David Amram in the News

Composer, musician and wordsmith David Amram does so many things that it's hard to predict the focus of his appearance Wednesday at Urban Think!

"My hope is that my presence in Orlando will encourage people to see that Jack Kerouac lived, created and worked there," Amram says, "and that in 2009, new writers are living and creating there, and that everybody has something creative to offer."

Amram, 78, contributed music to the first Beat poetry session in 1957 in Greenwich Village. He composed the score for Pull My Daisy, the landmark 1959 Beats documentary narrated by Kerouac. That's part of a lengthy résumé that includes film scores, work with iconic jazz musicians and educational projects.

A short list of accomplishments includes film soundtracks for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate, two operas, a stint as the first composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic in 1966 and collaborations with Langston Hughes, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Odetta, Arthur Miller, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton and others.

On Wednesday, he'll be bringing along toys from an instrument collection that represents 25 countries.

"I'll have some wind instruments from Egypt and the Middle East, all kinds of flutes, my French horn, and whatever kind of keyboard they have there," he says. "There will be hand drums and a Sheeho, a native American courting flute."

Along with the music, Amram will be reading from two of his books, Offbeat: Collaborating With Kerouac and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat. Nationally known Kerouac author and expert Bob Kealing of WESH-Channel 2 also will be on hand.

"We used to have a thing called Amram Jam, and this will have that kind of egalitarian spirit," Amram says. "I know enough folk music from around the world, and jazz, to play for 60 hours.

"Since I'm 78 and good taste is slowly creeping in, I'll try to limit it to a bearable amount — and we'll see who shows up."

David Amram is a difficult musician to classify, frequently blurring the distinctions between jazz, classical, and world music. He has also composed scores for several memorable films including John Frankenheimer's Manchurian Candidate, Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass, and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, featuring the "narration" of Jack Kerouac. Given his past collaboration with Kerouac and experimentation with world music, it is not surprising Amram had a strong affinity for T.C. McLuhan's new documentary The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace, which had its American debut at the MIAAC Film Festival last night, followed by a special concert performance by Amram himself.

McLuhan's documentary reverently tells the story of Ghaffar "Badshah" Khan, Mahatma Gandhi's Islamic contemporary and close colleague in their campaign for Indian independence. Khan's early advocacy of non-violence is presented as a remarkable development, since he was a devout Muslim Pashtun from what was then Northwest India, a region long associated with war and strife—think of the Khyber Pass. As Frontier explains, both men developed similar non-violent ideologies separately, but joined forces to become the Odd Couple of the Indian independence movement. One was short and Hindu, the other was tall and Muslim.

As a native of the North-West Frontier Province, independence did not exactly work out the way Khan had hoped, eventually finding himself a resident of Pakistan following the national referendum of 1947. Frontier is strongest when addressing Khan's post-independence years in the wilderness, when he was all but forgotten in India and unwelcome in Pakistan, spending most of his time in Afghanistan.

Great effort clearly went into the making of Frontier, including interviews with Afghan President Hamid Karzai (who also happens to be Pashtun) and then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Amram's music is quite tasteful and appropriate throughout. Featuring the great Badal Roy on tabla, it incorporates his world and classical chops, but jazz is not an appreciable part of the compositional mix. However, his concert afterward would be a different story.

Amram developed a special program integrating music from around the globe, with an unusual quartet of Avram Pengas on either guitar or Greek bouzuki, his son Adam on congas, and daughter-in-law Teresa Colamonaco on tambourine (an instrument Amram spiritedly defended at one point), with the leader on just about everything else. He started on flute with a raga dedicated to Roy, before shifting to piano for a slow blues. Amram had a plethora of exotic instruments spread across the stage for pieces dedicated to various forms of traditional music, including the shanai and dumbek representing Egypt, the Lakota flute for a piece originally composed for the Philadelphia orchestra, and a surprisingly bluesy number featuring the bouzuki and traditional Chinese woodwind. However, the highlight of his set was a rendition of a jazz waltz he composed for a production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall, which he started at the piano, but concluded playing two penny whistles simultaneously, Rahsaan Kirk-style.

Tears nearly came to local bass player Pepe Aparicio's eyes when he saw David Amram. As the Beat culture goes, one doesn't forget a face. And after more than 35 years since their last gig in New York, Amram still recognized Aparicio.

"He's a Renaissance man, man. This guy does it all. He has no prejudices against music, whether it's rap, folk, classical, rock," said Aparicio, who plays with the Afro-Cuban band, Oriente. "They don't make them like David anymore. He's one of the last of his kind."

Minutes earlier, the pounding and meticulous strumming of the stand-up bass accompanied the slow, swooping melody of Amram's trumpet solo.

The lights were yellow and low at Tobacco Road a week ago Thursday night, and with good reason -- Amram was in town.

To Miami's poets and new-age beatniks alike, it was the closest thing to having Beat poet and travel extraordinaire Jack Kerouac on stage at the local bar.

Through the efforts of Florida Center for Literary Arts at Miami Dade College, Miamians got to witness a rare moment in their city, with a cool and calm Amram gracing the bar's low-set stage. "When the times get tough, the artists get tougher," Amram told the quiet and smiling crowd that filled every spot on the bar's second floor.

The man onstage, with his short, wild, gray hair and fading voice, once had jazz great Dizzy Gillespie crash in his cramped Washington, D.C. apartment. After spending time with legendary symphonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, he composed theater and film scores. When hanging with Kerouac, he fiddled with his French horn.

His 1952 jam session with jazz great Charlie Parker, he recalled, "literally changed [his] life, with Charlie's spontaneous flights of fancy." Amram will be at Books & Books in Coral Gables at noon April 12 for the release of his newest book, Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat.

With his long list of historically profound associations, Amram calls himself an "advocate for the arts and ambassador for culture." He hopes to introduce today's youth to a different form of thought, much like Amram and his comrades did in the '50s with the Beat movement.

Amram walked around the room after the show, greeting fans and discussing art in today's world. Annelise Berish, an MDC nursing student from Pinecrest, was excited to finally meet an artist from the generation that so deeply influenced her poetry.

She even named her 18-month-old son, Cole Maddox, after jazz legend John Coltrane. "Everybody's so stressed out all the time. It's refreshing to be in the presence of someone who's so laid back and pure of heart," Berish said.

Lugging his French horn, large duffel bag and handbag at his sides, Amram shuffled downstairs to the first floor of the bar, his beads jingling from his neck, reflecting on why he came to Miami.

"I hope it'll inspire them to celebrate their own lives, their families, their own life stories and to develop that," he said. "It's not that hard to do, and it doesn't cost anything."

"I Speak Out" @ Denver Public Library

I resent it when bands instruct me to "wave my hands in the air," and furthermore I become increasingly uncomfortable if they add "like you just don't care." Who are you, sir, to tell me what to do with my hands, or to pontificate about my level of involvement?

Call me a party pooper, a scrooge, or some evil killer of youthful solidarity, but I feel embarrassed to participate in such displays. I guess it's the bratty individualist in me, but I want to raise my hands when I deem worthy, not like some Pavlovian urban hippie clone.

However, I do love me some hip-hop, and have heard that spoken word and its larger umbrella of hip-hop are the wave of the future. This sentiment reigned as sociologist Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D., introduced Saturday's jam session between Flobots and David Amram as an event on par with Bob Dylan going electric. Her earnest projections aside, this show, called "I Speak Out," was going to be interesting: An old Beat legend turned composer, some spoken-word poets and a new buzzing Denver band performing for an odd assortment of die-hard Flobot fans, parents trying to show their kids something both cool and possessing of a good message, old burnout Beat men, youthful slam enthusiasts and … us. All of this in a place notorious for the harsh shushing of elderly spinsters: the library. It was a live show in the Denver Public Library, and it was (probably illegally?) packed to double the capacity.

Sprenger then introduced David Amram as the greatest living composer, and when he got on the mic, he said, "I don't know about the greatest, but I am living." I immediately liked him. "In this library, Neal Cassady came to give himself an education," he told us.

I wondered if those kids, dragged along by their parents, appreciated how exciting that statement was, how cool David Amram is. If I were a kid, I would probably view Amram as a joyful, lovable, jazzy old grandfatherly figure. I certainly wouldn't understand how breathlessly excited, how god damn special Denver should feel for catching the eye of such men like him and Kerouac. Amram talked about how he and Kerouac had only seen the West in films — films made by people who had probably never been here. As a Colorado native, I feel a certain thrill reading the words "Larimer" and "Rocky Mountains" used in poetic and literary devices, in works like "On the Road." But my imaginings of Neal Cassady take place less in the library and more on Larimer Street, up to no good.

So David Amram rattled off an epic running dialogue interspersed with snippets of life as Jack Kerouac's friend; advice on music via Max Roach via the son of Thelonius Monk; he talked to the intergenerational love we were vibing, how kids are the future and the present is now, and haven't you heard of spoken word? Then he and two musicians started off with some jazz, Amram on keys.

Jazz drumming might sound like noise. The key is to try and continue the original time signature in your head while they're venturing into outer space, shuffling out seemingly chaotic rhythms and different time signatures that circle around and ultimately land back on earth, in ¾ time or whatever they were in, as if that venture was purely in the listener's imagination. That drummer had that earthy basic rhythm in the back of his mind, his feet firmly planted on the ground, the entire time. Wow.

Then the spoken word artists came on, Panama Soweto, (Meggan Gould???) from Denver Minor Disturbance Slam, Isis, and geekhipster slam poet Ken Something or Other. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not the target audience for slam poetry, if only for the aesthetic. How many more slam poets will step onto that stage with their diverse looks and claims of counterculturalism, only to hurl the same dart at McDonald's and Wal-Mart in the same spoken word accent? And if I criticize spoken word, I feel like I'm criticizing the message, which is conflicting to me because I generally agree with that message.

That said, the group on Saturday put on the best spoken word performance I've seen. They hurled darts at McDonald's and Wal-Mart, but they were more like interweaving missiles, sharp and delivering powerful blows. As a writer, I truly admired their cleverness, their abilities; although I probably would have just preferred to read their poetry on my couch with a cup of tea.

After what seemed like a pleasant eternity, Sprenger urged everyone to ("Quietly! We're in a library") move all the chairs aside for Flobots to come on. Suddenly it felt like a club packed with cross-cultural high school kids, all dancing ferociously and singing along to every word of Flobots. It was not quiet.

I last followed guitar player Andy Guerrero when he worked at Independent Records, playing in Bop Skizzum. I guess that was a while ago, but it feels like I turned around for a second, and now he's commanding an army of socially-conscious, positive hip-hop indie rock violin-tinged music lovin' kids.

Besides their crispness and energy, their ability to inspire the crowd so suddenly, Flobots' music impressed me with their simple minimalism. Much of the time, they played with a drum set, a violin and a rapper, but it wasn't what I would call "sparse." The spaces just allowed for more room in the music to dance. My companion Father Guido noted how they're like Denver's Gym Class Heroes. I thought they should open for Saul Williams. Would probably get his audience primed.

David Amram got onstage with the Flobots, contributing some double-flute action. Then Jonny 5 handed off the mic to Amram for some free-styling. It was part-grandpa, part-emcee, as Amram meandered through topics like "Here we are, at the library," but found his footing on firm hip-hop ground in the end. Then he pulled the sheets out from under Jonny 5, working into his freestyle something about how he'd now be scatting with Amram. I couldn't tell if it was planned or not. So Jonny 5 started scatting, and he did an alright job. It wasn't until then, when I saw someone from my generation attempting to scat, that I realized just how much Amram was stretching his musical horizons at that moment. And then, if that weren't enough, Jonny 5 and Amram started this back-and-forth scat-off. It was impressive, the both of them. And I didn't "put my hands in the air," but I did clap a lot, not just with my hands at chest level, but above my head. That should count for something.

50 YEARS ON THE ROAD

Written by John Grady for "The Wire" Portsmouth New Hampshire
Wednesday, 12 September 2007

Sweet piano notes rise into the warm summer evening. A mixed crowd of aging baby-boomers, sprinkled with tie-dyed shirts and tattooed younger folks, sprawl on the grass of Lowell's Boarding House Park, enjoying the smooth, jazzy stylings of virtuoso composer David Amram. He sings out whimsical lines, reciting a fresh version of a tune jointly composed in the late 1940s by his beat writer friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. "Pull my daisy, tip my cup, all my doors are open," he sings.

Amram broke into scat-style improvisation as he played piano with his accompanying quintet. "Well, if Jack and Neal and Allen knew that we were here in Lowell in 2007 tonight, they'd be so glad that finally the U.S.A. is getting it right, 'cause when they honor Jack, they honor all of us ..."

The Sept. 7 performance, as well as Amram's concert with the New England Orchestra at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre two days later, culminated a summer-long homecoming Kerouac celebration. Worldwide recognition of the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's "On the Road" piled up all season. Media outlets from the New York Times to Wired magazine published tributes to the novel that changed a nation. A number of new books were released documenting the free-thinking cultural phenomenon that "On the Road" unleashed. But, the famously troubled writer's life began here, in the immigrant-populated Massachusetts mill town of Lowell.

"Jack kept his Lowell soul for his whole life," Amram told the crowd. "His heart was always in Lowell. It has its own identity. Look around. Go to the neighborhoods. Hear the different languages. Jack knew America was a place of refuge for people from all over the world. He set up a mirror for us to see ourselves. People love his work. He shows all of us the beauty side of America, the beauty side of ourselves. And he would go into the hard conditions, where people struggle and suffer, and he could find the human, beautiful side of life, and that is why his work will be with us forever."

Among the most acclaimed composers of his generation, Amram is listed by Broadcast Music, Inc. as one of the "Twenty Most Performed Composers of Concert Music in the United States." He has received four honorary doctorates, and appears as guest conductor and soloist with major orchestras around the world. Amram performed with Kerouac in the first ever jazz-poetry show in 1957, but the music and poetry guru is known in Portsmouth, as well. The maestro has appeared at all three Jazzmouth festivals since 2005, and the man known as "Pops-A-Roonie" will be back in April 2008 to perform at number four.

Kerouac's worldwide appeal was evident in Amram's Friday night concert, which featured Native American flute music and fast Middle Eastern rhythms, as well as classic jazz numbers like "Take the A Train" and Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time." It also featured a Chinese sing-along.

"I got to visit China because of Jack. They love his work over there," Amram told crowd members as he taught them the funny-sounding words. "Next week I'm going to England, where they will celebrate him at the London Library."

Jack Kerouac, who was born into a French-Canadian family in Lowell, would have turned 85 this year, had he not died in 1969 at the age of 47. It was in April 1951 that Kerouac typed out his post-war tales of hitchhiking, railroad riding and driving across the country with Neal Cassady, weaving jazz music sensations and spiritual realizations into a long, single-spaced paragraph on thin sheets of paper, fastened together to make a 120-foot scroll. (He didn't like to interrupt his flow by changing paper.)

When Jim Irasy, owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team, bought the famous scroll for $2.43 million in 2001, it was the highest price ever paid for a literary document. The scroll has been on exhibit in Lowell all summer, part of an American tour honoring the 50th anniversary of the release of "On the Road." It heads down to the New York Public Library next.

"On the Road" is one of the most influential books ever written. As Kerouac's friend Joyce Johnson recalled in an article published in Smithsonian magazine this year, "Who could have predicted that an essentially plotless novel about the relationship between two rootless young men who seemed constitutionally unable to settle down was about to kick off a culture war that is still being fought to this day?"

It continues to sell thousands of copies every year, guiding new generations of readers to self-discovery and enlightenment. "He's survived the test of time," Amram told his audience last weekend. "Something that's beautiful stays beautiful ... People read it and pass it on, and today, all of his books are in print all over the world in all kinds of languages."

Actor John Ventimiglia, of HBO's "The Sopranos," later climbed the stage to join the Amram Quintet, which also included Jerry Dodgion on saxophone, John Dewitt on bass, Kevin Twigg on percussion and David's son Adam Amram on congas. In a clear, deep voice, sounding much like Kerouac himself, Ventimiglia brought the author's words to life, sending urgent sounds echoing through the nighttime streets of Lowell.

"There's always more, a little further--it never ends," the actor read. "They sought new phrases. They tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every now and then, a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men's souls to joy. They found it, they lost it, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned and Neal sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go..."

Ventimiglia, who narrated an audio book of the newly released "scroll" version of "On the Road," smiled when asked about the enduring appeal of Kerouac's writing. "He has joy in his words, exuberance. He goes right for the heart, like when kids meet and play together. He holds nothing back."

Sunday's concert at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre also featured Kerouac's words, along with Amram's symphonic mastery. A whiter-haired crowd filled the seats of the theater for a classical and jazz tribute concert featuring Amram's Kerouac-inspired compositions. "Giants of the Night--Concerto for Flute and Orchestra" was commissioned and premiered by Sir James Galway with the Louisiana Philharmonic in 2002. The "giants" celebrated in the work's three movements are Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac and Dizzy Gillespie.

Fenwick Smith, longtime flutist with the Boston Symphony, performed exquisite solos as the orchestra produced lush and emotional stirrings on strings, horns, harp and percussion instruments. "Kerouac used to sing French Canadian folk songs he learned as a child in Lowell to me," Amram told the crowd. "These same songs I learned from him are contained in the second movement of my flute concerto."

Amram praised Lowell's John Sampas, brother of Kerouac's wife, Stella, for ably guiding the Kerouac legacy as executor of the estate. "He's finally attained the recognition for Kerouac's work that it deserves," Amram said.

Poet Lawrence Carradini (president of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, which runs annual events honoring its hometown writer, scheduled for Oct. 4-7 this year) took center stage on Sunday. Accompanied by Amram music that was first premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington with the National Symphony, Carradini gave a reading from the end of "On the Road," heightened in emotion by the beautiful symphonic music.

"Tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know God is Pooh bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody knows what's going to happen to anyone besides the forlorn rags of growing old," Carradini read.

As he raced to catch a plane to perform with Willie Nelson at Farm Aid in New York City, Amram offered some final thoughts about the tribute to his friend. "Jack and I often dreamed of putting his work to symphonic music," he said. "I just wish he could have been here with us to hear it done so beautifully."

You can get a sense of the breadth and diversity of David Amram's career from his recent composition "Giants of the Night." Each of the movements is dedicated to an artistic "giant" whom Amram knew and worked with. The first and third movements are dedicated, respectively, to two bebop innovators: Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The second is a remembrance of Jack Kerouac and interweaves two French-Canadian folk songs that Kerouac taught him. "He used to sing them to me, usually very late at night," Amram recalls over the phone.

You wouldn't normally associate any of those figures with the cultural corpus we call classical music. Yet each left a strong mark on Amram and on his colorful and accessible music, long famous for taking materials from jazz, folk, blues, and whatever else crosses his path. A New York Times reviewer said some years ago, "Mr. Amram was multicultural before multiculturalism existed."

It is the Kerouac connection that brings him to Lowell this weekend for events marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of "On the Road." This evening he plays a free jazz concert with his quintet at Boarding House Park. Then on Sunday at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, the New England Orchestra plays "Giants of the Night," with Fenwick Smith as soloist, as well as two other Amram works: "Classical Jack," two settings from "On the Road" for narrator and strings (with "Sopranos" actor John Ventimiglia narrating); and a work written in memory of the great Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo, in which Amram's trio will play with the orchestra. Kay George Roberts conducts.

Amram's musical achievement is substantial. He has written more than a hundred compositions in many genres, including the classic score to John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate." He's played hundreds (if not thousands) of jazz gigs and has a busy conducting career. Yet increasingly, it is his friendship with Kerouac that gets top billing. The two met in 1956 and pioneered the spontaneous jazz-spoken word performances that would become a hallmark (and later a cliché) of the Beat movement. Amram also wrote the score to the famous underground film "Pull My Daisy," starring Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg and featuring Kerouac's dreamy, free-flowing narration. Yet if the 76-year-old Amram's own accomplishments are being somewhat overshadowed by his association with the now-canonized Kerouac, it doesn't bother him in the least. It is, he says, a small price to pay for seeing his friend's work finally being taken seriously.

"Until the last 10 or 15 years, he wasn't recognized as a unique voice in American literature," he says. "Now people are so interested in Kerouac that they're happy to speak to or know anyone who was alive that played and worked with him. So I'm thrilled to see that Jack, who died almost penniless and with all of his books out of print, is now being appreciated."

Of course, palling around with Beat writers and using folk and jazz elements as compositional material weren't really anyone's idea of what a composer should be in the 1950s, when music schools were largely turning to serialism.

"Rather than trying to do what everyone was being told we should do, I more or less harkened back to an older, 18th- and 19th-century idea of writing what touched your heart, and what you knew and felt that you would like to hear the most," he says.

He remembers when his first pieces were played, when the approachability and openness of his music led him to be branded a reactionary, a strange label for a supposed "Beat composer." "I said, 'Jack, can you believe it? I'm being called a conservative!' We both thought that was hilarious," Amram recalls with much laughter.

He never put much stock in the "multicultural" or "eclectic" labels, either. By incorporating other musical traditions into "classical" works, he was simply doing what his friends were doing. He recalls Parker advising him to listen to the English composer Frederick Delius and Gillespie expressing his admiration for Stravinsky and Bach.

The composer puts it this way: "Really good musicians always pay attention to anything and everything and try to have an open mind and be receptive to all things in life and music."

One of the great pleasures of talking to Amram is hearing him spin out stories about his colleagues in his deep, mellow voice. He recalls a friendly skirmish between Lawrence's Leonard Bernstein and Lowell's Kerouac over which city had the better high school football team (Kerouac: "We always beat them, effortlessly!") and a 1977 trip to Cuba with Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Earl "Fatha" Hines, when they were among the first Americans to visit the island since 1961.

Amram won't be sticking around after Sunday's concert; instead, he's jumping on the shuttle to New York, where he'll be playing with Willie Nelson at Farm Aid. Yet he's grateful to return to his friend's birthplace, especially to hear "Giants of the Night" and the folk songs that Kerouac taught him many moons ago.

"He learned [them] in Lowell as a kid," he says, "So in a certain sense, it's almost as if I'm bringing that part of the piece home to where it came from."

There was that week, five years ago, that history will remember for the panic and the sweat of fear. It will recall the smell of death, the sorrow and the pounding drums sounding the noise of war.

Here, there was silence. Quiet, but not calm. The kind of silence that fills an empty room after the party has ended and everyone has gone home; when all that remains are the lipstick traces on empty glasses and the lingering stench of crowded ashtrays hovering in the air.

Ten million astrologers, but no one could say that something bad was coming? A truck backfires on the corner of Broadway and Caroline Street. People waiting at the crosswalk flinch. Some visibly jump. The ones who do talk about it are reduced to muttered nuances: Aw, Christ. Ah. God. Oh, no.

While the schools try to deal with the dilemma of shielding the students, or talking them through it, society itself seems unsure about whether it should go into lock-down mode, or power up and mobilize.

Fight and flight. At night, the only sound in the sky is the rumble of fighter jets patrolling heaven, two F-14's at a time. There was the silence and there was David Amram.

It was Amram's friend and co-collaborator Jack Kerouac who tagged him with the nickname 'Sunny Dave' nearly a half-century earlier. It was when the two were young men focused on recreating American music and the spoken word with something that was later called The Beat Generation.

Kerouac reached his creative peak in the 1950s. He would not live to see the 1970s. Amram survived and his list of collaborators would grow.

Leonard Bernstein to Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg to Arthur Miller, Willie Nelson to Sonic Youth to Frank McCourt. He would compose more than 100 works, stand as conductor for major music festivals in Brazil and Cuba and Kenya and Egypt, and score songs for the films 'Splendor in the Grass' and 'The Manchurian Candidate.'

After all this, from being a young man in a one-room apartment in lower Manhattan to a grown man in his 70s cultivating organic vegetables on his upstate farm, he remained Sunny Dave. And tragedy or not, he was honoring his commitments.

Five days after the towers collapsed in lower Manhattan, with the rubble of concrete and dust and twisted metal still smoldering, David Amram walked into Shepard Park and onto the stage at the Lake George Jazz Festival. More than 2,000 people assembled on the sprawling lawn. For many, it was the first time they had been to a public place since that miserable day.

Amram bowed humbly to the crowd and turned around to face the 36-members of the Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra. He picked up his conductor's baton and led the ensemble into a musical opening of 'The Star Spangled Banner.' On the sloping hill of the grassy park some instinctively saluted, Many cried and behind the bandstand, on the waters of Lake George where the music was carried, passing boats slowed to a stop and started waving small red, white and blue flags that they held in their hands Amram conducted the Glens Falls Symphony through an orchestral set of classical music. The audience watched and enjoyed. The stage was cleared and he introduced the T.S. Monk Sextet.

Amram sat in and improvised jazz riffs. The audience watched and enjoyed this as well.

Blessed with an amazing talent of inspired musical coordination, Amram invited both jazz ensemble and symphony orchestra onto the stage to play together.

It was a refined orchestra. It was free jazz. It was an exhilarating collaboration - past and future -- of the blending styles of the world It was Sunny Dave's gift to America and the music that broke the silence.

Tommy Goodman and David Amram have their own comfortable rhythm -- so comfortable that they don't need to practice before Sunday's jazz performance at The Turning Point in Piermont.

"We're not even going to rehearse, we come from a common place," says Putnam Valley's Amram.

They met almost 50 years ago, when a mutual friend "used to rave to me about what a great performer he was, doing classical and jazz," says Amram.

There was a time when jazz wasn't a respectable pursuit, so no classical musician learned jazz or admitted to wanting to play jazz.

"David Amram and I have classical backgrounds," says Nyack's Goodman, who studied piano with Paul Hindemuth and Nadia Boulanger, who taught Aaron Copeland and was a friend of Stravinsky. "I was very lucky," says Goodman. "I had the GI Bill and got to study in France with her (after World War II) then with Hindemuth in the U.S.

Goodman is composing an opera, and Amram is doing "Symphonic Variations on a Song By Woodie Guthrie" for the Guthrie Foundation. His other composition, recently finished, is a book titled "Nine Lives of a Musical Cat," due out in 2007.

Amram will open on Sunday: "I'll be playing French horn, assorted pennywhistles, the shanai -- a Middle Eastern ancient oboe; dumbek -- a Middle Eastern drum; piano and Latin percussion."

Pianist Goodman, bassist Mark Hagan and drummer Charlie Descarfino will join Amram for some jazz standards and Goodman originals. After Goodman, Hagan and Descarfino play, Amram will join them to close the show.

"We'll be doing classic pieces like 'Autumn Leaves,' a work by Thelonius Monk; a song I wrote with words by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neil Cassady for the film 'Pull My Daisy' -- I was in the film. I make up words on the spot," Amram says.

"Playing at The Turning Point, you get energy and never get composer's or writer's block," he says. "When you play you are replenished."

"My late wife and I played at The Turning Point 25-30 years ago when it was at Xavier's current location," he says. "I was doing commercials and I used to stop there on Fridays as a decompression point. So we agreed to split the cost of an electric piano, and Lisa and I played classical -- she played recorder. After dinner, they had a house rhythm section and we invited friends to have a jam session on Sundays. We did it for four, five years, then stopped because we got busy."

Local performances have been satisfying for musicians for centuries, Amram says.

"Mozart played in cafes, Brahms, Beethoven did it," he says. "Doing something regional is the most important. Every place I've been, there's a (growing) sense of small is beautiful. You don't have to play a stadium to have something wonderful happen."

"One of the joys is to work with young people. When they see older people working and enjoying what they do, it's very beneficial," he says.

He recalled seeing the old pros like Tommy Dorsey when he got interested in jazz and how they fostered young musicians.

"Tommy Dorsey was so grateful when people would walk in -- he created such a great atmosphere," he says. "Being with him was a crash course in everything. Our conservatory was hanging out with older people. We went to the 'University of Hangouttology.' We're graduates, active members and students."

So, he asks, "how do you get people interested in music? Go out and play it so they feel comfortable with it."

Years ago...I would have known that David Amram was playing The Cornelia Street Café by hanging out at The Kettle Of Fish or The Gaslight Cafe. David would have come bounding in with all his enthusiasm and told me in person. Then, the lot of us would have told a few stories and shared a few songs. David could always ignite a group of people wherever he went. This time, he contacted me by email. Not as much fun, but it works.

The feeling that 'somehow it's gotten away from us all' is common among old hipsters and artists from the fifties and sixties. Last Monday evening, at The Cornelia Street Café, David Amram took the audience home again. Just in case you've never heard of him, David Amram is not an easy act to describe. He plays too many instruments to remember...he talks about his old pals Miles and Kerouac, recalling stories that spin you into yesterday with a warmth and love so genuine it escapes no one. His jazz is a wonderful mix of everything and everyone he has encountered.

Most Amram fans will agree that he has played and recorded with everyone great since time began. He becomes a member of the audience from the stage, and he does this every time he performs. His trio is excellent; his stage persona is the same persona you'd find if you ran into him while he was parking his car. In his seventies now, there's no stopping him, and you'd have to catch a show of his to understand what I mean.

I first met Mr. Amram at a Grove Press Party at The Village Gate...say...1972. There was shrimp the size of lobsters...and champagne, and nothing but top shelf booze. My girlfriend Cory and I dropped in to have a little fun. After people were done talking, the entertainment began. It was David Amram, and I'd never heard of him. His performance astounded me. He drew me in using no false effort, which so many performers fail to understand.

If you're going to tell stories and share experiences between songs, don't do it to increase the response from the audience when your songs are finished. Do it as he does it...make the stories and the songs one, and nobody does that better than David Amram. He's a classic, a treasure, and he's the genuine thing.

David is a performer constantly grateful for the musical life he's lived and continues to live. Each time he performs he shows us how it's done...he shows us that we can still be as happy as he is, and sometimes I think that's all he's trying to make us realize. From 'Take The A Train' to 'Pull My Daisy,' Amram gives us a verbal and musical tour of everything that was great about an era filled with legends, and what is still great about the world today.

David Amram performs at The Cornelia Street Café on Mondays...8:30 to 11PM. Do yourself a favor....
Randy Burns

The Hilton Head Orchestra's valentine to its audience was a heart-shaped "box" full of friendship, romance and passion.

Low-calorie but lush, the program looked at different aspects of love from a musical perspective, and made the orchestra's fans fall in love with it all over again.

Monday's program opened with David Amram's "Giants of the Night," a concerto for flute and orchestra commissioned by renowned flutist James Galway in 2002. Amram, who has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works, numerous film and Broadway scores, and two operas, has made some incredible friends in his life -- Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie and Jack Kerouac among them. Each movement of "Giants of the Night" pays homage to one of these men.

Conductor Mary Woodmansee Green described Amram, who attended the concert, as "truly a Renaissance man," and the concerto clearly integrated different musical ideas from a variety of cultures. Amram returned Green's compliment when speaking to the audience before the piece, calling Green, "a musician's musician, a conductor's conductor, and a true musical leader." He also praised guest flute soloist Mimi Stillman.

Just 24 years old, Stillman is one of the world's most highly-regarded flutists, and she played with poise and power. Her breath control was nothing short of astonishing, especially on two encore pieces she did throughout the evening which also required virtuosic finger work.

Not surprisingly, given its tribute to jazz and beat leaders of the 1950s, "Giants of the Night" showed a heavy jazz influence, especially in its first movement, "For Charlie Parker." The brass and woodwinds briefly served as human percussion instruments, clapping and snapping their fingers in syncopated rhythm.

The piece's second movement, dedicated to Kerouac, was very sweet, somewhat melancholy, and featured melodies from two traditional French Canadian songs that Amram has said Kerouac would sing to him "in the early morning hours." In a particularly lovely passage, Patricia Anderson's harp accompanied Stillman, who was then joined by Concertmaster Terry Moore in an achingly sweet, lullaby-like melody.

The third and final movement, dedicated to Gillespie, set toes tapping with Caribbean and Afro-Cuban rhythms from the percussion and brass sections. The percussion quite possibly were the MVPs of the night: Ray McClain, Principal timpani, Stephen Primatic, Principal percussion, Hisayo Ermoli (a new face who really worked the cymbals), Matthew Fallin, and Ryan Leveille.

Stillman performed a brief, extraordinary encore, Paganini's Caprice No. 5 in A Minor, "stolen" she said, from the original arrangement for violin.

I am so proud of the Key West Council on the Arts Impomptu Concerts. Sunday was the very best.The Renaissance Classical Orchestra played to a packed house with the remarkable David Amram conducting.

David is as good a musician as exists, and has an intriguing history. He and Jack Kerouac gave the first jazz/poetry reading in New York in 1957. He has done movies and Broadway productions and was chosen by Leonard Bernstein to be the first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic. His credentials would fill this newspaper.

The orchestra was made up of soloists playing together as one.This was the most exciting music I have ever heard.All of us pray that he'll come back.

What is Born of Spirit Is Spirit: It was the best- attended Impromptu Concert in all its 25 years of performances in Key West. The Renaissance Classical Orchestra at St. Paul's on Sunday was a huge hit, bringing the audience to its feet for both the concert and the encore.

The orchestra was led by David Amram, 75, fittingly described by the Boston Globe as "the Renaissance man of American music." His instruments include the French horn, piano, guitar, flutes and whistles and "a variety of folkloric instruments from 25 countries," he told Soundings this week. Amram enjoys rotating his players on each piece "so that everybody gets to be concert master and can choose their own soloists," he explained.

At the Key West concert, and at its Monday repeat in Marathon, Amram's son Adam played in the orchestra for Duke Ellington's "C Jam Blues." The youngest of his three grown children, Adam has his own band "but he's never been on the road with me with a classical orchestra before," said his dad.

Amram has composed hundreds of works, including the scores for movies such as "Splendor in the Grass" and "The Manchurian Candidate." Back in the early 1950s, he would often hear Charlie Parker play. Since then he has played with Charlie Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Dizzie Gillespie and Thelonius Monk. Amram is an icon to Soundings because he wrote the music for "Pull My Daisy," a 1959 movie written by Jack Kerouac and shot by Robert Frank in Alfred Leslie's Greenwich Village apartment. It went into minor release with John Cassavete's "Shadows".

The story of "hope bursting with poetry," "Pull My Daisy" starred poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky as "Allen," "Gregory" and "Peter," plus Amram as "Mezz McGillicuddy" and a French actress called Delphine Seyrig as a wife.

British critic Ian White called the film a "document of its own unraveling." American critics have been unkinder: "As fresh as a frozen green pea," said Parker Tyler.

Kerouac, of French Canadian ancestry, called the film "notre petit flic." It opens with a ditty written by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, composed by Amram and now a signature song for Anita Ellis, that begins and ends with:

Pull my daisy, tip my cup 
all my doors are open. 
Cut my thoughts for coconuts, 
all my eggs are broken 
Hop my heart song
harp my height
serpaphs hold me steady
hip my angel
hype my light
lay it on the needy

The music for "Pull My Daisy," recalled Amram, was made up of "the treasures of Europe and the marvels of the New World." He mixed Renaissance sounds with jazz. The "commonality" of Baroque music and jazz, added Amram, is their "purity of intent and an exquisite choice of notes. I think our concert in Key West helped to portray that, without my having to say it."

Jack Kerouac he remembers as a "deeply religious man, always searching for something. Amram composed an accompniament for string orchestra and narrator premiered at the Kennedy Center, with E.G. Marshall reading the &quot;Children of the American Night" section from the last page of "On the Road." Kerouac once told Amram, "You know, man, that passage was read by Sir Charles Laughton on the radio. It was so great! Better than anyone has done it." That cultured English accent, said Kerouac, made his words sound like the King James Bible.

Since Kerouac's death in 1969, at the age of 47, Amram has collaborated with Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein, Willie Nelson and Dustin Hoffman, among others. Last year he wrote a eulogy at the funeral of Lucien Carr, one of the founders of the Beat Generation who never wrote a word, with a quote from John 14: 1-6: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit."

Amram reminds those young people who wish they were around in the 1950s and '60s that Charlie Parker once wrote a classic called "Now's the Time." "This is the perfect time to be here," he declared, concluding our delightful conversation with, "Cheers to you and your family from that endless road."

The concert ... with David Amram conducting the Renaissance Classical Orchestra was the most enjoyable and meaningful one I've been to since I moved here eight years ago. The lovely timeless music of Hayden, Mozart, Bach and others reminded me of the hundreds of years that we have gotten pleasure and joy from listening to these pieces.

Mr. Amram's great charm and vigor at age 75, the young musicians clear adoration of him and the opportunity of so many musicians to do solos, reminded me of the endless passing of love and knowledge from one generation to another.

The exquisite beauty of the church, the timelessness of the music, and the pure enjoyment of watching people who clearly love what they do was so revitalizing to me in a year of great personal loss, a serious illness and flooding of my home. Thank you for the gift of renewal and peace.

As part of the continuing celebration of renowned musician David Amram and the late "Beat" poet, Jack Kerouac, an Interdisciplinary evening of film, music and poetry was presented at Schein Hall on Friday, January 27,2006.

David Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated for the first poetry-reading ever given in New York City in October of 1957. Tonight's participants included, David Amram playing piano, French born, penny whistles, bass ocarina, Lakota Courting flute, Shanai, dumbek, Latin percussion and improvised scat vocals, Vince Evans on acoustic double bass, Adam Amram on conga drums,with readers, Joe Pacheco, Jim Brock and Bill Highsmith.

The two hour first half of the evening's program started with Duke Ellington's theme, "Take The A Train." The, trio of piano, bass and congas was tastefully presented by the three musicians. Pianist Amram has a sensitive touch in both soloing and camping. His jazz phrases are well constructed and his bebop roots surface smoothly. Vince Evan's deep and resonant bass sound and excellent time was reminiscent of the great Ray Brown, The accents and embellishments of the congas contributed nicely to the overall presentation.

David Amram improvised on a solo penny whistle and then, with fingers flying madly, two penny whistles at the same time. It is amazing that he is able to sustain long eighth-note phrases with one breadth on both whistles. The texture changed as David and son traded 4s (four bars each) and then the same format followed with bass and piano. It was a pleasant jazz exchange and a preview of the camaraderie that was to follow.

The next selection was the showing of the 1959 film, "Pull My Daisy." The lyrics of the title song were by Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg and the music and improvised scat lyrics were by David Amram. Kerouac first coined the phrase, "Beat Generation" to label a literary and social movement in the '50s. The film was produced in a New York loft, from a Kerouac play about the Beat Generation.

As Kerouac provides a narrative storyline, straight society is represented by the bishop, his disapproving mother and prim sister, who are entertained with drinking, cussing, poetry, and jazz. David Amram blows a few jazz licks on his French horn.

Four selections from Jack Kerouac's, "On the Road: How Jazz/Poetry Was Born" were read along side original poetry written by Sannibel poets, Joe Pacheco, Jim Brock and Bill Highsmith. As David Amram and Vince Evans supplied a slow and easy blues, Joe Pacheco swayed rhythmically as he read Kerouac's, "Children of the American Bop Night."

Knighted by David Amram as "Poet Laureate of Sannibel," Joe Pacheco read his own poignant poem, "The Night Charlie Parker Played Tenor", a poem that received national coverage as it was heard over NPR Radio.

Jim Brock read Kerouac's poem, "On The Roof of America" to the accompaniment of David Amram playing the soothing and resonant bass ocarina. Jim Brock's poem, "Jim Otto's Dream" was accompanied by piano and bass in a freely improvised minor tonality that effectively established a dreamlike mood and enhanced Brock's touching poem.

Bill Highsmith read his poem, "Teen-ager 1970" to the piano and bass slow and bluesy accompaniment.

Kerouac's, "So in America" was read by Joe Pacheco and was followed by a sensuous reading of Joe Pacheco's poem, "Grand Popper Rap." Joe began the reading of his poem to the accompaniment of congas and small bongo type drums, A subdued Latin tinged beat developed and Joe swayed and gyrated rhythmically to this beat as he read his bebopish lyrical poem.

The first half closed with David, Neil and Adam playing the title song from, "Pull My Daisy" written by David and Jack Kerouac in 1959, Seated at the piano, David talks over his finger clicks and then accompanies himself singing, Vince Evans's bass walks and skips wondrously and then, much to my disbelief, David picks up his ice-cold French horn and starts playing bebop licks with no intonation problems and ends with scat singing like Bobby McFerrin, This man can do anything!

When David Amram is touted as a Renaissance man, they're not exaggerating. The pioneering jazz French horn player collaborated with writer Jack Kerouac, composed the music for "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Splendor in the Grass," and served as the first composer in residence for the New York Philharmonic.

Amram, who'll show off his versatility Jan. 14 in Olympia, also is quite adept at freestyle rap, though he wouldn't call it that.

The comparison is an apt one. A conversation with Amram is not unlike a Homeric epic: It's fascinating, but it's definitely not quick.

And that reminded him of a story. Amram was hanging out with Arlo Guthrie at a Woodstock reunion, and they ended up being interviewed by the media.

"Arlo gave great short answers," he said. "Then they asked me about the Beat generation and working with Kerouac and Charlie Parker. I gave this huge 30-minute answer, and the folks were sitting there with their eyes starting to glaze over, saying, 'Well, that's the most fascinating thing I ever heard.'

"Arlo said: 'That James Joycean Birdland rap was fantastic, but this is the age of the soundbite,' " Amram recalls. "He said it in an affectionate way.

Although he's better connected than Kevin Bacon -- he's worked with everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Willie Nelson -- Amram also is most down-to-earth.

An e-mail sent to his publicist got lost in the holiday rush, but a follow-up contact resulted in an immediate phone call from the man himself. "I don't know why they didn't just give you my home phone number," he said in the lengthy voice-mail message.

"Andre Segovia was listed in the phone book in 1955 when I came to New York," he added. "Dizzy Gillespie, whom I played with for almost 50 years, used to hand out his card to everyone. I never thought it was something mysterious. I'm listed in the phone book."

Amram enjoyed some down time during the holidays -- relatively speaking. "I'm thrilled to be home, not on an airplane or at an airport," he said. "I have deadlines for a book I'm writing and a symphony I'm writing, but I actually have time to talk to you like a normal person."

The book, Amram's third, is an autobiography to be titled "Nine Lives of a Musical Cat." And from the summary he gives, it sounds like a lengthy one. (The first volume of his autobiography, "Vibrations," is 480 pages.)

"My hope is that the book will show anybody -- whether in the arts or not -- that by working hard and paying attention and being in the phone book of life with a listed number, you can have a very rewarding life," he said. "I just turned 75 and still continue to be educated."

Amram ended the conversation as many performers do -- "If you're at the show, come say, 'Hi' " -- but he added a postscript: "I'll be the senior citizen wearing all the beads."

This weekend, Cork will learn the David Amram formula -- music that sounds composed but is created on the spot. It's accessible and fun, he tells Dave Sanbrook.

With only weeks until David Amram turns 75, you would think he had pretty much done it all. He has played and recorded with some of the greatest names in jazz, composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, as well as written operas, numerous theater and film scores, and two books. Described by the Boston Globe as "the Renaissance man of American music," Amram has collaborated with the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Jack Kerouac and Dizzy Gillespie. He's a multitalented, multi-instrumentalist, and his expertise in a range of folkloric instruments from around the globe prompted the New York Times to label Amram "multicultural before multiculturalism existed."

Despite portraying Mezz McGillicuddy, a French horn-playing Irishman, in the classic 1959, Kerouac-narrated film, Pull My Daisy, and despite spending a large part of the 1970s playing at Malachy McCourt's Bells of Hell, and in the back-room of the famous Lion's Head with The Chieftains and The Irish Rovers, Amram has never been to Ireland.

"I've been waiting to go to Ireland all my life," he says. "Given the Celtic influences that I've used on many of my compositions, it's something of a Mecca for me. With artists like my old friends McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, John Faddis and Ron Carter, the Cork Festival promises to be a fabulous seven-course banquet. I hope that my participation, if nothing else, provides a wonderful antipasto. I think my role will be as an ambassador for jazz, so that whatever music people come to listen to, I can express the philosophy of jazz - spontaneous music, created on the spot, but sounding composed, and all done in an accessible and enjoyable way."

A more approachable or qualified musical envoy would be difficult to find. The first thing you notice about Amram is the extraordinary accumulation of beads and chains around his neck which are an indication of both his creativity and eccentricity. He dresses smartly in a jacket and tie, but teams them with blue jeans. Having been raised in a musical family on a farm in Pennsylvania, it's not surprising that he is turned out like the veritable country gentleman.

"When I was six, my father bought me a bugle. The first time I played a note I felt something - I didn't know what - but something really special. My uncle, a merchant seaman, took me to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra with the great Leopold Stokowski conducting, and later Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. Because he had travelled all over the world, he made me aware of the fact that all kinds of music were part of the language. You may never be able to speak 30 different languages, but with music you always have a way of speaking and being spoken to."

At a time when segregation was still the norm in the US, Amram's family moved to a "checkerboard neighbourhood" of Washington DC. "I was invited to a kid's party where I met a man called Louis Brown, I didn't know it at the time but he was Duke Ellington's mentor. He invited me to play with him and his band. So here I was, this 12-year-old boy, sitting in with these fantastic musicians. I was encouraged to fit in to a different world where you take a chance, where you dare like a tightrope walker, where you improvise."

Two years later braces forced Amram to change to the French horn, which saw him relocated to the centre of the school orchestra. The upshot, he says, was that it enabled him to better appreciate all of the other instruments around him. Amram was one of the first to improvise jazz on the French horn, and his embryonic career saw him jamming with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

In 1952, having graduated from university with a degree in history, Amram was drafted into the army and stationed in Germany. He played with the Seventh Army Symphony and when his two years were up, he spent a year in Paris writing symphonic music during the day and playing jazz clubs at night. It was here that Amram made his first commercial recording with Lionel Hampton. Amram returned to the US in 1955 to study at the Manhattan School of Music, and the Charles Mingus jazz quintet he played in after-hours attracted a following which included Miles Davis, Larry Rivers and Jack Kerouac.

"In 1956 I was at a party and this man came up to me and said, 'Play with me'. He started reading something and I began playing. That was the first time I played with Kerouac and it felt exactly the same as when I first played with some of the great jazz musicians. The collaborations that followed developed into what became known as jazz/poetry. We shared the philosophy that formal works of art could be inspired by spontaneous collaborations celebrating the beauty of commonplace experiences."

Amram was chosen by Leonard Bernstein to be first ever Composer-in-Residence for the New York Philharmonic in 1966. He has appeared as guest conductor and soloist with major orchestras all over the world, and was recently appointed artistic director and conductor of the Renaissance Chamber Orchestra. In 2004 demand for Amram's recorded work saw the soundtrack for the film, The Manchurian Candidate, and his Holocaust opera, The Final Ingredient, released more than 40 years after he had composed them. James Galway doesn't intend to wait as long, with plans afoot to record the critically acclaimed flute concerto, Giants of the Night, which Amram wrote for him in 2001.

As well as working on his third book, Nine Lives of a Musical Cat, Amram is composing Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woodie Guthrie, and collaborating with Frank McCourt on Missa Manhattan, a work celebrating the myriad of cultures which have influenced New York over the past 300 years. "I'm working harder now than at any stage of my life, and I find that each day I enjoy creating and sharing music more than ever. I hope I can inspire others to dare to dream the way I was encouraged, and to contribute something positive to make the world even just a little bit better for the future." David Amram lectures at the Guinness Festival Club at the Gresham Metropole Hotel, Cork on Saturday.

David Amram, prolific composer, multi-instrumentalist, one of the last surviving members of the beat generation, is a man whose contribution to the world of music is considerable. Almost 75 years old, he remains a force to be reckoned with. The description "The Renaissance man of American music" is apt given the sheer number of different musical genres he has influenced. From jazz to folk to punk to film scores and opera, the list is broad, and Amram, with close friend the legendary author Jack Kerouac, invented jazz/poetry.

Speaking with David in San Jose, California he tells me that to him jazz means: "Spontaneity, freedom and celebrating a moment in a way that will never be duplicated. Jazz is wide-open music that deals with the spontaneity of beauty. The masters would encourage anyone to participate and feel welcome."

"When I was a little boy I met some of the people who were the founders of what was called jazz. The music took place in less than a century. Thelonious Monk told me in 1955. Someday jazz will be appreciated all over the world and I hope every country will make their own contribution and know the roots and tradition and not only copy what we've done. The amazing thing is this is what has happened."

Amram is well qualified to recount his generation's special relationship with the jazz phenomenon. But as he explains, Kerouac represented the key to the marriage of two cultural forces. He recalls: "Specifically Jack Kerouac, without whom the beat generation would never have existed, was himself a very gifted jazz singer and he was a reporter of our time. Just like James Joyce he captured the special sounds of a special time and place. Jack saw the aesthetic as well as the spiritual, enduring, value of jazz. He also loved Bach and heard the similarities in the perfect choice of notes to the spontaneous solos of Charlie Parker."

Jack Kerouac and David Amram were close friends and performed together on countless occasions. Amram reflects on what was a special relationship from the beginning: "It was just like the first time I played with Charlie Parker (saxophonist and one of jazz music's tragic heroes) and Dizzy Gillespie (iconic trumpet player), he was a natural. He brought something out in me that was there and I was able to tune in and bring something out in him. All the times we played together we never rehearsed and it came out perfectly. Jack would read and play piano and I would scat, sing or make up rhymes spontaneously. It was like the forerunner to rap."

David intersperses his recollection with memories of a recent encounter that, judging by his reaction, he finds quite amusing. "At a recent performance this young twenty-two year old came up to me and said 'You are the best seventy-four year old rapper I have ever heard.'"

Asked how he and Kerouac created the New York jazz/poetry movement, Amram explains that the roots of their idea lay in an almost mischievous attitude the duo possessed. He admits: "We used to do it just for fun on park benches, in coffee houses and at other peoples parties until we were asked to leave.

A great friend of ours (poet) Frank O'Hara tried to get the Museum of Modern Art in New York to stage some of our work but they thought we were too young, too crazy and too unknown. So Frank decided we should do it downtown in Greenwich Village where we lived. We ended up creating something that became a fad for a while with anybody coming up and screaming into a microphone in front of a band that would be playing as loud as possible. It was the New York fashion of the month and ended up dying a natural death. It also influenced both Ray Manzeric and Jim Morrison."

Amram has written and performed the scores for a number of Broadway shows and films including 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate. Asked how he would approach such a mammoth undertaking, he discloses: "What I did was I watched the film and instinctively followed where it seemed that music could enhance the musicality that was already there." I always used the two precious maxims 'Less is More,' and 'When In Doubt Leave It Out.'"

Amram also collaborated with writer Arthur Miller. "I did music for his play After The Fall in 1964. Amazingly enough he and the director wanted a Jazz score. One of the stars of the play was actor Jason Robarts Jnr. We would always go to old Irish bars and Jason would sing there until the early hours of the morning."

David has a great love of Irish music. Asked what this can be attributed to he reveals: "I used to hang out with Frank McCourt and Bernard Shaw in a place in Greenwich Village called Bells of Hell run by Mallachy McCourt. I learned a great deal about Irish music in New York. I always loved Sean O'Riada's music. The extraordinary thing is Irish music has been preserved in the states."

A great ambassador of jazz, Amram has written something especially for his Cork performance. In the spirit of Charlie Parker it is entitled "The Blues From New York Finds The Fox Hunt In Cork". He describes it as mixing: "A slip-jig and Afro Cuban Blues... Charlie Parker used to do things like that!" he adds.

NIU's guest recitalist, veteran world music composer, performer and conductor, was introduced by friend and NIU jazz professor, Fareed Haque, as "the incredible, unstoppable, unbeatable, David Amram."

Amram, who has persevered for more than half a century in the professional symphony circuit, was an integral member of what now is known as the late '50s "Beat" movement and has the good grace to be able to list American literary-giant Jack Kerouac as one of his dearest friends.

A world music aficionado in the truest sense of the word, Amram attacked the aural senses of his audiences Monday and Tuesday night with spoken word - scat, poetry, prose, improv - and music such as folkloric, classical, Afro/Cuban, Irish and jazz.

The original 1962 "Manchurian Candidate," score written and conducted by Amram, was screened to a small, devout audience Monday. This was followed by an in-depth dissertation and question and answer concerning his musical manifesto, "purity of intent" and "exquisite choice of notes" and how his world music roots made the inspired score possible.

Haque, Amram and others then went to The House Café, 263 E. Lincoln Highway, owned by Haque, to catch the back end of the "Poetry Slam."

The poetry reading was concluded by Amram giving an impromptu speech about himself, Kerouac and the "Beats," a name and category Amram railed against every time the word came to pass.

"We were just people who came together to inspire and be inspired by each other; it was only later that kids would go and buy all-black clothing and walk into depressing poetry readings with their bongos, still with the price tag on the side," Amram said.

Amram took to the piano, one of the instruments under his control, and initiated a performance of beat-classic "Pull my Daisy" with a near five-minute improvised rhyme, "ode to poetry" and played the folksy, jazz song with lyrics by Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

The consensus among the energized poets at The House Café was DeKalb poetry slam history was being made, and Amram's praise of the local poetry reading tradition left the room buzzing hours after he left the stage.

At 11 a.m., Amram spoke to students at an all-school lecture in preparation for his 6:30 p.m. guest recital in the spacious concert hall.

"You have to take him with an open mind, he seems like a goofy guy, kind of in the moment," Haque said. "But if you listen to his serious orchestra pieces, you can hear there's a very serious undercurrent."

The concert, "From Cairo to Kerouac," took listeners first through '50s America with works by Thelonious Monk and Amram performed in an informal jazz jam session and recitations from his book, "Offbeat: Collaborations with Kerouac" and Kerouac's "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums."

Five flutes, one djembe and many Indian-inspired scales later, the concert began to focus on Amram's critically-acclaimed orchestral pieces, which have been played in concert halls around the world. It included Native-American inspired tunes performed by Amram, Afro/Cuban/Irish jam sessions and a concerto for cello and piano by NIU faculty members Bill Koehler and Marc Johnson.

The concert brought together the growlingly popular ethnic themes with European music's accessible sensibilities.

"The concert ran like a cultural variety show: rants, readings, jazz music, classical music and philosophy," said Madeline Fairbanks, a sophomore fine arts major.

The last two days of culture can be attributed to the social tendencies of Haque and his ability to make friends and bring around some of the larger names in the professional music field.

"We met when I was in the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and David was the conductor," Haque said. "We both loved jazz, world and classical music, which in those classical circles wasn't very common. We had the same agenda."

Haque has brought many important musicians to DeKalb either to perform at The House Café or give guest recitals NIU would not have been able to acquire alone.

The "Deranged French Hornist," a nickname given to Amram by Kerouac, was a gift to all the students who took the opportunity to see a world-renowned cultural figure brought to a town that's not likely to see such musical royalty very often.

Fighting for its niche in the cultural marketplace, Symphony Silicon Valley could hang on and play it safe, trotting out warhorses by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Dvorak and little else. This weekend it took a risk: It played symphonic jazz and it seemed all charged up. It was one of the orchestra's best programs yet.

Before Saturday night's first downbeat, the California Theatre's stage was as congested as crosstown streets at rush hour in Manhattan. A jazz quintet faced the audience. A few paces back stood guest conductor Paul Polivnick, with a woodwind quintet and a brass quintet seated in half-moon formation around him. Pushing back to the walls behind them were an additional 75 players, including a battery of percussionists.

Then came the music, bracing and bluesy, sharp-edged yet billowing with song. It was David Amram's "Triple Concerto," a work that bridges the 74-year-old composer's lifelong commitment to jazz, symphonic music (think Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith), and so-called "world music," especially from the Middle East. The three quintets are the "soloists" and Amram, a let's-go-crazy improviser, was originally to have been the pianist in the jazz quintet as well as the Pakistani flute soloist in the final cadenza.

He didn't make it to SSV's performances (the program repeated Sunday) due to another commitment; the Guiness Jazz Festival in cork Ireland was honoring Amram, whose resumé includes collaborations with Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. He deserves the honor. But his absence didn't matter much. This was Polivnick's fourth stint as guest conductor with the orchestra and he has clearly established a rapport with the players. With less than a week of rehearsals, he managed to tame this beast of a piece; the orchestra gave it a surging performance. And the soloists -- watch out.

Alto saxophonist Bill Trimble, in a farewell performance (he is leaving the area after 38 years as first-call saxophonist with SSV and the old San Jose Symphony), was beguiling: pearly-toned and blues-tinged.

Baritone saxophonist Aaron Lington was revelatory. He obviously relishes the beautiful, blustery bark of his instrument and his solos careened through the music, rubbing against the orchestra. If there were any problems, it had to do with the California.

A mid-sized hall with a "hot" acoustic, it was at times so swamped with sound that hearing the work's intricacies was difficult. The playing seemed spot-on. Zipping solos rocked against one another in the woodwind and brass quintets, creating seesaw tension. The jazz rhythm section was on-the-money, helping the orchestra swirl through the jazz waltz and elegant, midnight-in-Manhattan melodies of the first two movements. They bear Mingus' mark, at once delicate and blustery.

The third movement is inspired by Egyptian and Armenian rhythm and melody, but pays homage to lots of traditions: South Asian, Celtic, klezmer, even American Indian. In the past, his Pakistani flute solos in this movement have been go-for-broke affairs -- happy, spirited showmanship. So you had to feel sorry for piccolo specialist Mimi Carlson as she walked on stage to take his place.

But no sympathy was necessary. Carlson filled the theater with wild over-blowing, buzzed notes, half-sung tones, and her own percussive accompaniment -- created by clacking the pads of her instrument's keys -- to the movement's dancing theme song. She was terrific.

After intermission, came music by Duke Ellington -- and a new conductor, Dennis Wilson, a virtuoso trombonist who spent years with Count Basie, Gillespie and others. Well-known locally for his work at the San Jose Jazz Festival, he was presumably brought in to lend idiomatic legitimacy to Ellington's breathtaking "Black, Brown, & Beige." That 1943 suite is ripe with blues feeling, proud strutting rhythms, and dignified African-American church sounds. It was warming just to hear Ellington's outrageously gorgeous melodies.

The program closed with Polivnick returning for Gershwin's "An American in Paris." This one sparkled, mostly. Lit up with solos by concertmaster Robin Mayforth and principal trumpeter Jim Dooley, it sent the audience happily packing. Symphonic jazz -- not too much of a risk, after all.

Using music and oral narrative, Embassy-sponsored composer/author David Amram wove an engaging tale of American cultural diversity in a stage-light centerpiece performance to kick off the 26th annual conference of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies in Braga, Portugal on April 21.

Under the theme "50 Years of Excellence and Idealism," Amram used himself as an example to show the audience of approximately 350 how thousands of America's best and most influential artistic creators impacted the evolution of American culture in the last half of the 20th century. Augmenting his stories with instruments, such as the piano, flute, Arab drums and Hindu tabla, he provided the captivated American Studies Conference audience with a dynamic and real representation of the beauty of American culture.

In response to popular acclaim form conferees, Amram agreed to a second performance April 23 featuring different vignettes and incorporating a short film. The second performance was attended be over 200 conferees.

Amram's interventions generated praise from numerous participants, particularly influential American Studies scholars, who congratulated the Embassy for sponsoring this colorful artist and conversationalist.

There's no doubt that much of the music pumped out by multinational record companies is crap. It's pre-packaged musical junk food, a steady diet of which has given listeners a sort creative of acid-reflux disease, kind of like what Ashlee Simpson uses as an excuse for lip-synching. If you want good music these days, you're not going to find it on MTV or on one of Clear Channel's innumerable radio stations. You've got to dig around for it, ya dig?

But the eternal search for soulful sounds can often lead to gems right in your own backyard. During the first weekend of the month, the Seacoast Guitar Society will host its second annual guitar festival, featuring performances by some of the country's best talent, including Harvey Reid, Chris Kleeman, Andrew Calhoun and others.

Two weeks later, Larry Simon, Groove Bacteria front man and host of Beat Night at the Press Room, will gather the region's jazz musicians and poets together for Jazzmouth, one of the rare jazz-poetry festivals in the nation. Festival organizers like Reid and Simon aren't putting on these shows for riches or accolades. They're doing it to celebrate local artists, save music from mediocrity and call attention to a pair of art forms that are undeservedly on the fringes of mainstream music.

wizards wanted
the second annual Seacoast Guitar Festival brings the best back home
by Keith Demanche

There are as many ways to play guitar as there are fingers in the world, and almost as many types and incarnations of the stringed instrument: banjo, mandolin, dulcimer, bass, acoustic and electric guitar, harp guitar, lute, dobro and on and on. The Seacoast Guitar Society's second annual festival plays host to eight performers who have played not only their fair share of the many varied guitars, but have also made names for themselves with their distinctive style and skill. It isn't often so many devotees to craft are brought together in Portsmouth for one event. There are well over 200 years of combined guitar mastery and knowledge on display. From the poetic stylings and considerable guitar skills of Andrew Calhoun to the innovative arrangements and lively performances of Mary Flower, there will be guitar wizards of all stripes performing.

"It's hard for people to believe that guitarists who usually play for 100 people in a coffeehouse are often a lot better players than even the best-known popular guitarists," said Reid, a national fingerpicking champion in his own right. "Eric Clapton and John Mayer are good guitarists, for example, but they can't even come close to doing the kinds of things Stephen Bennett does with a guitar. It's just the way it is. There is no merit system in the music business, and the cream does not float to the top."

a guitar society
Harvey Reid wants to use the skills and knowledge he's gained as a musician to make the Seacoast community a better place. "Instead of picking up trash on the beach, I put on concerts and workshops," he said. The Seacoast Guitar Society is his way of reaching out and giving back. And while musicians often gather to support each other and non-profits often put on shows, Reid wants his efforts to "promote and preserve guitar music," as the organization's mission states, not just raise money.

Is guitar music in danger of disappearing? Not really, as a listen to the radio can assure, but "America is a fame-driven place," Reid said, "and things in the mass-merchandised and mass-entertainment world tend to overwhelm things on the fringes. The big entertainment companies spend millions, maybe billions, promoting and selling their music, and it makes sense that some people like me have to drink some strong coffee and beat the drum for the lesser-known but artistically valid forms of music."

As part of the "below the radar" arts scene, Reid and co-producer Joyce Andersen (no slouch on the six-string herself) play festivals and concerts around the country and meet a lot of other artists they figure their friends at home would want to hear. How better to introduce them than by having a two-day guitar party? By really focusing on guitar playing skills as a criteria, they winnowed down a list of exceptional players. Andersen picks the lineup for Friday, which is songwriter night, and Reid chooses the lineup for Saturday, guitar night. To that end, the performers for this year's event are not only people they respect and enjoy seeing perform, but players who have the chops to enthrall an audience from opening note to grand finale.

playing is not just fun and games
"Music is like cooking because it always takes different ingredients to make a particular dish, just like playing a particular song," said Chris Kleeman, the headliner on Saturday night. "Some of my songs like to be served fried, some grilled, some spicy, some oven baked... some slow-cooked, and the ingredients are always a little different." Kleeman has played with legends like Buddy Guy and Koko Taylor, and blues maestro B.B. King produced Kleeman's debut album in 1970. He started playing when he was about 15, learning on a Gretsch electric and moving up to a Martin D-18 when he was 17 and not looking back. Though he's been on hiatus for some time, becoming known for his new role of chef, he found he couldn't resist the pull of the stage.

"I'm never happier than when I'm spanking the hell out of my 12-string or my National steel, and hearing and feeling the harmonic structure and overtones of the music. The acoustic groove is my absolute favorite. I'm drawn by the harmonic nature of the beast," Kleeman said. All of the festival's performers share that love of craft, and the zealous focus on minutiae that comes from serious immersion. When someone devotes their life to playing guitar, there's nothing too small or too difficult for them to focus on. Everyone has their own specialty, their own "thing," and self-set standards are pretty high.

"I'm a recent fiddle player, maybe 10 years... still in the awkward stage," said Friday night headliner Steve Gillette, a preeminent singer/songwriter whose songs have been recorded by the likes of Garth Brooks, Linda Ronstadt and Waylon Jennings. "I'm fond of saying that I quit the music business to become a songwriter, and I believe there's much more to learn." With his wife, Cindy Mangsen, he tries to push his limits to keep music stimulating, including a musical adaptation of a Mark Twain story, in between practicing the fiddle. "Someday, I hope to own a fine violin," he said, "I suspect that a 200-year-old Italian instrument might have that special voice I could grow into."

For Saturday night headliner Stephen Bennett, mastery of an instrument is not enough. He's won both the fingerpicking and flatpicking national titles on guitar, but is best known for his wizardry on the harp guitar, an asymmetrical beast that has 14 strings and an extra sound hole. The songs that come from his one instrument need to be seen to be believed. Reid, too, dabbles in a variety of stringed instruments. "Certain songs I like to play on mandolin or banjo or autoharp, but I usually play those instruments for a while and come home to the guitar," he said. "It is versatile and portable, and I can use it to accompany all manner of songs."

For Kleeman, who focuses on guitar, writing is the addiction instead of the instrument, and the instrumental song is the best way to express himself. "A song with lyrics is harder for me, as I'm always too critical of the words. But I always give an instrumental a title you can talk about, make jokes about, or just make conversation about my life and how it relates to the song." "Writing an instrumental is a whole different animal," agreed Reid. "It can take several hundred hours to write a guitar instrumental work. It can take a while to write a song (with lyrics), but instrumental music is composing, and often involves developing new techniques. It can take months to develop the skills and find the notes in a major work for guitar." Gillette and co-writer Mangsen spend months in the process of making drafts of songs for each other as well, tweaking and polishing the tunes until they feel just right. "I need to hear from the still, small voice, that faint, internal compass, and that does take some solitude and some time," Gillette said. But as for-hire songwriters, they need to include lyrics for their material and find it works best if both collaborators contribute to the music and the words to find the right atmosphere and emotion, not to mention some good guitar licks.

Look for frenzied fingers, laughs and high-level talent this weekend. With two nights of music and as many varied styles as will be showcased, there really is something for everyone. And for the techie set, there will be a free workshop with Harvey Reid on Thursday demonstrating and comparing the various acoustic instrument amplification technologies available today. The workshop will be held from 6-8 p.m. at Acoustic Outfitters, 72 Portsmouth Ave., Stratham Plaza, Stratham (603-778-9711).

THE CAPO
The capo is a device used to shorten the neck of a guitar, so to speak, and raise the pitch of what is played. The very first capo was invented in the mid 1700s. "Both the yoke capo with screw and the wooden Spanish capo cejilla were invented in the late 1700s. The yoke capo still looks the same, and the Spanish capo is still in use by Flamenco guitarists," notes the Sterner Capo Museum Web site (web.telia.com/~u86505074/capomuseum).

There are about 130 capo patents on the books, but very few reach the mainstream market. Probably the best capo invention was the W.H. Russel elastic capo, which is still in widespread use today after more than 70 years. Since then, capos have been fashioned out of plastic, held with clamps, screws and even Velcro, and designed for more and more eccentric styles.

There is even at least one capo invented by a Seacoast resident, the one and only Harvey Reid. "The partial capo is a new tool for doing cool things with the guitar. It changes the landscape of what's possible, very much like changing the tuning of the instrument but different." It uses moveable rubber stoppers at each of the string locations to hold down a string or let it ring. Basically, it gives the player an extra hand.

ALTERNATE TUNINGS
"Alternate tuning" is when a guitar is tuned to something other than "standard tuning," which is E A D G B E, from fattest string to thinnest. Alternate tuning is not a new concept. Its use can be documented as far back as the 1700s. Even before guitars had six strings, when they had either four or five, variations on the A D G B E tuning were used. Why is standard tuning standard? Well, because it is, that's why. And it sounds nice. Alternate tunings range from the somewhat obvious "open tuning," which is when the guitar is tuned to play a chord when strummed, such as Open C, or Open D, to the weird: A A D G C D on Peter Mulvey's "Rapture" for instance. Many, many players use different tunings today to make complex fingering easier or to get a personal sound. There are also cool regional names for these different tunings: sebastopol, vestapol, sawmill, slack-key and cross-note, to name a few. So the next time you find a tuning you like, name it and tell your friends!

the beat goes on
Jazzmouth celebrates poetry, jazz and all things hep
by Larry Clow

The beat spirit as we know it-smoky Manhattan bars, impromptu jazz riffs and bursts of poetry that seem to spring forth from the ether, perfectly formed and complementary to each other, only to dissipate fully and forever after the last notes and syllables fall into silence-got its official start almost 50 years ago at the Brata Art Gallery in New York. It was October 1957, and for its "founders," musician David Amram and author Jack Kerouac, it wasn't a new movement or genre or anything out of the ordinary. It was music. It was poetry. It just was. "Phillip Lamntia had the idea of calling it 'jazz poetry trio' because they wanted to call it something. It was just something we did. We didn't want to call it anything," Amram said in a recent interview with The Wire.

That "something" was the fusion of Kerouac's writing and Amram's music. It started out at "parties, park benches, wherever we were," Amram said, and after the performance at the Barta Gallery, it moved to Circle In The Square, a club in downtown New York. With only a few flyers and some word-of-mouth advertisement, the performances at Circle In The Square created such a buzz that it became the "official entertainment" at the club and, shortly after that, a discarded fad.

"(It was) something being done so much that any bar or any place that would have a jazz group... would have someone get up and start screaming into the mike and the band would play 'I've Got Rhythm' or 'Cherokee' as fast as they could," Amram said. It's been almost a half-century since those first performances in New York. Now jazz-poetry is coming to Portsmouth in a big way with Jazzmouth, the Seacoast's first jazz and poetry festival, April 14-17. Amram will be on hand to perform, along with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic and a host of local talent.

The festival got its start because there is nothing else quite like it in the region, said local musician Larry Simon. He's been producing, hosting and playing at Beat Night at the Press Room every month for the last five years and, in doing so, has met "tons of poets and musicians... that are really sensitive to working" together.

"It seemed like a natural thing to celebrate all this with a festival," said Simon. While Portsmouth boasts other music events, including a summer blues festival and the annual Tommy Gallant Jazz Festival, Simon said those festivals, while cool, aren't entirely inclusive of the Seacoast's jazz and poetry community.

"There's a lot to celebrate in this community artistically, and this festival does that," he said. "I really wanted to celebrate in a large way...Seacoast jazz and poetry." Bruce Pingree, general manager of the Press Room and one of the organizers of the Portsmouth Blues Festival, is also a driving force behind Jazzmouth. Apart from the yearly Kerouac celebrations in Lowell, Mass., and Beat Night, there aren't many events in the state, or even the country, which celebrate poetry and jazz.

"There's nothing like this," he said. "It's more of an eclectic sort of thing, which is the reason why we're doing it."

Simon has been a jazz fan since the age of 14, when he started listening to artists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

"Even as a young kid, for whatever reason, I would be fascinated by stuff that wasn't in the mainstream pop culture. I was a hippie kid and very proud of that," he said. "A lot of the artists that you heard about that were also anti-establishment were the Beat poets and jazz players."

Simon said jazz is like philosophy and, like the poetry of the Beats, it has serious depth that "resonates with people for mysterious reasons."

"It's pretty complicated stuff," he said. "A lot of pop music offers something else that might not be quite the same...for somebody who's being very philosophical and tearing things apart and digging deep and questioning things."

a jazz legend and Pulitzer poet
To jazz and poetry aficionados, the addition of Amram and Simic to the lineup may seem like a major coup, but for Simon, getting them to perform at the festival started with a few phone calls. Local poet John Grady, a former student of Simic's at the University of New Hampshire, called and asked him to perform. Though he rarely performs locally, the Yugoslavian-born poet, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems in 1990, turned out to be happy to oblige.

Simon had met Amram briefly a few years ago. "The amazing thing about Amram is that he's more accessible than your typical schmo walking down the street," Simon said. When it came time to organize the festival, Simon thought of him immediately.

"He is, of course, the guy who worked with the original Beat poets. If you're going to do something like this, he's the guy you want to get." Simon's not exaggerating when he says Amram is accessible. During his interview with The Wire, Amram discussed the philosophy behind poetry-jazz collaborations, his work with Jack Kerouac and where he thinks the Beat spirit is now while driving to the airport to catch a plane, only stopping the interview to go through security and board the plane.

The amalgamation of jazz and poetry hardly started with the Beats, Amram said. "We were continuing the bardic tradition, but in the jazz spirit," he said. "It was anybody collaborating with anyone else, always listening, always having respect, and never being aggressive and drowning the other person out. Jazz is all about harmony and spontaneity and surprise and making a situation better than it would be otherwise."

Amram said using that philosophy in collaborating with poets is "the nicest thing you can do," a tradition that he said Simon is upholding. "They say it makes them feel like they're reading it even better than if they were reading it by themselves," he said.

By far, Amram's favorite collaborator was Jack Kerouac. The two were close friends and performed together frequently, working together on Pull My Daisy, a 1959 film about the Beats that Kerouc narrated and which features a score composed by Amram. Those collaborations were the subject of Amram's 2002 book "Offbeat."

"I had more fun with (Kerouac)," he said. "We were so in tune. We never rehearsed and everything always came out perfectly."

clichés and the artistic spirit Although known for their work with jazz musicians, visual artists and other members of the cultural scene, Kerouac and the Beats were also famous for their excesses. But Amram is quick to dismiss the typical Beat stereotypes of excessive drinking and drugging as a means to achieve artistic expression, which he says has dragged down many artists.

"We've been limited by the clich?? of the torture and misery of the life of an artist being the most important thing, rather than the glory of their work," he said. "There's really a misapprehension that somehow...that was going to give you some kind of spirituality." That kind of intangible artistic high that Amram so often experienced with Kerouac and other collaborators can only be achieved through dedication, creativity and working with other artists, something that he hopes to bring to Jazzmouth.

"It was a remarkable period and a remarkable group of people," he said. "I hope in Portsmouth what we can do is inspire maybe some high school kids and maybe their grandparents to go home and finish making that painting, write that poem, and encourage them to be creative."

Sunday, April 17
Jazzmouth winds down with an intimate Poetry & Jazz Brunch at 11:30 a.m. at the Library Restaurant, 401 State St., Portsmouth. Larry Simon and Groove Bacteria will provide music while poets Diedre Randall, Mickey Blanchette, Mark DeCarteret, Pat Parnell and others dish out some fresh morsels of poetry.

When George Plimpton wrote that "every profession should have its Amram," referring to jazz and classical composer David Amram's inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm, he was expressing a wishful thought. As Saturday night's lecture/concert at the Tifereth Israel Congregation in Northwest demonstrated, Amram is one of a kind.

The theme, "Jewish Roots in the Art Form Called Jazz," served as a broad outline for an extended suite of sorts, at once enlightening, entertaining and autobiographical. Amram and his dexterous trio mates -- bassist John DeWitt and percussionist Kevin Twigg -- began by illustrating how ancient prayer modes relate to modern jazz, and concluded by encouraging the audience to sing along, in Mandarin no less, on a talking blues.

Now 74, Amram championed ethnic music decades before the term "world beat" was coined, and his zeal for illustrating commonalities -- "purity of intent and an exquisite choice of notes" -- remains undiminished. He played the oboe-like shanai, piano, French horn, dumbek, tambourine and other instruments, as the focus shifted from a Sephardic melody to Gershwin's "Summertime" to excerpts from Amram-penned scores for both film ("Splendor in the Grass") and theater ("After the Fall"). "Pull My Daisy" offered a delightful, if poorly amplified, diversion -- a Beat-era reminder of Amram's collaborations with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Popping up often were colorful anecdotes concerning Amram's early jazz adventures in Washington (he once served Charlie Parker borscht at his basement apartment on 16th Street), and subsequent encounters with Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Warren Beatty and a host of jazz greats. A remarkable life, a memorable evening.

David Amram, one of America's most noted living composers, will be in the audience next week when the Harper Symphony Orchestra plays his violin concerto. "He's the single most American composer since George Gershwin," said Frank Winkler, the orchestra's conductor.

Just as Gershwin incorporated jazz and the popular music of his day into orchestral compositions, Amram draws upon a myriad of influences, ranging from beat poetry and Native American songs to music from cultures around the world.

And while the diversity of Amram's influences is amazing, what's truly impressive is how he uses them to create music that's accessible to audiences, said Winkler, who lives in Glenview.

Amram, who plays dozens of instruments, was a friend of Jack Kerouac and the beat writer's musical collaborator, playing with Kerouac at the first "jazz poetry" events. He also composed movie soundtracks, including "The Manchurian Candidate."

And he is often regarded as a father of the multiculturalism movement. The title of his 1971 two-record set "No More Walls" became something of a slogan for the idea that barriers shouldn't exist between the waltzes and concertos of Europe and the music being played in the rest of the world.

'No More Walls'
"I said the walls that were built up between those kinds of music were only artificial ones put up by people who felt that they had to appreciative or participatory in only one area," Amram said last week in an interview from San Francisco, where he was promoting his new book, "Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac."

Three decades after "No More Walls," the New York composer says, "What I failed to do was to (say) why that music really had something in common... What all these musics have in common is purity of intent and an exquisite choice of notes."

Some college courses on multiculturalism have appropriated the title "No More Walls," but Amram said his idea of breaking down the barriers between cultures was hardly a new concept.

"When Bach, in ‘The Goldberg Variations,' used a hunting and a drinking song, and Mozart wrote the Turkish march ... I don't think it was because they ran out of ideas," Amram said. "It was just that they liked it so much, they somehow wanted to put that in the piece, just to honor something that they felt was very beautiful."

Amram said he immerses himself in the music of a culture before he attempts to borrow from it.

"A lot of anthropological ethnomusicologists ... really don't spend a lifetime hanging out with the people who create that music so they can sing, dance, play and eventually notate the music correctly," Amram said. "What you have to do is humble yourself each time you sit down to the situation, as if you were 5 years old and you were saying A, B, C, ‘Run, Spot, run.' "

Once Amram feels comfortable playing and singing the music, then he carefully works at writing it out in musical notation.

A different 'Howl'
He said he used the same process to figure out a way for musical instruments to simulate the sound of hounds baying and wolves howling, an effect that appears in a short passage of the violin concerto the Harper Symphony will play May 18.

The violinist who commissioned the piece, Charles Castleman, gave Amram a recording of wolf howls and asked him to use it in the music somehow.

"I spent about a week and a half when I was out at the beach, just howling at the moon each night," Amram said. "When I would get a good howl, I would try to notate it and figure how to write it out so the conductor and the musicians would be able to do that effectively... just from what was on the paper."

Amram hastened to add that he doesn't normally write the sort of avant-garde music that he calls the "shock the audience and upset the musicians" genre.

"I still believe - just as all writing has to come from Shakespeare and the Old Testament - that all composing has to come from Bach and Beethoven, and then you go from there," he said.

The violin concerto, which Amram composed in the 1970s, begins with a fairly traditional first movement, followed by a second movement based on the 12-bar blues and a third movement that incorporates Irish folk tunes associated with fox hunting, as well as the hounds baying. Somehow, those disparate elements work well together, Winkler said.

"No one else except him could do it or make it work," Winkler said. Amram first met Winkler and Lyric Opera violinist Alexander Belavsky, who will perform the concerto at the Harper concert, when he was conducting the Grant Park Symphony in the 1980s and they were playing with the orchestra.

When Winkler called up Amram and said he and Belavsky wanted to perform the violin concerto at Harper, Amram was thrilled, he said.

"A composer's dream, I think, is that somebody on the planet will pick up a piece of music that you've written or hear something that you've done, and they'll like it so much that they'll want to do (it)," Amram said.

Amram's current projects include a concerto commissioned by flutist James Galway and a musical collaboration with "Angela's Ashes" author Frank McCourt, whom Amram knew long before he was a best-selling writer.

Like Kerouac, Amram said he tries to honor "everyday experiences" through his art. Kerouac wrote novels that sounded spontaneous, and Amram strives for the same quality in his music, but neither really created art spontaneously, Amram said.

"When I'm going over what I've written, painstakingly, sometimes hundreds of times, I'm able to get it to sound natural," he said.

"So when I sit down, I don't just have a stream of consciousness, and Kerouac didn't either. He edited all of that stuff in his head, and he always had notebooks with him. So when he actually wrote, it sounded spontaneous, but it came from a tremendous formal discipline."

It's obvious during an interview with Amram that he embodies another of the characteristics he recognized in Kerouac and other people he has worked with, including Dizzy Gillespie, Leonard Bernstein and Willie Nelson.

Like them, Amram is approachable and enthusiastic when talking about the artistic process. "All these people were inclusive, not exclusive," Amram said. "And that, I think, was a very important quality that gave them the special communicative ability that they had and made them such fantastic artists."

Turning 70 didn't stop famed composer-musician Davis Amram from doing his usual thing.

Amram first came to fame during the late 1950s/early 1960s, when he became the first composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic, hung out and worked with Jazz greets like Charles Mingus and Beat icons like Jack Kerouac, penned soundtracks for classic movies like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Splendor in the Grass" and introduced an idea called "World music," then barely heard of, to mainstream American audiences.

So it was fitting that Sunday night's celebration at the Knitting Factory was both a birthday party and the launch of the first New York Underground Music/Poetry Festival. Old and new Amram colleagues, like surviving Beats Tuli Kupferberg and Ira Cohen, jazz musicians like Rodney Jones (music director of Rosie O'Donnell's TV show), rockers like Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and writers like Jack Newfield spent hours saluting their host and reviving the congenially loose, shambling mixed-arts presentations associated with the Beat Generation and the happenings era.

With Amram's bubbly, irrepressible personality at its core, the night meandered yet threw off warm sparks of pleasure, camaraderie regained and memories of a time when books were routinely banned, sex wasn't discussed publicly and lobotomies were a preferred method of mental treatment.

Kupferberg, feisty as ever, took similar aim at present-day America when he said, "This poem uses language, and so if language offends you, please don't listen."

By contrast, Amram is as confrontational as your favorite uncle. Seated at the piano next to a table piled with instruments from around the globe, pulling out different horns and drums and whatnots and explaining their origins end uses, improvising an accompaniment to a poet or suddenly walking over to the center stage microphone and playing percussion with his quartet, Amram embodied a kind of innocent grace and spontaneous joy in artistic creation.

Dozens of poets gave readings and many pieces of music were performed. Amram's quartet version of Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" complete with a twin- pennywhistle harmony break, was a brilliant and neatly pointed treat - who plays Duke on pennywhistle?

In between, the birthday boy spun tales of his rich past and the hundreds of characters who enlivened it - and American culture.

LAST Saturday, with an hour until curtain time, David Amram - musician, composer, conductor, world traveler, free spirit teetered precariously atop a stool in the Paramount Theater here to hang a banner announcing his latest achievement: turning 70.

Below him, a table covered with CD's, sheet music, books and pamphlets gave testament to a lifetime devoted to educating the masses.

"I haven't gotten around to those yet," Mr. Amram said, chuckling, his feet by now firmly planted on the floor. "I suppose it's about time I start endorsing something more age appropriate - say. a walker. 1 can see the ad now: 'walk along with Amram ,' as I go hobbling by."

For those acquainted with the ebullient Mr. Amram, the prospect of his slowing down is no less than anathema. Dressed in jacket, tie and the ubiquitous rattling leis made of objects collected by friends on their travels, he resembles but a faintly faded version of himself from portraits decades old.

In the hours leading up to the night's celebration (his actual birthday was the day before), his Putnam Valley household was a hub of activity as three children, two dogs, eight cats and several visitors vied for their host's attention. Phones rang with congratulations from the conductor Maurice Peress, somewhere in Italy, and the comedian Jerry Stiller, in a jet somewhere between New York and Los Angeles. A fax from the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis proclaims Mr. Amram "one of the courageous - at the forefront of combating prejudice, ignorance and elitism."

"You are a wonder and a joy, a godsend to those who believe in the power of music to change lives and to inspire action. l am among the many that love you "Keep swinging." Indeed.

Three hours later, the Paramount had been transformed into a veritable love-in as friends and colleagues paid tribute to Mr. Amram's influence In the world of music, it is hard to find someone - anyone - whose life has not been touched by the man affectionately dubbed the Pied Piper of Persuasiveness for his ability to turn people on to his causes.

Mr. Amram made his first jazz recording with Lionel Hampton in the early 1950's and by the end of the decade was hanging with the writers, painters and poets of the beat generation in New York, where in 1957 he and Jack Kerouac gave the first jazz-poetry reading.

But unlike many of the Beats - a name given a group he maintains never really existed but was actually a marketing ploy - Mr. Amram created nonstop.

From 1966 to 1967, he was the first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic, under Leonard Bernstein. He has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works and two operas, and early in his career wrote scores for theater and film, including Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park productions, "Splendor In the Grass" and "The Manchurian Candidate." For the past 27 seasons, he has directed the young people's, family and free summer concert programs for the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

In his spare time, what little there is, he grows organic vegetables and raises Jersey cows on his Peekskill Hollow Farm, "so my kids see that hard work is not a bad thing to do," he said.

This night, he delighted in being the focus of an odyssey of music and anecdotes which, in typical Amramian style, he deflected from himself, calling it "a celebration of a lot of wonderful people I've been lucky enough to be with and who continue to make wonderful contributions themselves." As the concert began, Mr. Amram jammed with his quartet - jumping from piano to penny whistles to percussion instruments laid out on a table - in tunes that harked back to gigs with Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.

The Native American singer JoAnne Shenandoah praised Mr. Amram's respect for "all living spirits, including women" and serenaded him with works inspired by the matriarchal society of the Oneida Nation.

The folk singer Odetta extolled his generosity, recalling how she walked with him from his apartment in Greenwich Village to the Gaslight club, where Ramblin' Jack Elliott was performing. "Four blocks." A pause and a raised eyebrow. "Two hours. Anyone who stopped him had his time."

Among those who had his time were the brothers, writers and raconteurs Frank and Malachy McCourt, whom Mr. Amram met some 30 years ago when Malachy McCourt owned the Bells of Hell, a saloon on West 13th Street In Manhattan. It was there, amid the Irish bands with their fiddles, bodhran and uilleann pipes, that Mr. Amram conjured the third movement of his Violin Concerto, performed this evening by the man who commissioned it. Charles Castleman.

"David absorbs all the music in the air, he's as generous as he can be, and he gives it right back," Malachy McCourt said before leading the audience in "Wild Mountain Thyme," one of Mr. Amram's favorite songs.

The actor Jane Alexander, a longtime friend and neighbor, said: "It's hard to think of David as an age. Tonight, he is the Pan of Peekskill, the rest of the time the Pan of Putnam and for all time, the Pan of the Planet. He's ageless."

As the clock struck midnight. Pan picked up his proverbial flute And took center stage. "Hopefully, we've encouraged young people to see that you can devote your whole life to what you love to do and follow your heart and try to do better than is expected," he said, as he had no doubt done countless times before. "And you can not only have a great time doing that, but you can create something of lasting value and enjoy yourself and give other people joy in the process."

He continued: "I think that now there's such an accentuation on the business aspects of life that It's hard to see why we do music and art in the first place. We need to teach our young people to follow the high path and help them to set the standards. To be as good as. possible. To accentuate the excellence."

It was a time for feeling the beat of a long-ago generation and reminiscing with old friends, including ED SHERIN, who until recently was executive producer and director of the television series "Law and Order." They met to the 1950's when Mr. Sherin was an actor In Joseph Papp's fledgling New York Shakespeare Festival and Mr. Amram was the music director.

And then there were Mr. Amram's Collaborators: the author PRANK McCOURT, with whom he is working on a new musical work, "Missa Manhattan," and the actress JANE ALEXANDER, with whom he is working on a book about working with yet another pal. The title is, "Collaborating With Jack Kerouac." "I'm still able to put in a 16-hour day," Mr. Amram said. "About a week ago 1 did this seven-hour concert with one break. At the end of the night, I said, 'I feel like I'm 70 right now.'"

Last night In the East Village, variations on several themes floated above the audience at a benefit concert for David Amram: that the young can gain much from listening to the old; that the community of artists is rich beyond paychecks; that music and generosity of spirit are closely linked.

Mr. Amram, 69, the composer, French horn player and former accompanist to Jack Kerouac, suffered a major setback in October, when fire nearly destroyed his farmhouse in Putnam Valley. When his artist friends learned that the house had not been covered by insurance. they decided to help with a modern barnraising, collecting money to help pay for renovations to the 80-year-old house, which needed to be gutted.

Mr. Amram recalled running back into the house, past a firefighter who tried to stop him, to retrieve the last movement of the flute concerto he was writing for James Galway.

He lost many pictures and papers, and all the belongings of two of his three children, but no one was hurt in the fire, and he remains buoyant.

"If you want to hear someone sing the blues, I recommend getting some Bessie Smith records," he said.

Artists on last night's program at St. Mark's Church in the East Village Included Matoaka Little Eagle, a storyteller and singer (Mr. Amram took part in a memorial benefit for her father, Swift Eagle); Estelle Parsons, the actress, for whom he wrote a score for a production of "Oedipus"; and Paul Krassner, editor of "The Realist." Mr. Amram estimated that he and Mr. Krassner had been in 70 or 80 benefits together. This year is the first time he is the one to benefit.

In an interview before the show, Mr. Amram let loose an ornate riff on the community of song and how improvisation is necessary in life as well as in art. "If you stay in the music for the true meaning of the music - which is a celebration of life and a sharing of good feelings and a sensitivity towards others and realizing that like life itself, anything can happen at any moment - your job as a musician, even a composer or conductor, is to turn a catastrophe into something beautiful, and to become, as Muhammad Ali said, a master of disaster."

Mr. Amram said that when he was composer in residence at the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein told him that part of his work was to contribute to the repertoire, to compose for musicians of the future.

"That's something very hard for a lot of young people to be aware of now," Mr. Amram said. "We don't live in that kind of a world, where those concepts are ever expressed in a public way."

Jason Eiisnberg, who performed last night as Lord Buckley, the comedian philosopher, calls himself an Amram acolyte. He had been helping with house repairs before the show.

David spent a good part of his long career doing the same kind of thing for other people." Mr. Eisenberg said. "When You do good work, what goes around comes around."

Mr. Amram said that the people he associates with believe, as did Kerouac and the poets Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that their role is to be inclusive rather them exclusive. "We came along at a time when, as young people, we were encouraged by a handful of older people, and we realize now that that's our job." he said. "And it's our mission and our joy to be doing that."

David Kellet, a tenor, met Mr. Amram when he sang in the composer's opera "Twelfth Night" "I feel he's always given us so much, we want to give back to him." Mr. Kellett said last night. "He generally, I believe, surrounds himself with people who look for the joy in music, who look for it to be something very special, not pedestrian.'

On June 21, Mr. Amram will be appearing In Chicago, at a benefit for homeless children, and on June 30 he will play in Battery Park with Pete Seeger, for the International Celebration of Clear Waters.

In a way, this can be expressed more concisely with the symbol that tells a musician to go to the top and start it all again. :|

David Amram, now 68, ever the humble multi-instrumentalist musician and populist composer, has a website. But he's reluctant to tell people about it. He prefaces his closing words in a phone conversation from his home, a small farm in Putnam County, New York, with, "I know it sounds really self-centered but go to my website for more information on my upcoming gigs."

Amram, who has successfully networked himself into the worlds of jazz, Latin jazz, folk, and classical music over four decades in music - and earned the respect of his peers in each idiom - will headline this year's silver anniversary edition of the New Jersey Folk Festival. Over the years, the festival has played host to everything from sheepherding demonstrations by Scottish border collies, modern fire-fighting techniques, glass blowing, cooking, crafts demonstrations, and even the unveiling of a huge American flag. All that is secondary, however, to the musicians and the storytellers who perform.

Amram has performed at the festival, founded in 1975, before, but it was still in its infancy. Recalling the last New Jersey Folk Festival he played, in the late 1970s, Amram says, "It was very small and very personal."

"I remember that they had a group wearing T-shirts that said, 'Piney Power.' They were playing some of the music that was played there, and I thought that was terrific! It was very open and a lot of people sat in and played with one another's groups, which is something I've done all my life," he explains.

Amram, raised on a farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, not far from the New Jersey border, moved to New York City in the early 1950s to pursue a life as a musician. In those days, his primary instrument was French horn but over the years, he has added more than two dozen Western and non-Western instruments to his repertoire, including piano, guitar, the dumbek (an Arab drum), and various Native American flutes and whistles. Amram was a part of the first jazz-poetry readings in New York City in the early 1950s.

"I had the chance to work not only with Lionel Hampton and Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk, but also to work with Jack Kerouac at his poetry readings," Amram says. Later, he met Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Pete Seeger, and Odetta.

"Jazz and folk music were very close spiritually in those days," he recalls, "and all of these people felt that music was about sharing."

Amram also recalls that a lot of people in the classical music world had difficulty accepting his interest in folk music and jazz, "but the folk musicians and jazz musicians and a handful of the classical musicians understood and always encouraged me."

Amram, the son of a lawyer and farming father and a translator mother, says his youth included many trips to the Jersey Shore, still one of his favorite places. His uncle David took him to see the Philadelphia Orchestra when he was six and the Duke Ellington Orchestra when he was 10. His uncle also took him to a concert of Native American music. These early musical experiences made a lasting impact.

When he first moved to Greenwich Village in the early '50s, Amram recalls, he was able to eke out a living playing jazz with 'classic bebop musicians.

"I was attracted to the purity of spirit of all of these musicians. [Saxophonist] Charlie Parker, who I first met in 1952, who was on a bill with the Clovers, [urban group harmony] and I remember he told me, 'If you want to understand me, you have to understand the Clovers.' Even though they were the most sophisticated vocal group around at that time, they came out of the streets and took a neighborly approach," he recalls.

"All of these people, they all had this integrity and this down-to-earth accessible quality about them," he says. "That's why I love playing with Willie Nelson now," he says, "because he's the same way." Amram has performed with Nelson at several of the annual Farm Aid benefit concerts through the 1990s.

Similarly, Amram has a down-to-earth, accessible quality that festival booking agents and others in performing arts administration find irresistible. Aside from his time playing folk festivals, Amram also spends a good portion of each year conducting orchestras around the country, including the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Nashville Symphony, the Austin Symphony, and several Canadian symphony orchestras.

Recently, the esteemed Irish flute player, James Galway, commissioned Amram to write a flute concerto. He has named it "Giants of the Night," and each of its three movements is dedicated to an artist ~ Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Dizzy Gillespie - whom Amram knew and performed with.

"Most of my symphonic pieces come out of my real life experiences, not the symphony hall, but experiences I've had in Brazil, in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Japan, in various places around Canada, and all across the United States on different Indian reservations that I've spent time playing in," he says.

Folk festivals have changed since he first began performing at them in the early 1960s. Amram says today's folk festivals are less snobby and more inclusive. In May, he will co-headline for his 23rd consecutive year at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, a massive gathering west of Austin that goes on for 15 days. Amram has also performed at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Hudson River Revival, the Winnipeg, Mariposa, and Vancouver folk festivals in Canada, and dozens of others.

"I remember one time, back in the '60s, I said at one of the folk festivals, 'It would be great to get a Native American to play this music.' And the people running the festival said, 'That's not folk music.' I realize of course in the '60s and '70s, some of the people who were saying these things had never spent any time with these folks, and didn't realize there were millions of people from these cultures who'd been playing these musics for hundreds of years, and some of them are based on cultures that go back thousands of years."

"Now of course with the interest in what they call 'world music,' it's very beautiful to see folk festivals include these musics, and in doing so they present the opportunity for the British Isles music to sound more beautiful by giving it the context of these other types of music."

"Thirty years ago when I was doing the early folk festivals, some people were shocked because they didn't think what I was doing was traditional music. I was playing traditional musics I'd learned from different parts of the world. Now when I go to the festivals, I'm very often the leading traditionalist there," he says, laughing.

Amram recalls he recently was asked to be part of the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance gathering in Pennsylvania, held last November in the Pocono Mountains.

"I was the one who was talking about the virtues of the older musics," he says, "I stressed to the younger musicians that they had the Internet and the ability to make their own recordings to get their music out there, in addition to better business skills, which, God knows, our generation did not have."

At the same time, Amram says, "it's important not to forget the spiritual and the humanistic part of the music. So it's equally important to be concerned with having respect for the older music and older musicians that came before you as well as passing it on to the younger people."

Amram argues in the 1960s, especially, folk music was bogged down with so much political rhetoric, musicians were almost in a realm of having to be politicians or to sound like politicians. Now, he says, folk festivals are more concerned with letting the music speak for itself. Folk festivals nowadays, he stresses, "are not desperately trying to be politically correct, but they're trying to be humanistically and musically correct.

"And they're including everybody. In these types of music, the left wing and the right wing and the differences are always going to be there. But the music is about healing and togetherness and celebrating everybody's commonality, through that drum, which represents all living things - as the Native American people would say - and that song that's in every human being's heart and that story that every human being has to tell."

At all of the hundreds of folk festivals Amram has played, he has never been reluctant to take part at folk festival workshops either. While some performers are hesitant to take part in workshops, thinking it might be bad for their careers, Amram is usually the first one up to the workshop stage at the Philadelphia Folk Festival or the Hudson River Revival.

"At the New Jersey Folk Festival, I'll not only be 'closing the show,' as they say, but I'll also be doing a workshop at 11:30 in the morning. And I'm happy to do it! And I look forward to sitting . in with other people throughout the day," he adds.

Amram has taken more than his share of criticism over the years for trying to master so many different kinds of music. But such criticism comes from people who don't know the man's purity of spirit and sincerity of effort in trying to learn and play many different types of instruments. Talk to musicians in Latin jazz, traditional jazz, folk music, and the classical world, and you'll find Amram is held in high regard.

Asked if he ever felt he was spreading himself too thin by being involved in so many different musical genres throughout his four decades in music, Amram says absolutely not.

"They used to criticize me," he says, "now, the New York Times in 1995 says 'David Amram was multicultural before multiculturalism existed.' Now I'm being called a pioneer of world music, and now - it's what I've been doing all my life - it's considered fashionable. So I'm getting work all over the world."

He notes that all of his classical compositions are being recorded now "by people I don't even know, because the strength of them, their uniqueness, comes from my involvement in all these musics that I deal with."

"When I'm playing at a folk festival I can do a workshop and play music from 15 different countries and make it fun for the audience," he says. "And it's not something I do because I read it in a magazine and thought it would be fashionable, I do it because this is what I've been doing my whole life."

Amram married in 1979, when he was 48. He and his wife Lora Lee have three children, two of whom are ready to start college. Having children is "a great healthification program" he says. And when he's not on the road, he enjoys talking with his children and their friends. "Trying to understand what they and their friends are going through is a very enriching experience," he says. For that reason, he also looks forward to sharing the stage at the New Jersey Folk Festival with younger musicians. "This kind of music doesn't celebrate selfishness and greed, it's about sharing our blessings," he says.

Composer David Amram pay homage to Jack Kerouac
By Steven Brown, Sentinal Classical Music Critic

There's more to David Amram than the fact, he was a friend of writer Jack Kerouac.

Amram, a composer, is writing a flute concerto for the acclaimed Irishman James Galway. That's no small-time project. But even that shows only one side of what Amram has be en doing since launching his career in the 1950s.

Besides composing concert music for Galway, the New York Philharmonic and others. he has created soundtrack music for movies - the most noted being The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Splendor in the Grass (1961). As a jazz player, mainly on the French horn, he has collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton and others.

As a world-music enthusiast, he has studied the music of -- and sometimes performed with musicians of -- the Miccosukee Indians and many other peoples whose music is far afield From the standard European classics. As an orchestral conductor he has led concerts that put European classics alongside music from other traditions that have caught his ear.

But Amram's connection to Kerouac -- whom he met when they were part of the New York Cultural scene of the 1950s - keeps popping up.

That concerto For Galway, for instance, will include a movement meant to evoke the cult-figure author. And evoking Kerouac will also be Amram's goal tonight when he headlines a jazz concert in College Park benefiting the Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project.

"I kind of call it 'From Cairo to Kerouac.' " Amram, 68, said in a telephone interview. In addition to playing jazz standards by Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and others, Amram will perform samples of the kind of music the ardent voyager Kerouac heard during his travels in the Middle East, There also will he a couple of French Canadian tunes that Amram remembers hearing Kerouac sing,

Obviously. it isn't just because of Amram's profession that he uses music to conjure up the aura of his friend, who died in 1969. Amram remembers Kerouac not merely as a writer but as a "very musical person" - an adroit amateur singer and a fiercely focused listener. Amram borrowed a description from another friend, one of the great jazz players of the 1950s.

"Charlie Parker used to say that Jack was one of those people who, when they were there while you played, you felt their presence so intensely that you would end up going and talking to them afterward," Amram said. Amram thinks that Kerouac's love of music influenced the style of his prose.

"He was able to capture the rhythm and flavor of jazz in his writing when no one else was able to do that," Amram commented. Amram singled out a passage from one work that describes a train hurtling along the tracks with such vividness that "you hear the motion of the train in his writing."

Kerouac's "tremendous ear for music" let him appreciate not only jazz but "Haydn and Mozart and Bartok string quartets," Amram said. That diversity of taste is something Amram shares, of course. In Amram's case, it came from family influence.

"My uncle was a merchant seaman," Amram said. "Every place he went when he traveled the world, he tried to learn the language and hear the music. He was very much like Jack, actually - except that he lived much longer. ... He encouraged me at a very young age to have my mind open to everything."

"He took me to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was 6 or 7, and he also took me to hear Duke Ellington. He told me that what Ellington was doing was similar to what the Philadelphia Orchestra was doing - that Ellington had created his own kind of orchestra and that I could respect what Ellington was doing too."

When it comes to musical genres, Amram and Kerouac ended up pioneering something of a genre of their own: jazz poetry, which at first featured Kerouac making up poetry on the spot as Amram improvised music. Amram still engages in this with others - and will tonight in College Park - although the verbal part isn't always improvised.

"I try to really accompany the reader, so that the music enhances the reading - rather than drowning it out," Amram said. "It's very rewarding because when you do that, you're part of a world you've never been part of before. You've put yourself in somebody else's world."

Amram acknowledged that his and Kerouac's innovation ended up spawning a 1950s caricature - the word-spouting, bongo-playing Beatnik. He recalled going with Kerouac into a cafe whose habitues were fitted out with "bongos that still had price tags on them and copies of Proust and Jack Kerouac that looked like they had never been read."

Kerouac scoffed. "He said, 'This is like Catholic school. Everybody is in uniform.'"

Hudson Valley resident David Amram is a Renaissance man for the new millennium.
By MITCHELL USCHER

A world-class musician, conductor and composer, Amram, who lived for years in Godeffroy and now lives in Putnam County, has composed more than 100 pieces for orchestras and chamber ensembles. He's written the music for Broadway shows as well as for such films as "Splendor in the Grass" and "The Manchurian Candidate." He has collaborated with everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Jack Kerouac. And he's spent the last four decades performing around the world with Willie Nelson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others.

Amram's next musical endeavor is a concert titled "World Dance/Global Rhythms" Sunday at Town Hall in Manhattan. The performance will feature music from North, South and Central America Europe, the Caribbean, and other lands.

"I will be performing with Larry Packer, a great Hudson Valley musician who used to open for Jimi Hendrix at his concerts" Amram said. Amram also will be performing with members of his quartet, and audiences can look forward to traditional folk-music pieces in Afro-Cuban, Appalachian, Latin, and Middle Eastern styles.

At age 68, Amram continues to hit the high notes. When he is not writing a concerto for flutist James Galway, he is traveling everywhere from California to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. for performances, recordings and lectures.

And while he enjoys keeping busy with all of his projects, Amram cherishes the time he gets spends at his home in the Hudson Valley. He has enjoyed the region since he first moved here in 1965.

"I think it has some of the most beautiful scenery in the entire nation," Amram said. "I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, and I wanted my children to experience country living, including joining the 4-H club, having animals, and meeting those responsibilities. Those activities gave me values when I was young and, hopefully, it is doing the same for them."

"I used to hear the whistle from the train as it came thundering through the area on the way to New York City" he said. "I would dream of someday going to the city and being a musician. My uncle used to take me to hear all kinds of great music from the Philadelphia orchestra to Duke Ellington's band. I learned to appreciate them all, along with Native American music and the traditional Jewish music I heard at home."

Eventually, Amram did come to New York City and begin to make a living as a musician and a composer. In fact, he wrote the music for Joseph Papp's "Shakespeare in the Park" productions for 12 years as well as or the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "J.B." These experiences led him to writing music for the movies.

As the millennium approaches, Amram says there is an increased appreciation of world folk music as an art form of lasting value.

"Each culture's music is being respected for its own character and style" Amram said. "Just as it. is great to eat foods from different countries, or listen to other languages, or see native dances, it is also wonderful to hear how each culture's music has its own harmonies and nourishing sounds."

Amram particularly hopes that young people will come to his concert at Town Hall.

"What I try to do with younger people is show them that if you love what you're doing, follow your, heart, and do the best you can, you can fulfill your dreams," he said. "If you can do that, the journey is worth taking. The Navajo people called it `walking the trail of beauty.'"

Busy as he is, Amram, who has three teen-age children, feels blessed with his life and his work.

"My father showed me that not only can enjoy your work, but you can also try to give other people enjoyment with the work that you do " he said. "I always try to do the very, very best that I possibly can. Whether I'm performing at a prison or at the White House, I always try to go for excellence and joy!"

From beat poets to Big Bird, composer-conductor David Amram keeps creative company
by John Mangan

FOR THE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, building tomorrow's audience begins today, and one of the best means of conveyance for this quest is a phenomenon known as the Young People's Concert.

The New Haven Symphony Orchestra will present its annual Young People's Concert for local school children Thursday in Woolsey Hall. Composer and conductor David Amram will lead a program featuring his own works as well as those of Kaufmann, Moncayo, Gershwin and Ginastera.

"I'll be doing in New Haven what I've done for the last 28 years for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and other orchestras around the country," Amram, 68, said recently.

"I try to devise a program that will relate to the community that I'm performing in. I try to do a Native American piece as well as an African-American work; so much great music has been inspired by jazz and the blues. Then I bring in a few European treasures. I want to make children feel that a symphony could be part of their everyday life," he said.

Brian Cook, violist as well as director of education for the NHSO, echoed Amram's enthusiasm.

"(Amram) is a very interesting guest conductor who has quite a history of conducting and performing music all around the world. Children find his stories captivating," Cook said. "The program is accessible; the music selected, even though it's classical, has elements that children will enjoy. It's a colorful and active repertoire. As an educator and member of the orchestra, I am excited that we can present these programs.

"I hope that we can put a little spark into the minds of young people," Cook continued, "to not necessarily say, 'I want to be a musician myself,' but to let them know that there is a lot out there in the world. (This concert) can help kids look at this music in a different light."

With the recent appointment of the NHSO's next music director, Jung-Ho Pak - a conductor known for his strong penchant for audience development and community outreach - there is talk in NHSO circles that concerts of this kind will increase in coming seasons.

Amram, who has been immortalized by the children's singer Raffi's lyric, "peanut butter sandwich, jelly with jam: one for me and one for David Amram," has produced an extensive body of compositions in many styles, including jazz, classical and world. He plays more than 30 instruments and regularly appears on PBS' "Sesame Street." He is also Known for having composed the soundtrack to the 1962 political thriller, "The Manchurian Candidate," which starred Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. Amram's performance with the NHSO, in addition to being fun, will have a strong educational component.

"I bring a trunk of instruments to demonstrate on," he said, "to show kids that the percussion and wind instruments have ongoing traditions that go back thousands of years. And I always do at least one piece that has audience participation - with clapping or something else they can be part of They become part of the orchestra for a moment. You know, I often get asked, 'Do you use visual aids?' The answer is 'Yes, the musicians and their instruments.' When young audiences see musicians playing great music of different kinds and loving it, it's irresistible. We need to bring all audiences back to the joy and excitement of classical music."

Amram's list of collaborators over the years reads like a who's who of 20th-century music, stage, film and letters. He .has shared inspiration with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Elia Kazan and Dizzy Gillespie.

It was Bernstein - the founding father of the now-legendary Young People's Concerts, whose performances with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall for area school children were first televised in the 1950s - who invited Am- ram to be the first composer-in-residence with the Philharmonic in 1966. Bernstein had taken over the orchestra as music director and conductor in 1958. By 1966, however, the chronically overextended conductor's schedule left no time for Young People's Concerts. It was then that he encouraged Amram to try his hand.

"He always said to me, 'I have you here at the Philharmonic because I like your compositions, but don't forget the young people. I don't have time anymore; other people need to find their own way of doing it,' " Amram recalled.

In the '50s, David Amram would have been among the last composer-conductors who any parent in America would have wanted bringing the joy of classical music to her children, though; more for the company he kept than anything else.

An oft-reproduced 1959 photograph taken in a Greenwich Village cafe shows Ginsberg and Kerouac, the collective epicenter of a new literary movement that came to be known as the beat generation. In the middle of the grainy photo sits a young Amram. He had befriended Kerouac in 1957 at the Five Spot, a New York jazz club. Later that year, at the Brata Gallery on East 10th Street, Amram, Kerouac and a few other poets held the first jazz-poetry reading in New York.

"Jack wanted to see a more gracious and accepting America" Amram noted. "I never dreamed I'd live to see the day when all of his books would be in print."

"Part of what I do is to bear witness to that era," said Amram, who tours a symphony program called "From Cairo to Kerouac."

"It wasn't about instant, overnight fame but about pursuing a dream and finding out what was in your heart. It was an exciting period for painters, musicians and writers. We were all trying to open up the doors, to feel at home in the arts."

Amram continues to "open up the doors." Having had the legacy passed to him by Bernstein, nurturing young audiences will remain at the fore-front of his concern.

Amram takes the world with him when he tours
by Bob Blumenthal - Globe Correspondent

David Amram eats lunch the way he plays music: voraciously, as if to stoke the furnace that powers his prodigious output. "I've conducted over 400 pieces in the last 30 years," he summarized between forkfuls of Indian food on Monday afternoon. "One hundred of my concert pieces have been published, and I've also written music for 31 Shakespearean productions in Central Park as well as incidental music for 17 Broadway plays and 40 off-Broadway plays. Then there are all of the jazz tunes, and the 130 songs and story-songs I've composed for folk festivals and kids' programs."

In the course of a 90-minute conversation, Amram found opportunities to allude to many of these works, as well as such new projects as the flute concerto he is writing for James Galway. He also mentioned dozens of friends and associates, an array that includes Pablo Casals and Willie Nelson, Charlie Parker and Gunther Schuller, Jack Kerouac and Dustin Hoffman. If there is a creative avenue that Amram has not investigated or a collaborator with whom he has not worked, just let him know and stand back.

Amram has been the visiting artist with the New England Conservatory / Theloneous Monk Institute of Jazz Performance this week, and will incorporate the program's sextet into the NEC Orchestra concert that he is conducting at Jordan Hall tonight. "I try to make every symphony program I conduct appropriate to the particular situation." he explained. "This program is a celebration of Thelonious Monk, but it starts with a piece by Bartok because Monk encouraged me, just as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie did, to not only keep playing jazz but also to incorporate what jazz taught me in my written compositions and conducting.

"So we'll go from Bartok to Ellington to my own 'In Memory of Chano Pozo' to Monk, like an incredible journey. And I'll play many parts - composer, conductor, soloist - I'll even join the students as a sideman. The roles do not denote status, they are just different ways to serve the music."

Amram has prepared for these roles and others for most of his 68 years. Conductor Otto Klemperer was a cousin, yet Amram found greater inspiration in another relative. "One of my uncles was a merchant seaman," he recalled. "In 1941, when I was 11, he took me to hear Duke Ellington's band and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also taught me folk music from around the world, including American Indian music. My whole life was formed from that point. I realized that more was around than what was given to me on a plate, and I saw that as an artist my job was to remain aware of everything out there."

This initially meant that Amram the classical composer and French horn player would also become a jazz musician. He received early encouragement while living in Washington, D.C., from Gillespie (whose entire band once stayed in Amram's apartment) and Parker, then joined Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop in 1955. "I had just gotten out of the Army and was studying French horn with Gunther Schuller," Amram said. "I met Mingus, and then he told me that I'd learn more with him than I ever would in school. So after three weeks in New York I was playing with Jackie McLean and Mal Waldron, meeting with Miles and Max Roach and Monk."

Amram quickly made other connections. "I met Jack Kerouac in 1956, and he was doing the same thing as a writer that I was doing. He was improvising, using that creative fire. We did the first poetry and jazz presentations in 1957, and collaborated on the film 'Pull My Daisy' two years later. My affiliation with Jack is responsible for a lot of the recent interest in my music, to judge from the hits on my Web site [www.davidamram.com]. I've just composed music for a new CD of Kerouac reading unpublished poems and singing with a jazz band that will be out later this year."

By the early '60s, Amram was also composing for the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park series in New York and such films as "Splendor in the Grass" and "The Manchurian Candidate." He also found time for international music. "Within the 10-block area surrounding my Greenwich Village apartment, you could hear music from 20 or 30 countries every night," he recalled. "So by the time the State Department asked me to tour as a good-will ambassador, I was already very interested in what is now called 'world music.'

"Everywhere I went, I tried to take something back with me, perhaps just one small instrument, and to present it in my performances once I felt that I could accurately represent the style of music.

"One of my jobs is to share the first-hand experiences that I've had all over the world, even if in some cases this means that just singing them. You don't only teach with written scores. I was composer in residence at Marlboro [Vt.] in 1961, and I saw Pablo Casals and Rudolf Serkin teaching their students by singing the music, bringing out the same soulfulness and expression that I found playing with Dizzy, or with Willie Nelson when I did the Farm Aid concerts."

Amram is a farmer himself in Putnam Valley, N.Y., where he lives with his wife and children. "I garden when I'm at home." he said. "We even have a roadside stand to sell vegetables, and we also raise chickens, ducks and cows. It's like therapy, or organic aerobics. I also have a little shed where I can compose, and I've learned to be productive while I travel. I subscribe to the old Lakota Indian saying that 'Wherever I am is my home.' Give me a room with a hot plate and a keyboard, and it feels like I've received a fellowship."

The urge to share all of the styles he has learned, "not as a melting pot, but like a fine 14-course meal where each course has its own special beauty," continues to drive Amram. His first orchestration of a Monk composition, "Bye-Ay," was written for a Central Park concert in which Dustin Hoffman and Ossie Davis read "Peter and the Wolf." He has since completed two more symphonic settings of Monk (all three are on the Jordan Hall program) and plans more. "Giants of the Night," his concerto for Galway, has movements representing Parker, Kerouac, and Gillespie. He is in his 28th year of mounting children's concerts at the Brooklyn Academy, and is seeing renewed interest in works like his "Triple Concerto" for woodwind, brass, and jazz quintets and orchestra. He noted with satisfaction that "what I've been doing my whole life, as someone on the outskirts, is finally being accepted.

"I've just followed the natural calling in my own heart, writing music that I'd like to hear," he said of his unique career. "I got married late in life, when I was 48, and until then I lived on a marginal budget. If I got a movie score, I could live on the fee for years. It's different now that I have three kids. I'm working all of the time - but I'm also still playing benefits. I'd like to cut back, but if I do, it won't be the benefits that are cut. It's like organic gardening. You have to put something back in."

You may feel you've met most people before but you'll only meet David Amram once.

The composer, conductor. horn player, pianist and general jack-of-all-instruments has been in town off and on since mid-April conducting the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's 61st annual Young People's Discovery Concerts.

Programmed for Indiana elementary pupils in Grades 4-6, the concerts resumed today at the Hilbert Circle Theatre. When we met, the tallish, reed-slender Amram, a youthful looking 67-year-old, gave me his business card, which reads, on one side: Pure Bred Jersey Cows, Alpine Dairy Goats, Chickens, Turkeys, Ducks & Organic Vegetables. Cider and Maple Syrup.

Besides knowing at least as much about music and how it works as anybody I've encountered in my 68 years, Amram is a farmer. He lives with his wife, Loralee, and their three teenagers at Peekskill Hollow Farm in Putnam Valley, N.Y.

"I lived on a farm in Pennsylvania until we had to sell it during World War 11 when I was 12 years old," Amram explained in his quick-spoken, soft-spoken way.

A world traveler who has absorbed the music of cultures from India to Bolivia, Amram recalled that he appeared with Willie Nelson in a Farm Aid benefit in Indianapolis about a dozen years ago. He believes that farming and writing music have a good deal in common.

"Farming helps your music a lot - not just the exercise. You have to plan a lot before you start and then you go to work and finally you sit out on the porch in the fall and see everything in bloom. It's a magical moment. like when you've finished a symphony you've worked hard on and musicians rehearse it and finally play it," he explained.

Early in his musical career, Amram wrote incidental music for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions. Starting with the bloodiest of the Bard's dramas, Titus Andronicus. Amram scored 25 Shakespeare plays for Papp.

His credits also include music for the films The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass and for Archibald MacLeish's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, J.B. And he has two operas under his belt: A setting of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and a darkly poignant one-act opera about the Holocaust called The Final Ingredient.

In 1966-67 Amram was the first composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic. then directed by Leonard Bernstein. and participated in a State Department tour of Brazil in 1969 and one of Kenya in 1975 sponsored by the World Council of Churches.

Equally at home with jazz, folk and classical music, he went to Cuba in 1977 with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Earl Hines and visited the Middle East the next year. All this comes out not only In his music, which embraces all styles, but also in his talks to the concert-going kids.

And he's no stranger to children's concerts, having been appointed conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic's youth concerts In 1972.

"Young people make You think of why you went Into music. The kids train you to communicate and then when you do the others (the adult concerts), it's so much easier. It's also a reminder that the conductor's job Is to make the musicians feel good," Amram added.

The more autocratic conductors probably wouldn't agree with Amram, who is the gentlest conductor I've ever watched. But when you're around him you know you're in the presence of a talented man and you feel you're in the presence of a good man. At the morning youth concert I looked in on, Amram arrived on stage with a big, webbed shopping bag full of strange Instruments. He played all of them. In fact, he played three exotic recorderlike flutes at once. And the musicians smiled and applauded along with the kids.

Called Istanbul to Indianapolis, his program, with little language lessons thrown in, ranges from the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture and Mozart's Turkish Rondo to his own Chakra, based on a tune he heard in Pakistan, and his orchestral arrangement of Thelonious Monk's Bye-ya.

He introduced Tell by admitting that most Americans hearing the end of the overture think of the Lone Ranger and galloping horses.

"Just think of those horses galloping from Rome to Sicily and taking an unusual turn to come to downtown Indianapolis," he advised the kids, after teaching them to say, "Molto grazie, Signor Rossini."

Back In the dressing room, I asked Amram about the turquoises, beads, medals and medallions of every description, including a Star of David, hanging around his neck.

"These are things people gave me. I wear them when I travel and put them on the wall at the farm when I'm home," he answered with a smile. He says he believes he's living a "dream come true." adding, "I'm blessed. I'm writing my music and I have a family and I'm conducing all these great orchestras, like this one in Indianapolis."

"Only One thing. If I had divine powers, I wish Jack Kerouac and Charlie Parker and Dimitri Mitropoulos and Joe Papp and Rudolf Serkin and Leonard Bernstein, all those who encouraged, inspired and helped me, could be here right now."