David Amram

David Amram disregards conventional musical categories, moving without hesitation across classical and jazz idioms as well as Latin jazz, folk, television scoring, and film music. In addition to the French horn—an instrument seldom featured in jazz—he has also recorded on piano, recorder, Spanish guitar, and assorted percussion.

He enrolled for one year at the Oberlin College Conservatory beginning in 1948 before completing a B.A. in history at George Washington University in 1952. His sustained involvement with Latin music started in 1951 in Washington, D.C., when he performed on horn and percussion with the Buddy Rowell Latin band while simultaneously serving as a classical horn player in the National Symphony Orchestra. During his posting with the Seventh Army in Europe, Amram recorded with Lionel Hampton in Paris in 1955; later that same year he returned to New York and joined Charles Mingus’ Jazz Workshop, appearing alongside both Mingus and Oscar Pettiford. He led a quartet that included tenor saxophonist George Barrow and produced a 1957 album for Decca; between 1963 and 1965 he appeared regularly at New York’s Five Spot. After the 1950s his work shifted primarily toward classical composition, generating orchestral and instrumental pieces as well as incidental music—among them the score for Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., which received a Pulitzer Prize—sufficiently respected to earn him the post of first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic from 1966 to 1967.

In 1977 Amram traveled aboard the cruise ship Daphne from New Orleans to Havana with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Earl “Fatha” Hines, among the earliest American citizens legally permitted to visit Cuba in sixteen years. A vigorous live recording of his composition “En Memoria de Chano Pozo” was made in Havana with members of Irakere, including Arturo Sandoval and Paquito D’Rivera, together with several visiting Americans, and can be heard on the album Havana/New York released by Flying Fish. The Cuban visit drew extensive contemporary press coverage and introduced many Americans to Irakere for the first time.

Most of Amram’s currently available recordings appear on Flying Fish. The same open-minded musician also supplies buoyant French horn, recorder, and piano obbligatos on several eccentric 1971 tracks by beat poet Allen Ginsberg (among them “Vomit Express” and “Going to San Diego”), later issued on John Hammond’s own label.