March 27–April 3, 1997

critic pick|film

September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill

The socially aware savagery and bittersweet off-kilter art music of composer Kurt Weill seems to be on several people's minds of late. With head in hand and misery's victories in tow, singer Marianne Faithfull takes full furious gulps of Weill's oeuvre on her CD 20th Century Blues (RCA). And in Larry Weinstein's1994 film September Songs, everyone from William S. Burroughs to opera diva Teresa Stratas matches wits with Weill's slithery theatrical jazz.

"Our music must express powerful emotions," Kurt Weill once said about his sound. But the emotions were not meant to concern only love, heartache or where money goes, but where his people were headed. As the Nazis denounced "this Jew" Weill's art as "interruptive," Weill became known as a rebel at the wrong time.

Whether giving women their intuitive due or asking that mankind be aware of its emotional decay, Weill's songs were viewed as having socially dismaying content. When he added jazz rhythms, brass and reeds to an already heady mix, Weill was castigated for adding the "threat of Negro blood."

Weill became a criminal — an "anti-nationalist." He and his wife Lotte Lenya, the first singer to do his music justice, fled to America where Weill wrote for Broadway and beyond.

To show all sides of Weill, director Weinstein rounds up the usual oddball suspects and asks them to pontificate madly and wriggle wildly around cheesy warehouse sets, mouthing the taut sarcastic words of Bertolt Brecht and the mordantly optimistic poetry of Sherwood Anderson. Nick Cave, with his blackened lounge-singer image, makes a flailing "Mack The Knife" more vile just by showing up. PJ Harvey's take on "Ballad of The Soldier's Wife" is a Salome-d vision of gaudy possessiveness with Harvey greedily clamoring for baubles. And no armpit hair. While David Johansen and Schoolhouse Rock's Bob Dorough drive like hobos for the drink and the buck of "Alabama Son," Teresa Stratas makes a torchy dramatic aria out of Weill signatures like "Surabaya Johnny." The best moments of September Songs are the most unadorned. Betty Carter sails through a spare jazz "Lonely House" like a wounded siren. Elvis Costello and the stringed Brodsky Quartet literally light up "Lost in the Stars." A snap-brimmed William S. Burroughs dryly cackles in protest through the bestial acts of "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" and a guitar-stinging Lou Reed muscles his way through the melancholy title song.

A true kitchen sink cabaret.

September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill, Seven Arts' Neil Zoren featured speaker, MOTA (Movies On The Avenue), Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., Room 100, Tues., April 1, 7 p.m., 545-4400, ext. 243.

— a.d. amorosi