Dionne Warwick Scepter and Warner Bros. Catalogs Remastered and Reissued by Collectors' Choice Music

Press release
Source: conqueroo / Cary Baker

Collectors’ Choice is set to reissue ten classic Dionne Warwick albums from the Scepter and Warner Bros. years, all remastered from the original tapes and all with extensive liner notes by Ritchie Unterberger. Featured are the multi-Grammy® Award-winning artist’s first six albums and nine out of her first ten, including a definitive cross-section of her masterpieces with Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Street date for the CDs is May 15, 2007.

The Collectors’ Choice reissues complement recent reissues on Rhino Handmade, which featured the singer’s final Scepter sessions.

Collectors’ Choice’s Dionne Warwick reissues include:

• Presenting Dionne Warwick: This 1963 album marked not only the emergence of a brand-new vocal star, but also the debut of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David/Dionne Warwick team, which is responsible for nine of this album’s 12 tracks. Featured are Warwick’s first single, “Don’t Make Me Over,” and “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” which was later a hit for Dusty Springfield.

• Anyone Who Had a Heart: Released in 1964, this album featured Warwick’s first Top Ten hit as its title track, plus plenty of Bacharach and David songs along with expertly chosen compositions from other songwriters such as Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. “Anyone Who Had a Heart” boasts an impressively bittersweet, unpredictably shifting melody; shifts in time signature from 5/4 to 4/4 to 7/8 and back to 5/4; a brief, smoky sax solo; gorgeous orchestration and swelling background vocals; and Warwick’s impassioned vocal.

• Make Way for Dionne Warwick: Make Way, released in ‘64, was Warwick’s first charting album, powered by “Walk On By” and a host of other Bacharach-David classics, including “Close To You,” a hit for the Carpenters some ten years later.

• The Sensitive Sound of Dionne Warwick: Taking a slight turn toward adult pop with this ‘65 release, the album contained the hit “Who Can I Turn To?” from the Broadway play The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd. The album contains some of Warwick’s more adventurous vocal work.

• Here I Am: This album, released in late 1965, contained nine Bacharach-David compositions out of 12 songs. Its biggest hit, "Looking With My Eyes,” reached only No. 64, and perhaps had a few too many melodic twists and turns to be a big AM radio hit. For those who savor Bacharach-David’s risky sophistication, however, it’s an obscure nugget, particularly in those passages that suddenly change gears to a stuttering, melancholy jazzy piano lick wholly unrelated to other parts of the song.

• Dionne Warwick in Paris: Europe was quicker to catch on to the enormity of Dionne’s talent than were American audiences. She was particularly big in France, where they dubbed her "The Black Pearl," so it was logical that her first live album would be recorded at the Olympia Theater in Paris, the very venue that hosted her first European concert. This January 18, 1966 show won raves from the local press.

• Here Where There Is Love: Released in ‘66, this was Warwick’s first Top 20 pop charting album and a No. 1 hit on the R&B charts, thanks to a quartet of Bacharach and David masterpieces: “Alfie,” “What The World Needs Now,” “Trains and Boats and Planes” and “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.” She even covers Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”

• The Magic of Believing: Dionne Warwick was so hot on the pop charts with hits like “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and “(Theme From) Valley of the Dolls” that she could afford to do such an avowedly noncommercial project as this tribute to her gospel roots. And those roots were deep — her mother, Lee Warrick, was a founding member of the Drinkard Singers with Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mother) and Dionne herself got her start with the Gospelaires along with her sister Dee Dee. Fittingly, the Drinkard Singers back Dionne in a labor of spiritual and musical love.

• Love at First Sight: This album concluded Dionne’s association with Warner Bros. Records in 1977. By then, the “marriage” of Bacharach and David had dissolved in acrimony, so noted producers Steve Barri and Michael Omartian took the reigns. The inclusion of songs by Brill Building folks like Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and Evie Sands brings it back to the classic Warwick sound.

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