Bacharach, Dre: Mashin' together
By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN

Thursday, October 20, 2005 Page R1

There's a scene in Jean Cocteau's film Beauty and the Beast in which the heroine gives a charmed necklace to her spiteful sister. The necklace immediately turns into a filthy rag.

Isn't that just like pop music? Some new sound dazzles the scene, and older hands start reaching in, only to find the magic disappear at their touch.

It happened to Frank Sinatra, trying to get hip with the Woodstock generation by doing awkward covers of Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkel. It happened to Ethel Merman, who in 1979 belted out a dozen of her trademark show tunes over a disco beat.

The Ethel Merman Disco Album has become a camp classic (now available on CD), and people who concur on little else can agree that Pat Boone's metal-rock disc was a turkey for the ages (sure to be joined, once the dust clears, by Paul Anka's recent Rock Swings). But the grounds for abhorring or being amused by such ventures are shifting. It's no longer unusual to hear blatantly forced marriages between musicians, styles and repertoire. The remix and especially the mash-up have created an audience that wants to hear bizarre twists on familiar artists and music.

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One of the biggest underground discs of last year was The Grey Album, a mash-up of recordings by the Beatles and rapper Jay-Z. Fatboy Slim and the Guess Who, ABBA and the Ramones and many more have been stapled together by shadowy pranksters whose influence spilled into the mainstream when MTV launched a live mash-up show that has featured, among others, Jay-Z with punk rockers Linkin Park.

It was maybe just a matter of time before someone thought of throwing Burt Bacharach in with Dr. Dre. What's a little surprising is that Bacharach should have got the idea himself, and made a record out of it.

It's called At This Time (Sony BMG, out Nov. 1), and about half of it uses bass and drum loops Bacharach got from Dre. Apparently the rap impresario, best known for his work with Eminem, hoped that the older man might come up with a few riffs he could sample for an album of his own. But Bacharach said in a phone interview that his first recorded responses to those loops were "too musically extreme for hip-hop."

At this point, you have to wonder which is more extreme: Bacharach wanting to work with Dre, or the other way around. The distance between Close to You and One Less Bitch would seem to be almost insurmountable.

You might also wonder how a seasoned bandleader like Bacharach, who has worked with countless skilled drummers, could ever warm to what a studio musician might call a customized click-track. Because whatever mash-up culture may have made it normal for us to hear, a musician of Bacharach's tastes and generation (he turned 77 in May) couldn't be expected to slam his own music against a hard surface of bass thumps and beats.

"I took [the loops] home and found the ones that inspired me," he said, explaining how the warming process took place. "The songs [that are based on the loops] wouldn't have been written without them. . . .

"If you really listen closely, it's not exactly mechanical," he said. "Dre makes it a little more humanistic. There's a minimal difference in where the backbeat lies. It's a little looser, not so machine-driven."

Listening really closely, what you hear on At This Time is a respectful showdown between one aesthetic and another. It's not so much a struggle, as an adjustment of tension on both sides until they reach the same mean temperature.

The best track is the opener, Please Explain, based on a loop by Denaun Porter, a member of Eminem's D12 crew. Bacharach matches Porter's deep bass and watchful funky beat with some straight-up piano chords and an angular riff on synthesized strings. His vocal floats in like a tenor response to Leonard Cohen's spoken-sung rumblings, and like Cohen sometimes, Bacharach sees dark things on the horizon. His lyrics (first ever on record, written with the satiric Christian songsmith Tonio K) ask with quiet anguish how we got stuck in the post-9/11 politics of hate and fear.

As the album progresses, however, Bacharach's more customary environment asserts itself, with a studio orchestra that gradually co-opts Dre's beats into a melodic easy-listening idiom. The exceptionally flat loop chosen for Danger refuses to go without a fight, plodding squarely under a piano that wants to swing.

The rhythmic feistiness of Bacharach's glory days (think of Do You Know the Way to San Jose?) flickers into hearing in a bossa-tinged number featuring a vocal by Elvis Costello, who co-wrote Bacharach's last noteworthy album in 1998. But Go Ask Shakespeare, a depressed song with Rufus Wainwright, noodles on like film library music, which may be just fine for hip-hop types looking for wallpaper to sample.

Advance rumour suggested that At This Time would be a political assault on George W. Bush.

In a sense the results could be more disquieting for Bush's supporters than the new disc by punk rabble-rousers Propagandhi. Bacharach's first foray into overt social commentary sounds like a cry of distress from a political moderate -- exactly the kind of person Bush doesn't want to see mobilized against him.

"I've never been political, I never voted, I didn't get too excited during Vietnam, just carried on in my own narcissistic life . . .," Bacharach said. "But we've made things worse [since 9/11]. . . . I'm not a writer. I have to express what I feel in my music, at this time in my life, in my kids' life, in the world's life."

Indirectly, of course, he's also expressing the mix-and-match spirit of this period in popular music. So is Herbie Hancock on his new Possibilities disc, a left-field Warner album in which the jazz pianist does one song apiece with the likes of John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Carlos Santana.

Like Bacharach, Hancock ends up simmering down to easy-listening temperature in some of this music, notably in tracks with Paul Simon and Annie Lennox, or in a soft-jazz collaboration with the more flexible Sting. Other songs find him sailing into a rock or blues environment with contextually bizarre solos, like a stranger at his own party.

The oddest track of all is a heavy soul-blues cover of U2's When Love Comes to Town with Joss Stone and Jonny Lang, which abruptly warps into a different universe as Hancock starts doing his brainy jazz thing. It plays like a live studio mash-up. So does A Song for You, in which Hancock's subdued accompaniment ends up emphasizing the rhetorical overload of Aguilera's typically baroque performance. You've got to wonder whether, like many mash-up artists, he's doing it with a smirk on his face.

What's harder to figure is whether this kind of thing is good or bad any more. Mash-up culture is partly about inverting the old standards of stylistic coherence. If you like the idea of Nirvana being mashed with Destiny's Child (as they were in Smells Like Booty), maybe you'll find Hancock's tryst with Aguilera to be the last cutting word on super-diva excess. But somehow I doubt that Hancock had that in mind. Like Bacharach, he's moving in step with the musical times, though not necessarily in full accord with their spirit.