The Beat goes on for composer David Amram
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
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."
For tickets, call 978-446-7162 or go to ontheroadinlowell.org.
