MUSIC
Kuehl, Linda
who can tell which such infant will be a great man. And in America Herr Scheitz, who looks almost like the infant, begins to have delusions that he is a great man, the discoverer of animal...
...It was between cool and hot, covert and overt, introspective and extroverted...
...But I don't believe Herzog intends us to take it seriously ~ny more than we did the voice-over narrative in Fata Morgana...
...Variations on these perpetuate the satellite image: "chicken dinner" and "kitten" for young female, "mouse" for the more mature female...
...It is a salient point and I am glad that critic, Robert Palmer, made it...
...Also seveneighths of the children born in the developing world are protein-malnourished--which means brain impairment and mental retardation...
...At times Stroszek's fate is, like the desert life portrayed in Fata Morgana, accompanied by a kind of solemn rhetoric...
...His resistance to her affects every echelon in jazz...
...But Stroszek's experiences in Germany don't translate in such easy, hospitable ways...
...LINDA KUEHL (Linda Kuehl, a New York-based writer and critic, is completing a biography o] Billie Holiday for Harper & Row...
...Like the overarching symbolism of Herzog's plots, any rhetorical wisdom those plots may contain is only an effort to surround a truth which exists, by its nature, in silence...
...It is she that receives praise for a "fiery, powerfully articulated" style about which there is "nothing delicately feminine," the kind of double-edged compliment that originally ignited this reflection on women in jazz...
...A talking myna bird that was one of his few companions in Germany is confiscated by customs...
...Bad ~s the lines of communication are in Germany, however, their breakdown is of course worse when he gets to America...
...With or without a name, the woman instrumentalist on the bandstand with her axe sorely diminishes the jazz man's celebratory macho pride...
...Address: The Thomas A. Dooley Foundation, 420 Lexington Avenue, New York, .N.Y...
...The only acceptable parts for her are singing at the microphone or playing at the piano or the harp...
...So does the immigration to America become, in effect, the passage from infancy to senility--life's pilgrimage not to the promised land, but to ruination...
...I had never heard of a counterpart Le Jazz des Hommes, and I knew enough about segregation to know that separate was not equal...
...The Dooley Foundation has been working in Nepal since 1963...
...A few years ago, a tenor saxophonist named Mary Fettig joined Start Kemon's band, and the thenwomen's page of the daily Times headlined STAN KENTON'S HOT TENOR SAX IS A 20-YEAR-OLD WOMAN...
...The point of this delineation is that jazz is not ipso lacto so-cailed masculine, yet women tend to gravitate toward the big and aggressive to legitimatize their entry into what is really a macho brotherhood...
...Headlining his review JAZZ DES FEMMES BELIES CLICHES, he complimented the woman saxophonist for her big tone, the trombonist for her assertive sound, the drummer for her aggressive MISSIONARIES OF THE SACRED HEARTS Apostolic, prayertul community seekinq eol- ~ leqe aqe men to join us in m~l~T~q Jesus" love visible as priests & brothers...
...In his film, both story and dialogue are similar gestures man attempt to get as close as possible to what can never be entered or known directly...
...Mary Fettig replied, "I guess there are...
...In and around 1935, an entirely new voice emerged, the rebel tenor voice of Lester Young soon called "Pres" for President...
...It's a horrific image of the attempt to encompass somehow a void which we cannot know in any other way...
...The dichotomy between his style and Hawk's was not between female and male...
...30 September 1977:626...
...At first Herr Scheitz acts as interpreter for him, but after awhile even Scheitz himself reverts to speaking German to Americans, who only shrug and walk away...
...victory is called "running everybody out...
...He rifled soft, light, sweet, breathy murmurings floating like a disembodied voice in space...
...Linwood, N.L 08221...
...Three formidable pianists instantly come to mind: Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland, Toshiko Akiyoshiwail three composers as well though only Toshiko Akiyoshi leads a band, significantly formed around 1972, with her husband, Lew Tabackin, an extraordinary tenor man...
...A well-intentioned (New York Times) critic indirectly illuminated the source of my discomfort...
...In Land of Silence and of Darkness (1972), in fact, Herzog made a documentary about a woman both blind and deaf...
...The macho is reflected in the jazz musician's martial idiom --terms like "cutting" and "carving" contests, or "battles" waged against peers and upstarts for supremacy on the instrument called an "axe...
...This anticipates beautifully the duality of his experience in Europe and America and the double failure of language for him...
...Jazz man" interchanges with "jazz musician" and "cool cat" and "hip dude," but distaff terms connote appendages rather than equals: "old lady" for wife (legal or commonlaw), "chick" for young female, "bandstand girl" for the equivalent of rock's "groupie," "girl singer" for woman vocalist...
...Like the cowboy imagery, the failure of language begins back in Germany itself...
...Admonished the impresario, "Who wants a girl trumpet player...
...That these women demonstrated qualities traditionally attributed to men proved that they could play in the accomplished manner of men...
...After agreeing with a stern lecture the warden gives about his not drinking, Stroszek goes right to a beer hall on his release...
...But I would like to make the converse point that jazz women have another way to go, not to mention possibilities of their own invention...
...Les ]emmes de jazz are inspired to have ostensible masculine tone and drive (certainly nothing "delicately feminine") even though Lester Young--the "President"--rendered yin and yang irrelevant to the way even jazz men began to play their axe forty years ago...
...So alien is the jazz woman (a term of convenience to differentiate her from the jazz man) to his midst that she does not have a name in his vernacular...
...While Herzog was a teenager, as I mentioned last time, he took a hike all around the sealed frontier of Albania...
...Kenton replied in kind, "She plays like a man...
...Typical is the impresario who dismissed a booker's atypical suggestion that he have a fine woman trumpeter (Chlora Bryant) play with a concert-assembled group...
...It will instruct health workers in the use of these means...
...Pres drove as hard laying back on the beat as Hawk drove frontally on top of it...
...And in America Herr Scheitz, who looks almost like the infant, begins to have delusions that he is a great man, the discoverer of animal magnetism...
...The new project will show how the utilization of radio, powered by windmills, solar panels and water wheels can improve medical care...
...10017...
...And so it continues to come full circle as macho hyperbole reinforces machisma self-defense...
...The reporter queried Kenton on Fettig's ability...
...Chief among these are malaria and schistosomiasis (snail fever) which afflicts two hundred million people...
...AN APPEAL--The Thomas A. Dooley Foundation is starting a two-year demonstration program in Nepal of what "telemedicine" can do to combat the fatal diseases chronic in much of the Third World...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...At one point, for instance, Stroszek tries to explain to Eva his feeling that America does to the spirit what Germany does to the physical and political man...
...When he, Eva and Herr Scheitz arrive in Wisconsin, Scheitz's cousin greets them with a sign reading "Willkommen" on one side and "Welcome" on the other...
...All the efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible leave us, in the end, with a pretty empty universe...
...In Stroszek Herzog again deals with a character who lives, increasingly, after he immigrates to America, in a land of silence and of darkness...
...Funds to set up this program and continue its training Of nurses, medical technicians and physical therapists are urgently needed...
...This Monterey Jazz Festival impresario would have dismissed just as automatically a "girl" on saxophone, trombone, drums, bass, vibraphone, guitar and, most flagrant of all, "on" baton...
...Were we to take it seriously, such an insight into his own situation would at the least be out of character for poor Stroszek...
...From mid-1920 to mid-1930, it is true jazz was defined by the full-toned, full-bellied, aggressive, brassy trumpet voice of Louis Armstrong, Father of Hot Jazz, called "Pops...
...At the end of this film, after he has lost his home, his Eva and his friend Scheitz, Stroszek leaves a truck he has stolen circling by itself in a parking lot and goes off to commit suicide...
...Ultimately the myth Herzog would create here is a very pessimistic one...
...That driverless truck going round and round is an image Herzog has employed before...
...Pres called women "hats," as in his comment about his sexual needs, "I got to keep wearing a hat...
...What really binds together the episodes of Stroszek's life more than anything else is the failure of language...
...The bassist Billy Taylor substituted "girls" for the word sardines in anticipation of his favorite repast, "I got a can of 'girls...
...A REFLECTION ON JAZZ WOMEN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MUSIC The announcement for an all-women's jazz concert billed as "Le Jazz des Femmes" gave me pause recently...
...Pops's style was matched by the sharp, passionate, powerful, dramatic growling voice of the leading tenor stylist, Coleman Hawkins, called "Bean" and "Hawk...
...In the end Stroszek stomps off in inarticulate rage as a cowboy-hatted trucker boasts in C-B argot over his radio about just having stolen Stroszek's girl Eva...
...Contact: Vocation Director, 2249 Shore Rd...
...The fascination she had for him was not so much her extraordinary ability to understand the world outside herself, but rather our inability to enter and understand the world inside her...
...One of these is an auctioneer who has, ironically, just sold off with his own doubletalk the trailer in which Scheitz and Stroszek live...
...The reporter covering the anomalous occasion queried Mary Fettig, "Are there often women good enough to find a place with Kenton...
...Commonweal: 625 swing, the pianist for her firm touch...
...Lend me your opener...
...It begins in the opening scene when some prison officials insist on using formal language while processing Stroszek for release, even though, as he objects, they know each other well...
...But I haven't run into them...
...In Germany Stroszek earns money as a street singer, and at one point we hear a performance he gives where he narrates and interpolates each verse of his song before he sings it...
...The more different ways of talking about human experience are introduced into the film, the less sense language makes to Stroszek...
...And the philosophical, generalizing response which that doctor makes to the terribly urgent, particular problem Stroszek brings him is equally meaningless...
...The immigration to America makes us especially aware of this since Stroszek speaks no English...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 20
