by Parker Gambino
Music is at David Amram’s essence; he creates, performs, and promotes it. But his essence spills over; he has an approachable intelligence and dignified yet hip outlook on life in general, and his is a caring and sharing joyful life.
Amram has worked with top-shelf musicians across a broad spectrum of musical and performance genres, collaborating with the likes of Charles Mingus, Leonard Bernstein, Allen Ginsberg, Aaron Copland, Bob Dylan, and Wynton Marsalis, among others. A favorite picture from his website has him standing with Muhammed Ali, Buffy St. Marie, Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman, Harold Smith, Stevie Wonder, Marlon Brando, Max Gale, Dick Gregory, and Richie Havens!
Amram is internationally acclaimed and has travelled all over the world to spread his joy and fellowship, and to soak up the best of genuine culture from any source. Amram’s personal collection of folk-musical instruments from around the world is extensive, perhaps surpassed only by some major museums. During performance, his neck is likely to be festooned with an assortment of some of the smaller wind instruments from his collection, and they are not merely for display (as in those museum cases!).
David Amram is the composer of over 100 orchestral and chamber music works, as well as numerous film scores; back in the day he hung out with notorious “beatnik” hep cats like Jack Kerouac and Charlie Parker; he was a pioneer of that wonderful collaborative collective creation, the fusion of spokenword poetry over improvised jazz music (or is it vice versa?), and he holds his own as either the musician or the speaker. Amram’s spontaneous live-performance stream-of-consciousness raps resonate precisely with the flow of his written works, almost always including one or several mentions of the word “joy”.
Amram has been with us since 1930; he remains at the top of his game, and you will want to catch him if you can, one way or another. Yes, music is at Amram’s essence; it serves his mission (as he himself phrased it to describe a collaborator) to “… make the very best of the arts a part of everyday life for everyone. And to encourage people to be creative and observant of the beauty that surrounded us in every daylife.” He joyfully walks that talk.
Visit the website www.davidamram.com/ and prepare to spend a few blissful hours basking in
all of his wholes, greater than any sum of parts.