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| Fluchtweg St. Pauli |
Hot Traces of St. Pauli
by robert whiteman
10.18.2001
Peter Schirmann’s soundtrack to the 1970 film Fluchtweg St. Pauli (aka Hot Traces of St. Pauli) makes a pretty good case for Schirmann as a kind of butterfly-collared, West German hybrid of Curtis Mayfield and Charles Mingus. With bombastic jazz horns, disco-funk guitars, and even Jimmy Smith-style organ vamps, his music is evocative of pasty-faced pimps and players, cruising the mean streets of Hamburg’s red-light St. Pauli district and dodging the long arm of das Gesetz. I haven’t seen Fluchtweg…, so I don’t know for certain what the main character, Willy, looks like, but judging from the soundtrack I’d bet dollars to jelly-donuts that he resembles Telly Savalas wearing a turtleneck sweater and a monocle, and that he drives an uber-fresh, customized Opel. “Who loves ya, fraulein?”
"No mere background music, this is the kind of soundtrack work that paints a mood and tells a story." |
Admittedly, Schirrman’s work lacks some of the emotional and political weight of Mayfield’s Superfly or Mingus’ Cumbia in Jazz Fusion (the lauded, and much sampled ‘70s soundtrack work of Lalo Schifrin would be a more accurate comparison), but Schirmann makes up for it with slick, loungey style and a relentless barrage of evocative, driving, cinematic funk. No mere background music, this is the kind of soundtrack work that paints a mood and tells a story. In fact, as used in the film, the music is never incidental but always placed within the context of the narrative; horns skronk form taxi-cab radios and organs grind from storefront PAs as cops and criminals play cat and maus on the streets.
Also included on this Crippled Dick Hot Wax! reissue is the title-piece from another film, Bleib Sauber Leibling, along with two new remixes of Schirmann’s original work. The “Bleib Sauber Leibling” piece is jarring, with female vocals that sound like a chorus of Japanese girls imitating a cat being tortured, but both remixes are superb, especially the Crate Soul Brothers reworking of “Auf dem Kiez.” The Crate Soul Brothers, aka Hungary’s funkiest and most eloquent DJs, Keyser and Shuriken, offer a less jazzy tune than one might expect having listened to their eclectic radio show, but their foray into “funky porn beat reconstruction” should have you shaking your ass even as you laugh it off.
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