David Amram Live

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David Amram and Jack Kerouac, with poets Philip Lamantia and Howard Hart, performed the first in a series of New York City’s first-ever “official” public jazz/poetry readings at the Brata Art Gallery, the Circle in the Square Theater, and Brooklyn College in the fall and winter of 1957-58. These first-ever public jazz and poetry collaborations of 1957–58 were organized two years before working together with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso on Robert Frank’s 1959 film Pull My Daisy.

In 1995, Amram was commissioned by the Library of Congress to compose Thomas Jefferson: A Little Rebellion for narrator and orchestra, narrated by E.G. Marshall and premiered at the Kennedy Center with Amram conducting members of the National Symphony Orchestra. In the program, Amram also debuted two settings of texts from Kerouac’s On the Road for narrator and orchestra.

In 2002, Amram was commissioned by flutist Sir James Galway to compose a flute concerto, Giants of the Night. Amram dedicated the second movement to Kerouac, since it included two traditional French Canadian airs which Kerouac used to sing to Amram in the late night hours during strolls in New York City.

These collaborations are all described in detail in Amram’s books Offbeat: Collaborating With Kerouac (2002), Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram, and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat.

David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works, written many scores for Broadway theater and film, including the classic scores for the films Splendor in the Grass (1961) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), two operas, including the groundbreaking Holocaust opera The Final Ingredient, and the score for the Pull My Daisy, narrated by Kerouac.

A pioneer of the French horn as a jazz instrument, he is also a virtuoso pianist, on numerous flutes and whistles, percussion, and dozens of folkloric instruments from 25 countries, as well as an inventive, funny improvisational lyricist. He served as the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence in 1966, under Leonard Bernstein, and has collaborated with a wide variety of musical, literary, theatrical, and other personalities, including Dizzy Gillespie, Langston Hughes, Dustin Hoffman, Willie Nelson, Thelonious Monk, Odetta, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Depp, and Tito Puente.  

Amram’s more recent orchestral works include Giants of the Night, (commissioned and premiered by flutist Sir James Galway); Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie, (commissioned by the Woody Guthrie Foundation in 2007); and Three Songs: A Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (written for and premiered by pianist John Namkamatsu in 2009). He was also chosen as the 2008 Democratic National Convention’s “Composer in Residence for Public Events.” David Amram: The First 80 Years, a documentary about David’s life, was released in 2011.