WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS

By BRUCE HANDY

Burt Bacharach's music has always had its thoughtful admirers along with its merely numerous ones. But given 30 years' worth of toxically vaporous renditions of his tunes seeping out of elevators, of knotty little songs like I'll Never Fall in Love Again and deliciously bitter ones like Walk On By being consigned to the easy-listening bins--the pop equivalent of assisted suicide--it takes a lot of nerve for a serious jazz musician like McCoy Tyner to record What the World Needs Now (Impulse!), an entire album of Bacharach compositions. And it takes even more nerve to start the album off with (They Long to Be) Close to You, on the face of it, one of the few irredeemably schmaltzy songs Bacharach and his long-time lyricist Hal David ever wrote. Indeed, despite the passion and intelligence of Tyner's playing, when we finally hear the notes that correspond to the words "Why do birds suddenly appear..." is it humanly possible not to think of sipping mai tais at an airport piano bar? Or of Karen Carpenter starving herself to death? Or of old-fashioned melody's last stand on the pop charts?

Both because of and despite such associations, Bacharach, 69, is currently enjoying greater popularity than at any other time since his heyday in the 1960s and early '70s, when, working against the rock grain, he was responsible for dozens of Top 40 hits, including surprisingly nuanced adult-oriented love songs for performers like Gene Pitney, Dusty Springfield and, his greatest vessel of all, Dionne Warwick. The current renaissance--Bacharach's last big hit was 1985's That's What Friends Are For--began a few years ago, with the explosion of interest in so-called lounge music, especially in Britain, where a two-disc set of Bacharach tunes became a surprise best seller. The U.S. will soon get its own three-disc retrospective, as well as a new Broadway musical in early 1998, tentatively named Anyone Who Had a Heart, with a trunkful of old Bacharach-David tunes; a Los Angeles revival of the team's one previous stage musical, Promises, Promises; and a new album featuring a collaboration between Bacharach and Elvis Costello that grew out of God Give Me Strength, the song that the two co-wrote last year for the movie Grace of My Heart.

In fact, Hollywood has been Bacharach's biggest promoter. The songwriter serves as a veritable totem of retro-cool in Mike Meyer's Austin Powers, in which Bacharach does a cameo singing behind a candelabraed piano that sits atop a Las Vegas tourist bus. His music is featured even more prominently--even if he isn't--in the Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding, providing for a younger generation the same kind of romantic charge, simultaneously nostalgic and bracingly fresh, that George Gershwin gave when he was rediscovered by the disco generation two decades ago in Woody Allen's Manhattan.

Unlike Gershwin, Bacharach, perhaps because he worked in pop-rock and pop-soul idioms, has not been taken seriously by devotees of the Great American Songbook. But Tyner's album, along with another new CD (Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach) produced by avant-garde composer and klezmer enthusiast John Zorn and featuring a number of musicians with jazz leanings from New York's Downtown school, makes the case that Bacharach's melodies are worthy of being standards. Tyner says he's "shocked" that more jazz musicians haven't taken them up.

One problem, paradoxically, may be that the intricacy and complexity of the songs--among musicians, Bacharach's difficult time changes and peculiar modulations are notorious--make them hard to tease apart and rethink. Take the Frank Sinatra version of Wives and Lovers, recorded with the Count Basie band in a 4/4 arrangement instead of the original's waltz time: it's one of the rare records on which Sinatra seems to be fighting the song. The Tyner and Zorn albums have some wonderful moments, yet here too the songs stubbornly cling to their original indelible selves. Maybe Bacharach is singular, an anomaly, the Henri Rousseau or Ornette Coleman of pop.

The man himself is both pleased and a little puzzled by the renewed acclaim. "Maybe people have gotten slicked out on all that techno stuff," he offers, on the phone from Dublin, the penultimate stop on a European concert tour. "With technology today," he says, "you can make perfect garage music, but when you peel it back, maybe what's missing is melody." What the world needs now, as someone once said.