Every great singer has her own signature, and Dionne Warwick’s, in her defining period in the ’60s and ’70s, was the gorgeous wavery ethereal slowness of her vibrato. It allowed her to hit a note, sustain it with that beautiful wide tremolo, and invest it with a yearning that was pure enough to pierce you. You can hear it in her very first recording, “Don’t Make Me Over,” which is the first record she made of a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, or in her first sublime recording, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (1963), where she sings a line like “Anyone who had a heart, could look at me,/And know that I lov-v-v-e you…,” the last two words ringing out like bells, tied to each other by a curlicue of emotion. Warwick didn’t just sing the notes — she lofted them into the air, so that they floated into your heart.
In the new documentary “Dionne Warwick:…
