Various Artists - Gershwin Prize for Popular Song Honoring Burt Bacharach & Hal David, White House, Washington, DC, 5-9-2012

I'm particularly psyched to post this album, because all the Gershwin Prize tribute concerts are nice, but most are very hard to find, and I want to post them all. Another tough one has been conquered. This one is a tribute to the great songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

By the way, with this one, I've posted ten of the Gershwin Prize concerts. That leaves four that I'm still missing. These four. If anyone has any of them, please let me know!: 

2013 Carole King
2016 Smokey Robinson
2017 Tony Bennett
2019 Gloria & Emilio Estefan 

The timing of this concert was fortuitous, because it turned out Hal David died only a few months later, in September 2012, at the ripe old age of 91. He was too ill to attend the concert, and had his wife Eunice David accept the award on his behalf. But at least he lived long enough to know that he and his songwriting partner won this prestigious award. Bacharach died in 2023 at the age of 94. As an aside, I've included them in the "Covered" songwriter series, with five albums of their music.

This one was a real challenge to put together, which is why I said up above I feel like I "conquered" it. At first, it seemed easy, and I found a download for it at a popular bootleg sharing site. But while that got me the first two thirds, the file for the last third was corrupted. I asked if anyone could fix it, and waited a couple of months, but nobody ever helped. So then I found a list of all the songs performed and went to find the missing ones on YouTube. After much digging, I found them all, including the speeches at the end. This was a lucky break, because YouTube didn't have some of the songs from earlier in concert. 

All's well that ends well. Everything should be here, and in excellent sound quality. I only cut out a couple of unimportant bits, such as a track at the start where the emcee named all the music acts that would perform in the concert.

This follows the usual pattern of various stars performing covers of songs by the prize winners, then an acceptance speech, then the prize winners performing a song or two. One surprise was that comedian and director Mike Myers performed. But instead of doing a comedy routine, he sang a song. He didn't embarrass himself, and he said some comments showing that he was huge Bacharach-David fan.

This album is 53 minutes long. 

01 talk (emcee)
02 I'll Never Fall In Love Again (Sheryl Crow & Lyle Lovett)
03 talk (Stevie Wonder)
04 Make It Easy on Yourself (Stevie Wonder with Arturo Sandoval)
05 talk (emcee)
06 talk (Diana Krall)
07 The Look of Love (Diana Krall)
08 talk (emcee)
09 Anyone Who Had a Heart (Shelea & Arturo Sandoval)
10 talk (emcee)
11 What's New Pussycat (Mike Myers)
12 talk (Mike Myers)
13 talk (emcee)
14 A House Is Not a Home (Rumer)
15 talk (emcee)
16 [There's] Always Something There to Remind Me (Lyle Lovett)
17 talk (emcee)
18 Walk on By (Sheryl Crow)
19 talk (emcee)
20 talk (Michael Feinstein)
21 [They Long to Be] Close to You (Michael Feinstein)
22 talk (emcee)
23 Alfie (Stevie Wonder)
24 talk (Stevie Wonder)
25 talk (Barack Obama)
26 talk (Eunice David)
27 talk (Burt Bacharach)
28 What The World Needs Now Is Love (Burt Bacharach & Everybody)
29 talk (Barak Obama)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/rHCqVPqb

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/MaAmDxJqb4273cL/file

The cover photo of President Obama giving the award to Bacharach is from this exact concert.