Burt Bacharach, the popular Oscar-winning composer of songs like Say A Little Prayer, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head and many other hit songs has died at his home in Los Angeles.
A spokesman announced it.
Bacharach was 94 years old and in his very long career he had won six Grammys and three Oscars.
Considered 'the king of easy listening' in the 1960s, fans felt his music was anything but 'easy' due to his use of complex harmonies, meters, rhythms and melodies, partly inspired by symphony composers of the late of the nineteenth century and to jazz.
Bacharach had composed over half a thousand songs for a thousand artists in a career that began in the 1950s when, likened to American musical greats like George Gershwin and Cole Porter, he worked with Marlene Dietrich and then formed a professional partnership with the lyricist Hal David in 1957.
It was when Bacharach and David met Dionne Warwick in 1961 that their talents took flight with 39 of the singer's chart hits written by the pair.
Bacharach continued to enjoy success for multiple generations of fans thanks to the resurgence of lounge music in the 1990s.
In 1997 he had recreated a new version of I'll Never Fall in Love Again by ironically playing himself in the film Austin Powers by Mike Myers.
More recently he had collaborated with stars as diverse as Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello and Dr Dre, proof that his music had never gone out of style.
Bacharach came from the heart of America: born in Kansas City (Missoury) in 1928, he grew up in New York and still a minor, he sneaked into jazz clubs to listen to Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, studying the music of Stravinsky and Ravel at the same time. conservatories in Montreal, New York and California.
After a stint in the Army, he made his debut as a piano accompanist to Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers, and the first of four wives, Paula Stewart (another was actress Angie Dickinson).
He had worked as an arranger with Dietrich and had followed her on tours of Europe in the late 1950s.
The songs created with David have become all-time classics: among them, I Say a Little Prayer, performed by Aretha Franklin, What's New Pussycat?
by Tom Jones, The Look of Love by Dusty Springfield, Make It Easy on Yourself by the Walker Brothers.
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, in BJ Thomas' rendition, entered the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and in 1969 won a Grammy and an Oscar while Bacharach's music won the statuette for best original soundtrack.
The relationship with Warwick ended in court after Burt and Hal stopped working together leaving her without music.
“It was an expensive and unfortunate dispute,” Bacharach admitted in a 2019 interview with the Guardian.
In 1985 the reconciliation led to the single That's What Friends Are For engraved for the cause of the fight against AIDS