOLO in Reno, and I added “I Live in the Woods” to see if Carly Simon was enough for the audience to embrace it. Nope.

 

[Harry]

No there's definitely no "hit" material here and the album needs to be taken on its own as a whole and as it is. It had been a long time ago that I'd listened to this one and I made a concerted effort yesterday to do the whole thing all at once.

 

[Harry]

I see though that "New York Lady" was released as a 12" single with its length shortened to 5:07 from the album's 6:28 length. It's this same shortened version that's on the CLASSICS. Comparing the two, there's an edit toward the end of the first section eliminating some repetition. Then the middle section with the heavy percussion is only played once in the short version, twice in the longer version. Then another repetitious section of the ending is chopped out for the short version before the ending.

 

[Rudy]

In his autobiography, Burt called this record an "expensive failure."

I've always liked it though, and found it via a promo LP copy not long after it was released. It's more like an extension of his original instrumental tracks like "And The People Were With Her" than anything else in his catalog.

As I was listening to this album, I looked it up here and found no AOTW thread for this one. Is it because we haven't done the 37xx series?

Yep. There are quite a few that never got featured as they were outside the 4000 series. I figure we'll get to them eventually.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

When I first saw this album I thought it was a traditional "live" album with an audience. I thought, why would Burt want to put an audience through a recording of unfamiliar new music? But, they sure were quiet during the recording! It was only later that I realized that the note just means it's a one-pass recording with no overdubs, not with an audience present. Given it was a four hour session, makes me wonder how many times they had to repeat certain songs!

Burt called this record an "expensive failure."

It's hard to imagine how he thought this would generate a lot of sales, considering classical-type recordings weren't his bag to begin with.

 

[Harry]

Looks like there was a push for "New York Lady" to maybe be a radio single, too. There's a really shortened version on the FOREPLAY #18 sampler coming in at 3:27.

 

[Rudy]

It's hard to imagine how he thought this would generate a lot of sales, considering classical-type recordings weren't his bag to begin with.

I had the feeling in the bio that he felt it was a failure from a creative standpoint. That it likely didn't sell very well probably reinforced that feeling.

I wouldn't really call it classical, as it's more like a complex version of instrumental pop. It does use a symphony, but also adds some instruments like a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboards, etc. I've never heard any of his work this densely orchestrated before either--there is a lot going on in these arrangements. And aside from "There Is Time" (where Sally Stevens adds a few lines), I am not at all fond of either of the other two vocal tracks on the album...or maybe I can say I enjoy the songs more once the singing stops.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

That's a good description - complex instrumental pop. I guess the word "symphony orchestra" on the cover sort of gives it the vibe that it's going to be a classical (or at least, classical-influenced) record. But yeah, I'm with you on the vocals. I had high hopes for the Carly Simon track because I like her singing generally, but that one's kind of a snoozer.

 

[Rudy]

I agree--I'm not really a big fan of her singing anyway, and that song just kind of lays there. If it were transposed to a different key and a different vocalist sang it (like Sally Stevens, who was identified with other Bacharach recordings in the past), it might have worked better. Carly's voice is just too similar to the rest of the arrangement and doesn't project outward like it should.

I do remember that Stereo Review, at the time, gave it a really good review. I don't know if it was a Record of the Month but they did praise the album and its adventurousness. Wish I still had those magazines as I'd repost the review here.

 

[Rudy]

Holy cheese curds, I found the review online. Seeing this magazine brings back a lot of memories.

STEREO REVIEW: Consumer audio and music magazine beginning in 1958

Stereo Review was an American magazine first published in 1958 by Ziff-Davis with the title HiFi and Music Review. It was one of a small group of magazines then available for the individual interested in high fidelity (the other major ones being Audio and High Fidelity) It featured a blend of...

worldradiohistory.com

September 1979 issue. Page 87 in the magazine; page 89 in your PDF reader.

I've copied it here and fixed a couple of scanning/rendering errors.

---

Burt Bacharach Demonstrates How It Should Be Done​

BURT BACHARACH'S new "Woman" on A&M is, like Alice B. Toklas' famed hashish fudge, an altogether different kind of candy. It will, I think, satisfy your musical sweet tooth immediately (and be assured that I do not take that simple function lightly), but it also packs a residual wallop or two that you might not have expected. It's a happy change for Bacharach, whose albums for the last several years have been saccharine-dipped, flavorless bonbons of interest mainly to those beady-eyed, sweaty-palmed adolescents who pester Playboy for make-out advice.

It has, in short, been pretty gooey going lately for a man of Bacharach's usually dependable creative gifts and invariably polished craft. "Woman," however, restores him to the place he earned several years ago with his unforgettably kinetic, high -velocity score for Broadway's Promises, Promises (from which several enduring pop standards have already emerged) and such instant pop classics as Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head. That place is a kind of pop Parnassus, the veritable hilltop of the mainstream musical Establishment. And "Woman" finds Bacharach keeping appropriately celestial company there-the Houston Symphony, singers Libby Titus and Carly Simon, plus a whole retinue of first-string instrumentalists. Not surprisingly, he makes the most of it.

Bacharach's big instrumental numbers here-New York Lady, Summer of '77, Woman, and Magdalena-are all large-scale, unabashedly emotional, romantic compositions in the symphonic-pop mode. When they work, they do so with the openhearted, unselfconscious generosity of a wide-screen, Technicolor sunset. And this kind of opulent scoring is no mere lily gilding; it takes real music to make the effect properly; think of the many dazzling symphonic arrangements of Gershwin-and check out your pulse rate during the opening sequences of Woody Alien's otherwise dour little comedy Manhattan for a recent brilliant example.

That same rush of elation ran through me as I listened to this album. Bacharach's work, the intrinsic quality of the music itself quite aside, simply gleams with confident, authoritative professionalism-the manner, the handling, the execution of absolutely every part under perfect control, the whole proudly signed with the flourish of a master craftsman. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the instrumentals of this unflaggingly glamorous album. It isn't the bombastic kind of glamour you get from a Star Wars soundtrack, or the sentimental, teary-eyed kind found in an oldie such as Gordon Jenkins' Manhattan Tower. This is as fresh, crisp, and contemporary, as pleasantly startling as unexpectedly running into, say, Faye Dunaway as she makes a striding, head-up entrance into the lobby of the Plaza.

And while we're on the subject of Good Looking Entrances, Libby Titus makes one here to take a lazy, sinuous trip on her Riverboat (she wrote it with Bacharach), and she sounds just about perfectly at home. But it is Carly Simon, with her performance of I Live in the Woods (which she wrote with Titus and Bacharach), who nearly walks away with the whole shining album. It is one of those songs that simply nail you to your seat, so gorgeously done that you recognize it immediately as state-of-the-art mainstream pop both in the writing and in the performance, the kind of nobody-else-can-do-it musical proficiency that this country used to be rightly famous for.

Have we finally gotten over our taste for fast-food music, for the clumsy, half-finished ineptitude we have for close to two decades put up with in the name of "sincerity"? I don't know about you, but this member of the audience wants no more do-it-yourself songkits that I have to sort out and assemble myself. Give me more of the taste and the high-polish skills that have been lavished on this album from the first groove onward. Let's rescue Burt Bacharach from those mark-time TV vermouth commercials and put him back to work at his big-time song smithy, showing the journeymen and the apprentices how it really should be done.

--Peter Reilly​

BURT BACHARACH: Woman. Carly Simon, Libby Titus (vocals); Houston Symphony Orchestra, Burt Bacharach arr. and cond. New York Lady; There Is Time; The Dancing Fool; I Live in the Woods; Summer of '77; Woman; Riverboat; Magdalena. A&M SP 3709 $7.98, ⑧ 8T 3709 $7.98, © CS 3709 $7.98.