David Amram has just turned 95. He’s still playing gigs — including two sets with his jazz quintet on Tuesday at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Last week, he gave a master class in Schenectady, N.Y., then performed at a concert featuring both his chamber compositions and his jazz group.
In an interview a few days before his Nov. 17 birthday, Amram recalled his father asking what he wanted to be when he grew up. As he tells it now, his reply was, “I’d like to live on a farm and be a jazz musician and write classical music and go around the world learning different stuff.”
He doesn’t live on a farm, but he’s done the rest.
Amram is a composer, musician, author, conductor and boundlessly connected collaborator who has been cheerfully ignoring musical categories since the 1940s. His output includes jazz tunes, symphonies, operas, film scores, theater music, off-the-cuff talking blues and idiom-hopping folk-festival performances where he’s likely to play piano, pennywhistle and percussion.
“David models the openness and appreciation of good music, no matter what traditions or genres it’s based in,” said Jerome Harris, the guitarist in Amram’s quintet. “Because David has been in it for so long, just his beingness offers a perspective on the range and richness that we can all take part in.”
Amram’s classical works — pieces that revel in long-lined melodies and knotty harmonies along with hints of bebop, the blues and global traditions — have made him one of the most widely performed living American composers. And his eagerness to learn and mingle multiple approaches, to reject snobbery or insularity, was well ahead of its time.
“Now I’m considered to be a pioneer,” he said, rather than a “nut case, jack-of-all-trades.” He added: “Whether it’s conducting a symphony or playing in a bar, it’s all the same thing. You’re putting something out there, you hope to get something back, and then you take what’s given back to you and put it out there again.”
Amram has released two albums this year: one with his genial vocals topping his idiosyncratic arrangements of songs by Phil Ochs and Woody Guthrie (including a newly rediscovered verse of Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty”), one with his classical compositions for violin and piano. While he embraces improvisation in many contexts, his classical scores are notated in precise detail. “If you’re composing,” he said, “I like the idea of trying to make it as close as you can get to what you imagine is perfect.”
Over strong coffee at his cozy home in Saugerties, N.Y., overlooking freight-train tracks along the Hudson River, Amram spoke about what he likes to call a lifelong education at “the University of Hangout-ology.”
“I just hang out with people that know more than me, better than I’ll ever be, and try to pick up something from it, and then share it,” he said.
Amram’s early mentors included the bebop saxophone trailblazer Charlie Parker and the New York Philharmonic conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. He is certainly the only musician to have worked or played alongside — for starters — Jack Kerouac, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Aaron Copland, Rudolf Serkin, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty, Arthur Miller, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Leonard Bernstein, Joseph Papp, Betty Carter, Tito Puente, Wynton Marsalis, Paquito D’Rivera, James Galway, Steve Martin, Willie Nelson and Patti Smith.
“So much of my life has been just bumping into somebody,” he said. “So if you’re that lucky, then you have an obligation to share that luck with other people coming up.”
He added, “Now that I’m going to be 95, I would be probably perceived as a professional old man. So I figure, if that’s the case, then I’ll try to act and live and be like the old people who gave me a word of encouragement, or at least said hello. The older composers were always part of the music community, and played music, and hung out with musicians, and reflected something of what they felt was the best they got from their society.”
He was wearing a blue jacket with a Farm Aid patch — he’s played the annual concert for decades — and a button reading “Truth.” About a dozen pendants hung around his neck, including a ZZ Top logo from a fan in Texas, a six-pointed star he was given by the Israeli songwriter David Broza, an amulet his daughter brought back from a Sephardic temple in Morocco and a medallion from the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. With a sparkle in his bright blue eyes, he looked forward to future projects.
Arturo O’Farrill, the founder and artistic director of the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance and the leader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, counts Amram as a friend and inspiration. “There are a lot of people that have played a huge role in my life, but I feel like David Amman is the one who said, fear not,” he said in a phone interview. “You don’t have to just be this or just be that. David Amram is the one who said to me, go ahead and experiment.”
Amram grew up in the country, then in the city. Born in 1930, he spent his early years on a family farm in Feasterville, Pa., tending crops and milking cows, forging a lifelong work ethic. In 1942 he moved with his family to Washington, D.C.; his father, who played piano, worked as a lawyer for the Agriculture Department.
Amram soaked up classical music, big-band jazz, Jewish cantorial singing, blues and more. When he heard Leopold Stokowski conducting Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” the wolf’s theme led Amram to what would become his central instrument: the French horn.
By the early 1950s he was juggling night classes at George Washington University, a day job as a high-school gym teacher, jazz sessions playing piano and French horn, composing theater music for Howard University’s drama program and playing French horn with the National Symphony. Ever gregarious, he made his basement apartment a hangout for late-night jam sessions with visiting and local musicians.
Charlie Parker was one visitor who stayed to talk. In “Vibrations,” Amram’s 1968 memoir, he wrote, “His attitude of an open mind and an open heart, of playing with anybody, listening to everything, trying to appreciate everything and then being able to distill all these experiences in his own way — all this affected me.”
Amram moved to New York City in 1955, where he was hired by Mingus, studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music and fell in with Beat Generation writers and artists. In 1957, he accompanied Jack Kerouac reading poetry — the first Beat poetry-with-music event — and in 1959 he scored and appeared in the film “Pull My Daisy” — now a cherished Beat artifact — alongside Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. From 1956 to 1967, he composed music for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival.
In the early 1960s, Amram wrote film scores in Hollywood, among them “Splendor in the Grass” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” A lucrative career path was opening up, but Amram didn’t want to become a hack. “After ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ I was offered seven films in one year. I said, ‘I can’t write that much good music, orchestrate it, conduct it, choose the musicians, and do a good job.’”
He recalled a lawyer told him, “‘Do what they say, make all that money, then you can be creative. You’ve got time for that.’ I said, ‘Man, Charlie Parker said, ‘Now’s the Time.’”
He returned to New York to write symphonic pieces. Soon, Leonard Bernstein chose him to be the New York Philharmonic’s first composer in residence, and he became a classical-music proselytizer. From 1972 into the 1990s, he conducted children’s concerts with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Among his catalog of more than 100 classical compositions, Amram cited as a favorite his second opera, “The Final Ingredient.” It was commissioned by the ABC network for Passover in 1965; set in a German concentration camp in 1944, it shows imprisoned Jews determined to preserve the Seder ritual.
Amram’s classical pieces are full of lyrical but angular melodies and grounded but richly ambiguous harmonies. “He has a firm command of Western harmony,” O’Farrill said. “But I feel like he’s more interested in sonority than tonality, which is really admirable in a way, because it means that chords are not just functional. It means that the chords are also highly descriptive. They don’t have to resolve the way that they were taught in conservatory. You can really hear him playing around the edges of traditional harmony.”
With travel, Amram kept expanding his musical palette. He delved into Native American music, learning its subtleties of rhythm and melodic inflection. He visited Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. He soaked up Latin music in New York and across the hemisphere. During the interview, he casually tapped out complex two-handed polyrhythms to demonstrate the subtleties of Cuban clave variations.
Amram is still looking ahead. He wants to learn new languages, after picking up a little Swahili in Kenya. He’s working on a piece for a wind, brass and percussion orchestra. “Then I’m going to start another orchestral piece, I imagine,” he said. “What I try to do now, when I’m done with whatever it is, I say, ‘Bam! Next!’”
O’Farrill recalled the advice Amram gave him when he entered his 60s: “He said, ‘Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat as long as possible.’”
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
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