Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac

David Amram is truly "a gentleman and a scholar." The expression was made for him! ... I have met Mr. Amram twice in my life so far, and on both occasions - before he even knew who I was, or who I was related to - he treated me with the utmost of dignity and respect. The man has class! Not only does he have class, but he has an abundance of energy and inspiration. For an individual getting close to the age of eighty, I can personally vouch for the fact that he is more inspired and has more energy than many people even half his age. David Amram, I believe, was also "touched by the hand of God" - a statement once made by Jack Kerouac about himself. He has a huge "neshuma" (Yiddish for "soul"). The man practically, singlehandedly, created the whole genre of spoken word / jazz improvisation as well as being a pioneer of the whole "world beat" movement of cross-pollinating different musical traditions from various cultures on the planet to blend together and mold into a new hybrid of musical modalities of sound mixed together from cultural traditions that would have never rubbed shoulders together naturally without a little help from people like him. He is a truly cosmopolitan composer and a real cosmic character with a compassionate approach to interacting with his fellow man. This book, OFFBEAT, that Mr. Amram has written about all of his time spent together over many years with the famous, modern author, Jack Kerouac, is a real gem. Not only did he know and collaborate with Jack Kerouac, he was his true friend - and he loved him like a brother. This is quite clear from everything that is written in this book as well as from everything that David has done over the years since the death of Mr. Kerouac to help further the appreciation and true understanding of the great body of literature left behind for the whole world to read that came forth from the fountainhead of that beautiful little boy in the overalls from Lowell, Massachusetts who had a dream about becoming a great writer one day. Indeed, he did - and Mr. Amram, his truly good friend and sincere appreciator of his life and his work, has blessed us all by pouring out his heart and soul into this labor-of-love of a book of all of his memories and stories of Jack. Mr. Amram is not only an accomplished composer and conductor of classical music in the great tradition of musical composition that goes all the way back in time before Homer and the lyric poets and extends up through time through Early Music, Romantic Music, and modern Symphonic Music, but he is also a tried and true jazz musician of the first order. It's one thing to be able to read and write music on a staff. It's another thing altogether to be put to the test in trials-by-fire on the spot of the hot seat of the jam session on stage before a live audience and be able to hold your own as well as inspire others to create free-form, improvisational and experimental, instrumental music that pushes the boundaries of musical expression

The book title is concise. Accurate. David Amram composes and conducts an upbeat validation of the raw and beautiful Jack Kerouac and was there as a friend when Jack died in his literal and literary arms. Amram is a true friend to art and on of the few men I can personally call a role model for modern times. Amram's first book, out of print, but readily available, is titled Vibrations. Vibrations is a symphony of the first 50 years of David's collaborative life. David cleaned up his eating act and has lived to tell the amazing stories of those who died soooo young from internal and external abuse. Blow, Davey blow your horn. thomasjohnmiller (February 22, 2007, comment written in Bellingham, Washington)

This book has been sorely needed for a long time. David Amram, composer, conductor and player of a vast array of insturments and musical styles is literally one of the hardest working people in the music business. Somehow, he found the time to write an incredibly detailed account of what creative life was like in New York in the 1950s and 60s. Not only does he recount specific events, such as the making of the film "Pull My Daisy" and the first-ever jazz-poetry collaboration in New York, he has also recalled conversations that took place while those events were going on. He also gives us enthusiastic accounts of the many events inspired by Jack Kerouac and his work since the writer's death in 1969; events that show the wide-ranging influence Kerouac has had on contemporary culture. Just as important, Amram has also successfully dispelled what he calls the "Beatnik Myth" that for years portrayed Kerouac and cohorts as something completely different than what they were. (The story Amram relays about the day Jack died, in which reporters badgered him and others with inane questions about the "King of the Beats" illustrates the tragic way Kerouac was thought of and treated.)Many of the great musical and literary personalities of the mid-20th Century are mentioned and quoted in this work, ranging from Leonard Bernstein, to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk all the way to the composer Edgar Varese and conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, Amram's mentor and Bernstein's predecessor as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. They all add a great deal of color to the narrative, which can be as exhilarating a read as Kerouac's fantastic trip across America in "On the Road".Not only is Amram one of the hardest working people in the music biz, he's also one of the nicest and most gracious. It was a great pleasure and honor to have met him during a concert and at a reading of OFFBEAT this past spring. For anyone even mildly interested in Kerouac and his contemporaries, this is THE book to read, written by someone who was there. And after reading it, you may be MORE than mildly interested in Jack Kerouac, a man who truly was an original.

Dave Amram passionately evokes in his newest book the rhythms and poetic vibes of his life all the while casting to the four winds the much misaligned "beatnik myth" that plagued Jack Kerouac's life and stigmatized his art. Through Amram's sound recollections, Kerouac's legacy as an artist resounds with the exclusive atmosphere that is also conducive, even to this day, to the heart and soul of Amram's classical compositions and world-wide performances. It is a testament written from a contemporary of Kerouac's that celebrates the efforts of those fascinating artists of the post-WWII years consisting of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Philip Lamantia and Dody Muller (as well as a host of others). We are there at the first jazz/poetry reading in NYC in 1956, the filming of Pull My Daisy in 1959, the last years of Jack Kerouac's life in the late 1960s until the posthumous aftermath that gradually began to realize the literary merit of Kerouac's art that today firmly places him within the canon of American Literature along side Hemingway, Poe, Melville and Twain. Kerouac is not so much eulogized in this memoir as he is painted humanly as the soulful cat he was celebrating life the best way he knew how, in his books. Despite telling Amram in July 1968 that "fame is a drag to anybody who wants new work done", Kerouac intuitively sensed the longevity of his life's work would outlast his own years dogged by the fame he no longer wanted. The same can be said for David Amram whose own art is vital to the understanding and appreciation of post-WWII American culture in symphonic, jazz, global and folk music. Pick up this book today for a breath of fresh Kerouacian air . . . .