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Tells the story of David Amram's adventures growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs, misfitting in the Army, barnstorming through Europe with the famous Seventh Army Symphony, exiling in Paris, scuffling on the Lower East Side, day-laboring - often down but never out - finally emerging as a major musical force.
In a career spanning 70 years, composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist David Amram is hailed today as the creator of symphonic works, chamber music, and two operas; as a brilliant jazz and vocal improviser; and the composer of memorable stage and film scores. He has collaborated with many leading musicians, playwrights, artists, actors, and writers, including Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Elmira Darvarova, Paul Newman, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, and hundreds more. An innovator who blended jazz and global folk styles with classical traditions, Amram’s career also emphasizes the cre...
"In a career spanning 75 years, composer David Amram has created a rich array of works across symphony, chamber music, opera, jazz, and stage and film scores, and collaborated with many leading musicians, playwrights, artists, actors, and writers, including Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Dizzy Gillespie, Arthur Miller, Paul Newman, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, Patti Smith, and hundreds more. An innovator who blended jazz and global folk styles with classical traditions, Amram's career also emphasizes the creative potential of collaboration. This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of Amram's work and influence, situating the composer in the context of today's international culture. It shows how Amram's proficiencies in spontaneous, on-stage music creation enriches his formal classical composing. The book includes multi-media links for readers. Bringing together perspectives from conductors, musicians, performers, scholars and journalists, this is the essential guide to a major figure in contemporary music"--
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"This book covers the first thirty-seven years of my life. I have been lucky to have spent most of it in music. This is no textbook or fabulous Horatio Alger-type success story. If things had been a little different, I might have ended up in reform school, the Army Stockade, Hollywood or dead. I could have left out the low points, all the mistakes, madness and confusion. I could have mentioned only the kind and beautiful people I've known, everyone in music who helped and inspired me, and the good times I've had. Bit I've tried to tell the truth. Music saved me. I consider myself a beginner in music. This book is about what and who helped me to start"--Foreword.
David Amram has been described as "the Renaissance man of American Music." His musical career has spanned participating with Jack Kerouac in the original jazz-poetry reading in 1957 in Greenwich Village to being honored as the first Composer-in-Residence for the New York Philharmonic and to playing in Farm Aid concerts. He's performed with an incredible variety of musical greats, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Willie Nelson, and and Tito Puente, and he continues to compose and tour nationally. Now available in paperback, following the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac's classic On The Road, Offbeat is the rollicking story of this legendary musician and his adventures w...
David Amram has played and rambled and galloped and staggered through a remarkably broad sweep of American life, experience, and creative struggle. The Boston Globe has described him as "the Renaissance man of American Music." Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film Pull My Daisy in 1959, combining Amram's music with Kerouac's narration. Amram, honored as the first Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic, has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Ho...
The first full biography of Thelonious Monk, written by a brilliant historian, with full access to the family's archives and with dozens of interviews.
In 1960, burgeoning actress and defiant dreamer Lena Spencer opened a small, grassroots coffeehouse in the quaint upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs. Within her then-husband’s plan to start the Caffè as a means for the couple to artistically flourish while “making enough money to retire in Europe” lay the seed of a more impactful cultural contribution that would change music history forever. It was a time in America when a coffeehouse could be something more—a focal point for a different sort of people, radical new ideas, and notably, emerging artists. Caffè Lena’s humble stage regularly welcomed musicians such as a young Bob Dylan in 1961, the singer/activist Bernice John...