Word: guntherized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DEDICATED TO DOLPHY (Cambridge). "Jazz has evolved from a folk music into an art music," said Gunther Schuller, explaining the kind of atonal, far-out compositions that he, John Lewis, Harold Farberman and Bill Smith have written for this album. The results are cooler and more cerebral than those of Eric Dolphy, the late wild-blowing, note-bending alto saxophonist. But Bill Smith (on clarinet) and the other instrumentalists are first-rate, and the music, though it seldom swings, consistently sizzles...
INSIDE SOUTH AMERICA, by John Gunther. A political travelogue of the South American continent, conducted by a tour guide who knows all the sights but moves too briskly to explain them thoroughly...
...Feet by Five Miles. Gunther makes an entertaining guide. He has a discerning eye for the arresting fact and the improbable statistic that not only sums up a complex situation but rivets the attention of the reader. Along his tour he notes that a farm in Chile, the beanpole country hugging 2,600 miles of the continent's west coast, can measure as little as ten feet in width and five miles in length. Paraguay, a landlocked dictatorship the size of California, has only 450 miles of paved roads, and in Venezuela, which is three times larger than Italy...
...Focus. Such tidbits illuminate a subject; they do not necessarily explain it. In grappling with the riddle of South America, a continent that was colonized half a century before North America and is still trying to catch up with modern times, Tour Guide Gunther sometimes finds the going rough. He often relies on sweeping generalities ("few South Americans have ulcers"), on superlatives (Colombia is "one of the most difficult, complex and contradictory countries in the world"), and there are some oversimplifications that sometimes border on the absurd. "Why is the army so important?" he asks of Brazil. Gunther...
...Brink. Gunther left South America with the conviction that it is "on the brink of revolution." Maybe- but it has been on the brink for quite a while. In all, he spent only six months touring an area twice the size of the U.S., and his book, like all his other Insides, can hardly be expected to probe as deeply as the title suggests. But for all that, Inside South America is a valuable introduction to a continent that deserves more attention and more understanding than it usually gets...