by Marie T. Sullivan

April 12, 2023

Once in a while, rare good things happen. People fall in love unexpectedly. They find wads of cash in the pockets of old coats. They overcook potatoes and discover French fries.

Happy accidents dot the landscape of our lives. In the arts (as no doubt in other disciplines), the chance combination of the right people at the right time can release great creativity, like a high school chemistry experiment. Mix two particular still substances. Combined, they effervesce.

Early this year the renowned composer and arranger of popular song, Burt Bacharach, went the way of all flesh at the robust age of 94. With full credit to his chief lyricist, Hal David, Bacharach’s more visible creative partner was the songbird Dionne Warwick, whose voice is well familiar to any American over the age of fifty who did not live on Mars in the ‘Sixties. The combination of Bacharach’s songs and Warwick’s voice was the secret sauce that caught and held the nation’s attention, and made hits.

Bacharach was not only renowned. He was wealthy, having recorded scores of top-charting tunes, no fewer than five of them reaching Number One. Can you name them? (See also Cory Franklin’s John Kass News post of March 5.)

Warwick was uniquely qualified to deliver for Bacharach. Aside from her prodigious God-given musical gifts, she earned a degree at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford and while in school worked as a backup vocalist in Manhattan recording studios. That means she had skills, particularly that of sightreading music, and a practical knowledge of music theory, allowing Bacharach to write songs that sounded simple but had intriguing complexities such as the mixed meter of Promises, Promises and the acrobatic melody of Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Not the sort of thing navigable by your average canary.

A great song has the power to move human beings deeply. It is said that Bacharach’s favorite among his own songs was Alfie, which has often been recorded. One version of tremendous artistry is that of the late jazz piano genius Bill Evans, whom Glenn Gould once called the “Scriabin of Jazz.” Miles Davis invited Evans to play and record with his band. Evans later said, “One night I looked up, opened my eyes while I was playing, and Miles’ head was at the end of the piano listening.”  Tragically, Evans died young. When he passed, Miles Davis was heard to utter words to the effect of, “Unimaginable that I’ll never hear Bill Evans play Alfie again.”

In the same era, another happy accident was the chance meeting of Sergio Mendes and Lani Hall. Don’t know Lani Hall? Yes, you do. Think The Look of Love, as recorded by Sergio’s band Brasil ’66 in 1967. As we Americans drove around unencumbered by seat belts with car radios blaring, her voice soothed and delighted us. It also brought sophistication to Top Forty radio.

The meeting occurred when she was nineteen years of age, a hugely talented beginner. A coffee shop owner invited Miss Hall to sing at his shop for four consecutive weekends. She was thrilled, but something much bigger was on the horizon. Sergio was in town, heard about her, and came one night to the shop’s door to listen. “I’m putting a band together and I want you to be the lead singer,” he told her when she was finished. Her voice was ideally suited to his musical ways. The woman was not only talented, she was lucky.

Through Brasil ’66 she had another stroke of luck, meeting her future husband, trumpeter, arranger and record producer Herb Alpert, whose A&M Records signed Sergio’s band. Alpert and Hall married in 1973. Their marriage endures, as does their musical partnership: they tour to this day. And like a cherry on the cupcake of their success, together they own a jazz club in Los Angeles, Vibrato, that is the stuff of dreams for jazz musicians. It is said that the club’s fine piano is tuned once a week. Now that is civilization.

Let us turn to the world of fashion. The meeting of Audrey Hepburn and fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy was the Ultimate Happy Accident. Shortly after he opened his first couture house as a young man, Givenchy was told that a Miss Hepburn had arranged to see him. He expected Katherine Hepburn, and was annoyed when the then-unknown Audrey Hepburn showed up. She won him over, however, launching what became a brilliant, forty-year collaboration. He designed the wardrobes for her best-loved films, of course, including the memorable black dress she wore for the opening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, reportedly one of the most copied garments of all time. The great Givenchy served as a pallbearer at Miss Hepburn’s funeral. (Feminine readers may wonder, what became of the dresses? Answer: They sell at auction for sums with which you could purchase a small condominium.)

In his marvelous book Creators, the English historian Paul Johnson (whom we also lost this year, may he rest in peace) tells us that in the 1850s, the designer Charles Frederick Worth helped shift the center of the fashion world at the time from London to Paris, setting up a shop there to dress the rich. Until then, London tailors and dressmakers had presided over the industry. But Queen Victoria was dowdy and had no interest in clothes, whereas the influencer Empress Eugenie of Paris never wore the same dress twice. It was an accident of history, a happy one for Paris and an immensely profitable one for Worth. The Empress enlisted him as her dressmaker; wealthy Parisian women lined up to follow. By providing client leadership she became Worth’s chemical agent, and Paris the center of action. Johnson further muses: “It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened if Wallis Simpson. . . had become queen. Even as the duchess of Windsor she became the finest client leader of the twentieth century, having an exceptionally slender, fine-boned figure that designers loved to work for, fit, and adorn: an intense interest in fine clothes. . .  As queen of England, with virtually unlimited money and an immense natural following of society ladies, she would surely have made London the focus.” Decidedly it was not to be.

Back to popular music. Did you know that in the ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies we Americans were duped? Those were the decades of what became known as the Wrecking Crew, an accidental collection of studio musicians in Los Angeles who played on certain recordings of groups such as the Mamas and the Papas, the Fifth Dimension, Sonny & Cher, the Beach Boys and the Monkees. Horrors! It was not dreamboat Micky Dolenz playing those drums in the studio!

The Wrecking Crew came about by chance. They were superlative players who spontaneously proposed fresh and marvelous ideas in the studio and had the skills to play them on demand—ideas so seductive they made hits. (A single example: listen to the hip, driving bass line under the “Let the sun shine” chorus halfway through the Fifth Dimension’s Age of Aquarius.) Recognizing a good thing, record producers began engaging the members of the Wrecking Crew not by accident but on purpose, behind the Name Groups. No one recalls how the name Wrecking Crew came about, though one theory is that by playing for rock groups they were “wrecking” more refined forms of popular music, like jazz.

This exclusive group of instrumentalists were not recognized until much later, in a 2008 documentary of the same name. But they had tremendous fun in the studio and became rich, along with the record producers.

As insurance companies remind us relentlessly, accidents happen. But some of them are happy.

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An Ohio native, Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan has lived in Chicagoland for all of her adult life. She has a degree in music, with flute as her principal instrument, but turned to singing in small vocal ensembles after college. In more recent years she took another musical turn, to singing jazz. By day she works for a Chicago nonprofit.

For two years she served as culture editor for the now defunct Chicago Daily Observer.