Little Big Things: Burt Bacharach's What the World Needs Now

IN THE LATE '80s, I sat with the great Japanese pop artist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto on a hotel rooftop in L.A. talking about Burt Bacharach. He was the last of three contemporary orchestral visionaries that Sakamoto, in his quietly passionate way, had cited — after Debussy and Ravel and other 19th-century French impressionists — whose music inspired him as a conservatory student.