A Review:
David Amram’s
Vibrations and Offbeat
by
R.E. Prindle
Amram,
David: Downbeat: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002
Amram,
David: Vibrations, original MacMillan’s 1968, this issue Thunder’s Mouth Press 2001
Wakefield,
Dan: New York In The Fifties, Houghton,
Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992
While apparently
but few have ever heard of David Amram yet he was a significant figure in the
Sixties and beyond. He was or is a
musician, French Horn player and composer.
A couple of his movie soundtrack credits, The Manchurian Candidate and
Splendor In The Grass of the Fifties give some indication of his recognition in
the entertainment world although having seen both movies I had no idea he
scored them while Imdb gives credit to Amram and Irving Berlin and Grass to a
Euphemia Allen. So there you have it.
No one to
whom I have mentioned him has ever heard of him. As I was in the record business in the
Sixties and Seventies I knew the name but nothing more. I don’t recollect selling any of his records
or even carrying them. I called his name
up on Amazon’s Echo or Alexa and listened to a couple hours of stuff a couple
of times and while the music is pleasant enough I find it undistinguished.
My attention for this review was brought to
me because his book Offbeat is a record of his association with Jack Kerouac the
author and founder of the Beats. I will deal with the association in the
appropriate place. Vibrations, David’s first book, is a discussion of his life
from birth in 1930 to his thirty seventh year in 1967, the book was published
in 1968. Vibrations is a very
interesting psychological study whether the reader has heard of Amram or
not. As of this writing (8/2/17) he is
still living at 87 years and looking very presentable. Significantly he doesn’t call Vibrations an
autobiography but a memoir.
David was
born in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where he spent his early years on a farm
until his father took a war job and moved the family to Washington DC in 1942,
the move was very traumatic for twelve-year old David who loved his life on the
farm and never recovered from losing it.
Later in life he would buy a farm.
The move to
DC was especially traumatic because his family moved into a house in what was
called a checkerboard neighborhood, that is a mixed Negro and White area. David and his family were themselves
Jewish. The central childhood fixation
that governed David’s life was when he entered Gordon Jr. High. He describes the experience in detail and
since it is so important to the telling of his story I will quote in full, pp.
17-18:
Quote:
A few days
later I entered Gordon Junior High School.
Because I had just come from a small rural school, Gordon Junior High
seemed enormous. The playground alone
was larger than the entire school area in the country. The atmosphere was completely different
because of the large number of students, the fact that it was a southern school
and the air of seething violence that seemed to be everywhere. The atmosphere of violence was constant and
when it erupted the teachers as well as the students seemed to take the idea of
fighting for granted.
The moment I
arrived I saw three or four serious fights in the school playground.
Six or seven
boys were holding someone’s arms behind him while he was being smashed and
stomped by two or three others. I was
used to being in fights myself, but at least we used to go at it one at a time
and when I got to be a good fighter myself, the fights finally stopped. But I noticed that here the parents of some
of the smaller kids led them right into school or they came in with older kids
who served as protection. It took me a
little while to realize there were several organized gangs in the school, including one called the Foggybottom
Gang. My sister was going to boarding
school in Florida because of her health.
I was sure glad she didn’t have to through this with me. When we had gone to school in the country she
used to lie down on the floor of the car on the way home so the kids wouldn’t
see her. She was terrified then because
of the abuse I used to take being called a Jew.
I had gotten used to it, but she never could.
But there at
least she was safe on the floor of the car.
In 1942 at Gordon Junior High no one was safe. Even teachers- those who couldn’t fight back-
were in danger of being punched pummeled kicked or even knifed. It was a madhouse and I enjoyed every minute
of it. I had never liked school anyway
except for music and sports, so the chaotic conditions in the classroom, with
kids yelling and insulting the teachers, setting their desks on fire, throwing
snowballs with razors and rocks inside, fighting and even one student being
pushed out the window- it all seemed wonderful and exciting to me. By the third day I felt at home. The classes were so backward that in about
thirty minutes I could do all my homework and spend the rest of the afternoon
practicing the piano or playing in the back with Walter and some other kids I
met.
The fifth
day in school I was coming from the science class when a boy named Joe punched
me on the shoulder and almost knocked me down.
“Watch that,
Joe.” I said.
He seemed
surprised that I knew his name. “How do
you know my name?” he said.
Suddenly the
casual group behind him seemed to become an organized gang standing stiff and
hostile. All the kids behind me also
stopped and in a few seconds later the immediate rumble was inevitable.
“Never mind
how I know your name, just watch who you’re pushing,” I said.
With that he threw a right at me.
Because I was expecting something like this, I slipped his punch. Next he hit me in the left shoulder, spinning
me half around. Then he leaped for me
and I caught him with my right elbow in the stomach, hit him three or four
times in the face put my leg behind him, hit him on the Adam’s apple and
knocked him backward into a locker. He
didn’t feel like fighting anymore.
Then all of
a sudden, one of the larger teachers materialized out of nowhere, hit me in the
face and knocked me down. He then proceeded
to knock four or five other students as well while everyone else
scattered. I was stunned. Kids who hadn’t even had anything to do with
the fight were lying on the floor, wondering what had happened. He pulled up and marched us up to the
principal’s office. While we were
waiting for the principal to come out, another teacher was rushing down the
hall, yelling for the teacher to get to another class where a serious fight was
going on. He left and by the time the
principal came back, Joe and some of the other students had slipped out of the
office leaving just one other boy and myself.
The principal was a kindly old man in his seventies and obviously was
nearly ready to retire. His name was Mr.
Winston, a sweet old man with white hair, a white mustache, stooped and worn
out by all the years in Washington’s public school system and very upset about
the chaos that had developed since the war began and the younger teachers were
all away.
“Boys,” he
said in a genteel southern moan, “The good Lord didn’t put you on earth to act
like animals. Fighting is for an animal,
not for gentlemen. I want you two boys
to shake hands and promise never to fight no more.”
“But I wasn’t
even fighting,” said the other poor boy, about to break into tears.
“Don’t sass
me son, I don’t even want your name.
Just don’t let me see you in here again with fights. I don’t know what’s happened to the school and
to young people today. In my day people
would fight each other fair and square, out behind the schoolhouse. It’s just with the fathers away, there doesn’t
seem to be any discipline.” He looked
through his thick glasses at both of us almost expecting us to sympathize with
him. “All right, boys,” he said wearily,
“you all go back to your classes and don’t let me see you in here again.”
We got up
and left and went back to our classes. After
a hysterical Latin class, during which the teacher, a kindly woman in her
fifties with an incredible case of dandruff, was shouted down and almost knocked
to the floor by one of the students, I left in disgust. I knew you weren’t going to learn anything
that way. Outside I saw Joe and the
members of the Foggybottom Gang waiting.
I noticed that two of them had knives, which I could see glinting in the
sun. They were not switchblades but the
kind of knife used for shucking oysters in Chesapeake Bay, easy to hide in your
pants and very sharp. I had heard of
several stabbings the year before, and I didn’t want to be the first victim of
the new academic year, so I went out the back way through the boiler room and
walked home.
Unquote.
And David says he loved that and was right at home. Apart from pretty spectacular total recall
the story sets out the problem of Black and White relations from then on. Of course the effect of this incredible first
week at school was very traumatic for David fixating him it would seem with a
variation of the Stockholm syndrome. Nor
was this an isolated incident but the ‘normal’ situation that would go on for
years, his entire youth, in David’s checkerboard neighborhood. While seeming to maintain a rigid separation
between his Black and White identities as well as White and Jewish identities
his primary identity seemed to be White during this period while he sank into a
medium grade depression. He immersed his
mind in music to escape his desperate situation and his music the rather odd
combination of French Horn and Negro Jazz.
Probably the French Horn was a desperate clinging to his White identity.
But, first
let us put his situation into a perspective that must lead to the Supreme Court
decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education.
The Brown decision assumed that schools were not segregated and that there
was no experience to indicate what the result of integration would be. Yet, here in DC in the forties and probably
the thirties one has a sociological situation that indicates precisely what the
result would be. There was no need for
guesswork.
The Supreme
Court justices who would make the Brown decision had integration information on
the residential level that was horrendous.
Eventually all the White people would leave DC or were driven out by the
Negroes and DC became something of a cauldron of crime. One in which even Negroes were desperate to
escape.
The schools
were such that, as in Amram’s case he was terrorized for life but the White
fantasy was that no resistance by Whites should be offered to the
atrocities. Now, this was not just young
Negroes mixed with young Whites. In high
schools grown men were entered as students who then directed the young Negroes
in terrorizing the Whites to gain control and dominance. Thus,. Whites were taught or required to
accept the criminal behavior quietly or they would be charged with the
horrendous crime of ‘racism’. If they
fought back win or lose they would be charged as the aggressors and have their
young lives destroyed, sacrificed on the altar of integration. The saying then and now was ‘you have to
break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Interestingly David has a song with the refrain, ‘all my eggs are
broken.’
Any rational
White person could see and understand the result of forced integration. Whites were being denied equality and their
rights, essentially enslaved to the Negroes.
The Whites of the South against whom the Brown decision was actually
directed with their long experience with the Negro were clear as to the
outcome. If nothing else they had this
sociological experiment in DC before their eyes as well as the deplorable
conditions in Northern schools which were already integrated. It was quite obvious that integration would
lead to disintegration of society so it must be obvious that the intent of the
Supreme Court justices was the disintegration of society.
The Southern
Whites therefore put up a stout resistance refusing to accept the Justices’
decision which, after all, was merely the Justices’ intention. It would take the Executive to enforce the
decision. This led then President
Eisenhower to his decision to mobilize army troops and if tanks were not used my
memory projected them on the scene.
These were regular Army bearing arms to conduct a Negro Student into
Little Rock’s Central High School.
Of course,
the propaganda value of a switchblade bearing six foot four, two hundred pound
Negro giant being led by an army squad into the high school was nil. Not being totally ignorant of propaganda
effects, as their model student they chose a petite little girl in a pink
pinafore and pigtails to be escorted by appropriately huge soldiers bearing
arms. Resistance at that point was
futile and Little Rock’s Central High was turned into the same hell hole that
David Amram experienced at DC’s Gordon Jr. High. Rape and turmoil.
In today’s
schools, one doesn’t see too many petite Negro girls wearing pink pinafores
with their hair in pigtails. The propaganda
effect of Eisenhower’s action was that the US government valued Negroes over
Whites and that has been proven in the sequel.
No integrated school today is an educational institution. Today, however, as well as knives, guns are
much in use, so students pass metal detectors on the way to classes. Was Brown an improvement in race
relations? As the current situation was
predictable it must have been according to plan.
David Amram
endured this torture all through Jr. High and High School. He must have needed some escape and he found
it in his music allowing him to retreat into the safety of his own mind. Trapped in a Negro culture the music given
him to express himself was Negro jazz.
However the instrument he chose was the French Horn which is not a jazz
instrument. He might have done better to
have chosen the saxophone or trumpet if he had really chosen to excel as a jazz
musician. Rather the French Horn was his
rather obvious connection to his White heritage. He carried it around with him like a child
and his security blanket.
Perhaps in
an effort to gain some security he sought the company of Negro musicians who
accepted him and his French Horn although they usually remarked: ‘Hmm, a French Horn, you don’t see those much
in jazz bands.’ I never have. David must have been a semi-comical figure on
the band stand. ‘Who’s the dude with the
French Horn?’ Thus he had a presence in
the DC area. I presume he graduated
high school although he says that what with the constant chaos in class the
academic standards weren’t too demanding.
Sufficient to say he attained a degree of competence on his symbolic
French Horn.
I suspect
that he was a mental wreck by his late teen years. The military draft had not been discontinued
after the war so the probable necessity of serving in the military loomed
before him. He solved this problem by
volunteering just as the Korean War burst upon the scene.
Following so
quickly on the heels of the Second World War the Korean War, referred to as a ‘police
action’ had a psychologically disturbing effect on society especially just
after the Soviet Union exploded their own atomic bomb in 1949, relying heavily
on US spies. The idea that Americans
would betray the country to Russians was very traumatic, causing a lot of self-doubt. It shook the country to its foundations.
-II-
David was
fifteen when WWII ended and he probably graduated high school in 1948. The Korean War began in June of 1950. The military draft was still in effect so
rather than wait to be called up David volunteered for a two year tour of duty
in the Army. Joining the Army also got
him out of DC a movthat might have been more difficult otherwise. For the first time since Jr. High, then, he
was removed from a Negro environment.
The military at the time was averse to social experiments so there were
few Negroes in the Army. The Army, of
course, had had Negro regiments since the Civil War but they had White officers
and were not integrated otherwise. The
Navy had never had Negro sailors except for Stewards and other service personnel
and would evade integration until 1957.
While his
memoir balances David’s Negro, Caucasian and Jewish heritages it must have been
true that the Negro characteristics of his heritage dominated his personality at
the time. He was clearly a hipster and
may have been what Norman Mailer called a White Negro. Certainly his speech must have been heavily
Negro and hipster, or cat, to use an alternate term.
At any rate
with his trusty French Horn tucked under his arm he began his military
experience. As luck would have it he was
not sent to Korea but to the other side of the world to monitor the Germans and
keep the Soviets on their side of the Iron Curtain. The fear of an invasion of Europe by the
Soviets kept people on edge along with the A-bomb.
Psychologically
his Army service must have been a healing period for David’s mind even if the
military experience is nearly as traumatic as David’s DC Negroland life. But, the Army would probably have been less
dangerous to navigate. And then, at
twenty he was older and more able to deal with things.
To compare
my own experience of a very difficult childhood that left me with certain
psychological impairments and my military experience following immediately
after high school graduation I was removed from the scene of my youthful
pressures, and, even though under the stresses of the military, my mind began
healing as soon as I left the scene of their creation so about eight months on
the worst psychological effects lifted much to my relief. I’m sure that happened to David also because
like me he spent the next decade or so in the process of realizing not only his
White heritage but even more deeply his Jewish heritage. At this period he became a Jew. Indeed, his memoir that carries his life only
up to the age of 37 was a record of that journey of realization.
David’s
descriptions of his states of mind and person are presented only
incidentally. There are no detached
descriptions and no analysis. So looking
through his narrative one sees a beat up hommey running very nearly on
auto-pilot, unkempt, close to dirty, making his way through the army. His trusty French Horn removes him from the
more onerous aspects of army life into a twilight zone of musical misfits
forming the Seventh Army Band.
As David
describes the band they are one subversive lot, refusing to wear their uniforms
properly while evading all other regulations to the best of their ability. It should be noted that most were draftees
and not regular Army. There was always
conflict between those coerced to serve and the regulars who chose military
service as their vocation, so his group wasn’t too far out of line. David describes how he grew his hair as long
as possible carefully stuffing it under his hat. I know where that’s at. I too was I wouldn’t say rebellious, bur
resentful, not only of the Navy but of life, I too grew my hair as long as
possible and stuffed it under my hat.
I hadn’t his
congenial atmosphere but I’m sure that being in with these musicians eased his
two years which in different circumstances might have been disastrous. With a better frame of mind his tour of duty
would have been delightful as the band toured Europe giving concerts thereby
living the high life compared to foot troops.
Somewhat
rescued from himself David was discharged into the world in 1953 having
contributed his two years to the destiny of America. However he was still an ill man suffering the
after effects of Washington DC.
Consequently unable to face returning to that future he chose not to
return to the United States taking up residency in Paris instead.
He was still
a beat up hommey hence he chose the Bohemian way of life. While he wallowed in his misery his intention
was still to reclaim the Feasterville life he enjoyed before his disastrous
removal to DC. Thus, after gathering his
psychological bearings to some extent he returned to the US landing in NYC in 1955. Having no desire to return to the horrific
memories of DC he found his way to Greenwich Village and the Boho way of life.
-III-
From 1955
when David Amram returned to the US from Europe to 1966 when he climbed the
mountain of respectability to become the resident composer of the New York
Philharmonic was a short eleven years, only a decade. For the major part of those years David was a
dirty, ragged Bohemian who most frequently offended his friends by his
appearance and the rat holes he lived in, by his own admission. His depression must have been fairly deep yet
he avoided drugs in a druggy atmosphere, stayed fairly sober and worked like
the devil.
He had been
advised that composing music would be his deliverance rather than his horn
playing. Indeed, while David assures us
that he was a superior horn player a professional shows up, befriends him, and
gives him lessons on horn playing to correct his defects. Regardless then of David’s self-evaluation
capable horn players thought he needed help.
Composing was to be his meal ticket.
Now, let us
concentrate on the subject of Amram’s second book, Offbeat, concerning his
relationship with the writer Jack Kerouac.
I’m sure that most people will recognize Kerouac as the author of the
Beat bible, On The Road. Perhaps some of
those know that Kerouac wrote reams of material throughout a couple dozen books. Critics at the time castigated the writer as close
to worthless. I have to agree with them
although I have to say that Kerouac is one of the all time greatest word
slingers. The words slip mellifluously
from his pen but with small content. His
books are the equivalent of well produced B movies. For me they always leave a bad taste. I mean, he wrote about bums.
Kerouac had
a difficult time getting On The Road published.
Indeed from the time he wrote the book to its publication he wrote ten
other unpublished books and he didn’t stop there. I was probably among the first to read On The
Road. The Beats, of which Kerouac is
considered the originator, were considered to be revolutionary, but as unsavory
types they succeeded indirectly. Revolution
was in the air in the Fifties through the Sixties and it permeated my time in
the US Navy just before the beginning of 1957 through 1959.
My ship was
leaving for a Pacific tour of duty at the end of the summer of 1957. Just before we shoved off, this is true, a
sailor on the dock passed a blue bound advance copy to our Communist Yeoman
telling him this was an important book for the revolution. I missed what was revolutionary about it
reading only about a bunch of footloose losers.
It was talked about aboard ship however and it changed attitudes.
Subsequently
the book became a bible of sorts for a certain type of guy. I could never understand why but it was a
major influence on their attitude toward life.
So, Offbeat
is a three hundred page book about Jack and David’s relationship. David met him in 1956 just as the Beat
movement was about to surface nationwide.
According to David in Offbeat their relationship was intense; at times
one can almost believe that they were married.
David says that he wrote the book at the insistence of a friend who
thought Dave’s experiences were too valuable to go unrecorded. However, in Dave’s six hundred page memoir Vibrations
Kerouac gets only a couple mentions with no indication of an involved
relationship, not even a hint of Kerouac’s significance. Where the truth lies, from my reading is
indeterminate. Nonetheless certain
indisputable facts are recorded.
In 1959
Kerouac wrote the script for a movie titled Pull My Daisy. A short film of twenty minutes. David was asked to score the film. His accounts between Downbeat and Vibrations
vary wildly. In Downbeat he says Jack
asked him to score it; in Vibrations he says Leslie and Frank did. I would imagine most people have not heard of
the movie, Pull My Daisy. David makes it
sound like a major cultural event. I
have watched part of it. I left off maybe halfway through. David who is a real booster of anything his
friends did thought it was terrific.
For those
immersed in the Beat period it may be of interest to see their heroes in
action. Ginsberg, Corso, Amram, they’re
all there in their beatnik glory. For my
tastes they looked like a bunch of bums goofing around a dump of a house. In Variations David gives credit for the film
to the artist Alfred Leslie and the filmmaker Robert Frank. Leslie was an artist, apparently of some
renown, I have to confess I have never heard of him, he has a couple of
published collections, while Robert Frank has a reputation as an early ‘experimental’
filmmaker. Having become somewhat familiar
with various experimental films I find them more self-indulgent than
impressive.
In Offbeat
David characterizes the performance as improvisational to the nth degree, the
actors cutting up in totally undisciplined disarray. In Variations he portrays the filming as
carefully planned by Leslie and Frank. Indeed
Leslie ‘revealed’ in 1968 that while the production was thought to be
improvisational it was actually carefully plotted. You’d have to read the sources to make up
your own mind. Offbeat seems the most
reasonable approach to me.
It is a
silent film with no dialogue but Kerouac does a voice over completely improvised
according to David while David improvises the musical background as Kerouac speaks. He says Kerouac and he were satisfied with
the result while Leslie and Frank wished to make several takes to get the best
possible results. Kerouac and Amram who
value extemporaneity more than a hoped for perfection demur but agree to one
more take and then refuse any further effort.
In
Variations David says the he reworked his music separately seeking perfection
corroborating Leslie’s 1968 revelation.
There does seem to be a clash of ideals that reduces the integrity of
David’s two texts while casting doubt on the veracity of his memories.
Dan
Wakefield in his 1992 memoir, New York In The Fifties makes mention of Amram,
usually positive and even admiring, as a spreader of sunshine so I suspect
David of speaking well, putting things in their best light for the occasion
rather than strict accuracy. This is
nowhere more evident than in his account of poetry readings. He credits Kerouac and himself as introducing
musically accompanied readings to Bohemia in New York. This is probably true as Kerouac and Ginsberg
had been doing the same in San Francisco.
I think he gives too much credit also to the quality of the poets and
their poetry. I attended a coupe readings
in North Beach, San Francisco and came away singularly unimpressed with the
poetry although the social scene was nice.
For some
delightful accounts of poetry reading in the New York of the Sixties Ed Sanders
of the Fugs has wonderful accounts in his Tales Of Beatnik Glory. There are also some filmed readings on the
internet, but without the ambience of being in the audience it’s not the same
thing.
While David
is great for waxing enthusiastic about his relationship with his horn he fades
away on the historical background of his activities. For instance, he mentions the jazz bar the
Five Spot as being important but fails to give context. Dan Wakefield on the other hand found the
Five Spot so significant that he goes into great detail even providing some
information on its ambiance. In fact, those places, jazz clubs, were holes
requiring a great deal of enthusiasm for jazz to endure the environment.
I never
visited any NYC jazz clubs during the day but I did pay a visit to the
Blackhawk in San Francisco. The
Blackhawk was one of the premier jazz clubs in the country. Let me say from the outset that I am not a
jazz buff. The depression, pain and rage
that underlies the music is offensive to my tastes, especially the classic jazz
of the Fifties. The Negro artists of the
Fifties were sui generis. As they aged
they were never replaced although that fact seems to have gone unnoticed. Jazz began withering during the Sixties, was
commercialized in the seventies and eighties and what remains is probably
formulaic today.
The mystique
of the Negro players was incredible. If
the Blackhawk was any indication the club was a church for jazzists and the
players were its high priests.
Essentially they could get away with anything in those dark nasty
hypnotic caves. The Negro artists were
themselves worshipped by the Whites. Dan
Wakefield tells the following story of one of the highest of the priesthood
Charlie Mingus, p. 309:
Quote:
Mingus was a
figure all right, and could be as dramatic and surprising off stage as on. The novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitizer
will never forget the time he took a beautiful girl to the Five Spot when he
was nineteen years old. “I wanted to
impress her,” he says. “Mingus was
playing, and I could tell he noticed the girl- everyone noticed her. When the last set was over, Mingus came up to
our table and took out a pair of handcuffs.
He didn’t say a word, just clamped one of the handcuffs on his own wrist
and then clamped the other on the wrist of my date. She didn’t say anything, and he pulled up her
arm, so she stood up, and then they walked out the door together, neither of
them saying anything.”
Unquote.
Of course,
the important thing here is that Wurlitzer made no protest, he acquiesced in
her abduction although he was responsible for her safety. No one else in the jazz church said anything either. The high priest had his prerogatives. That and the mystique accorded to the Magic
Negro.
Indeed,
Amram, Wakefield and others were all working hard for the integration of the
bands themselves, perhaps thinking that was a panacea for something. Wakefield himself, accounts the advent of the
Beatles in 1964 as the disruption of the integration dream and perhaps the
beginning of the end for jazz. Certainly,
the musical priesthood was transferred from Negroes to Whites when the Beatles
became the high priests. As Wakefield
complains, the Beatles and the bands following from England were all
White. So, while there were a few
exceptions in Rock- Jimi Hendrix- that jazz dream was destroyed. It should be noticed that there is a Hendrix
church. Negro energy was transferred to
the all Black soul bands of the Sixties led by Detroit’s Motown label.
According to
Wakefield the Lit., Music and Art crowds of Greenwich Village were separate,
the artists favoring the Cedar Tavern, the Literature crowd the White Horse
Tavern and the music crowd the Village Vanguard and other spots. The Folk crowd was not prominent in Wakefield’s
mind during the Fifties for some reason.
They were certainly there.
Wakefield says that while most crowds stuck to respective groups Amram
was a curiosity as he moved freely through all groups with a reputation as Mr.
Sunshine.
Indeed, he
was something of a touch giving small sums of money to anyone who asked for
it. He complains about being broke while
at the same time he says that he gave
his money away, living in digs few would tolerate. If his sweater, of which he speaks so
lovingly, hadn’t been so raggedy, worn and smelly he would have given that off
his back to anyone willing to take it. A
real St. Francis. He must, then, have
had many acquaintances who would speak well of him in place of returning the
loans.
In addition
to pushing for integrated bands and racial harmony David rediscovered his own
racial roots in Judaism. A synagogue beneath
his window whose religious music rose through it awakened his interest through
its mournful dirge answering to his own depression as jazz did. Consequently David offered to compose sacred
music for the services, which music was well received. Thus his ties to Judaism were revived.
As a
composer he composed furiously, able to turn out reams and reams of
compositions. Now, the Fifties, they
were not a dull time unless, of course, you were dull, although my own
familiarity with the later years was disrupted by entering the Navy, losing
contact with those critical years for the future; I was in exile, as it were, in the
military. Nevertheless, so-called world
music began after WWII in the nascent Folk music scene by the group called the
Weavers led by the ever present Pete Seeger.
Wakefield seems to have ignored the Folkies but Folk was very largely
White as well as Rock music and the two actually coalesced in the Sixties.
After the
War it seems like there were hundreds of songs celebrating the charms of far away
places with strange sounding names.
Martin Denny’s LP The Quiet Village was a whole album of songs
celebrating exotic tropical paradises.
At this time
also Electra Records began a series of LPs of ethnic musics that was very in
with the knowing, the avant guard. On
its Nonesuch label Electra issued two terrific albums of Balinese Gamelon music
including the memorable Ramayana Monkey Chant, a real listening
experience. A Bulgarian record was much
revered and well as several others. The African record Missa Luba is a not to
be missed classic. That’s only if you
are of the ilk otherwise you won’t appreciate such discs
So, David
was a leader of this Travel Poster Crowd.
Travel posters of far away place were de riguer on everyone’s walls
especially after the Boeing 707 changed international travel in 1959. David Amram was riding the wave of a future
on that score even though jazz was emitting a dying moan. By the seventies these Fifties jazz artists
were so passe that a record producer by the name of Creed Taylor fashioned a
line of easy listening records employing various of these old passe Negro
players with reputations as a front to legitimize his easy listening and he
made a fortune. There’s gold out there
you just have to know where to find it.
It was the end of an era.
David then
had conquered all musical worlds except for the White world of classical music. As I see it he had made a million friends
with his zippity doo dah attitude expecially and most importantly in the Jewish
religious world.
The
background story here is unknown or, at least, undiscovered by me. The New York Philharmonic had never had a
resident composer but in 1966 the position was created for David. David was appreciative and by his account
overwhelmed and well he might be. There
appears to have been a great gulf between what he was doing and the
professional world of the New York Philharmonic of Leonard Bernstein.
The
impression one gets is that the Philharmonic gave into pressure from somewhere
to create a respectable paying position for Dave. In doing so, of course, they enabled him to
rise from his declassed state caused by his entrance into DC’s Gordon Jr.
High. He now became a man of all classes
and was enabled to regain his lost self-respect. He probably would never fit in to the over
world because of the underclass characteristics he had acquired in his long and
traumatic exile among the subteranneans.
If I had to
guess as to how he was offered his newly created position I think it would be
his association with the rabbis and his sacred compositions for them. The upper music world of New York is almost
all Jewish. Leonard Bernstein himself,
then the conductor of the Philharmonic, was himself Jewish and subject to
pressure from the rabbis. I’m guessing
it was all in the synagogue, but David realized his goal and immediately
commemorated it in his memoir. David was
only thirty-seven, living today at 87 his life wasn’t even half over.
-IV-
Up to 1967
David’s is an American story. A
collection of racial, ethnic and religious heritages to be reconciled: in his
case White American, Jew and Negro. The
conflation of all three could have destroyed David’s life but he had what it
took to blast through to salvation.
Salvation to at least 1967, the sequel remains to be seen. David continues his story in a 2008 book he
titles Upbeat: Nine Lives Of A Musical Cat.
I have yet to read that but I may report on it when I do.
David grew
up under a Melting Pot hope of immigration.
Under that fantasy the immigrants would gradually assimilate themselves
to Anglo-American mores, forget their antecedents and then the US would be a
great big harmonious happy family Anglo Saxon family because Anglo-Saxons had
discovered he secret of governing. One
fault to that theory was that Negroes weren’t immigrants and the Melting Pot
theory didn’t include the Negro race. No
matter what happened the Negro problem would be insoluble.
The theory
also broke down because some immigrant groups wished to impose their mores on
the Anglo-Saxons rather than those of the Anglo-Saxons on them. Chief among those were those of David’s
Jewish heritage. As it was their intention
to impose their mores made it necessary to dissolve the Melting Pot into its
constituent parts and then reassemble them under the Jewish aegis. Thus for several years after 1945 it became a
custom to have various national festivals in
which people dressed in their national dress and did a couple
dances. That didn’t last too long
because under American conditions it was humiliating; we were supposed to be
one and for most other national customs really had no place. The time for that sort of celebration had
passed.
David’s
Negro heritage was a more convenient lever for disintegration as well as his
Jewish heritage itself. Lest we have
confusion let me say I share David’s three heritages, as do all Americans
whether they realize it or not, plus a heritage of the orphanage and several
lesser ones, most notable Polish an English but I consider myself American
First, White second and devil take the hindmost. But, we all, because of immigration, share in
each and every heritage. The Jews, the
Negroes and whoever have given up any exclusivity to their heritage, like it or
not.
As there was
tremendous White guilt over slavery this was cultivated as the Negro question and
was a great tool as witness the White girl Mingus abducted for sexual purposes no doubt and neither she
nor her boyfriend nor anyone objected. No other race or nationality could have pulled
that off. It is significant that Mingus
knew he could. No one has to excuse his
conduct because he was Black and objecting would make one a racist. Absolute nonsense. Injustice wherever it is
found should be resisted.
It is also
indicative of how society had disintegrated when David as a Jew, within the synagogue
if I’m correct, had the job of resident composer created just for him.
America
rather than being a Melting Pot was being created as diverse before our eyes consolidating
under a Jewish aegis.
In order to
do that it is necessary to destroy the symbols of power of the dominant
culture. Thus, the well documented War
on Christmas, reducing it from a national custom to a parochial one, depriving
Anglo-Saxon of the notion that America is Christian. This, even though the Jews are only two
percent of the population. In the last
couple of years any symbol ‘offensive’ to a non-White culture such as statues,
trademarks etc. are being forcibly removed by sub-cultures. Not only the Confederate flag but the US flag
itself is under assault. The law, the
Supreme Court Justices, enforces minority rights against the majority. Since the election of Trump resistance to
these encroachments has become permissible but not legal.
The problem
is not that sub-cultures want their own monuments that exist along side
traditional monuments, names, titles, whatever but that the dominant culture
and its monuments shall be replaced by the minority cultures and monuments.
Rather than
follow that line of reasoning for the time being I think I will break off here
and continue when I have read Amram’s Upbeat, see how the nine lives have
worked out.
