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BOOK REVIEW
David Amram
Offbeat
(Thunders Mouth Press)
by Walter Horn
May 2002
For a substantial number of non-aficionados, David Amram's name is
familiar today only from a line in a Raffi song for small children.
But Amram has an impressive resume that includes entries as a classical
composer of concert and film music (his score for The Manchurian
Candidate has been justly praised) and as a bop French hornist
who played with Mingus, Gillespie, Taylor and many others. I have
long admired Amram's touching and understated violin sonata, of which
there is, lamentably, no recording available at present. Furthermore,
his "Holocaust opera", The Final Ingredient, though
brief, seems to me far superior to several more celebrated recent
works, such as John Harbison's Gatsby and Anthony Davis's X.
Amram was also a good buddy and frequent collaborator of Jack Kerouac's,
and his new memoir Offbeat (Thunder's Mouth Press-$22.95) is
a good natured-if highly repetitive and self-congratulatory-record
of a number of Thunderbird wine-soaked experiences among "the
beats".
My placement within scare quotes of the common term for beret-covered,
bongo-carrying, scat-singing, goatee-wearing bohemians is highly
advised, since Amram repeatedly insists that there never were any
such animals. In fact, it is perhaps the main tenet of this book
that Kerouac was a writer, pure and simple, and that the only part
of the beat mythology with any grain of truth is that Kerouac and
his friends Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and David
Amram, were precursors of flower children in being particularly
gentle and constitutionally opposed to formality or exclusivity.
That's it. In all other respects, at least according to Amram, Kerouac
was just a slightly tipsy version of Melville or Emerson who is
finally receiving from critics and academia his long-denied coronation
as a towering genius of American Literature.
Offbeat contains a number of incongruities that are common
to this type of work. Each of the dozen ingredients of a certain
(now 50-year-old) omelet is recounted with precision, while there
is no recollection whatever of the first meeting between Amram and
his subject. Entire conversations and minor details of late night
jazz-poetry events from the 50's are set forth in detail, but where,
when or exactly how Amram became Kerouac's collaborator/muse never
comes to light.
In addition, there seems an almost painful desperation for Mr.
Amram to get his "creds" into public view. Apparently
sensing that he could tell us only so many times (three, I believe)
that his prior book, Vibrations, contains 465 pages, and
that he has written over 100 orchestral works, he frequently puts
this sort of information in the mouths of others. At one point,
poet Frank O'Hara, who is trying to ease Amram's disappointment
at failing to get a Kerouac/Amram improv gig at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1957, provides the following consoling remarks:
Do it downtown where you're already loved.
It was a mistake for me to try to break down the walls of pretension
here at the Museum. When you get better known, they'll fawn and
grovel over you…at least until you fall out of fashion. Do
it downtown. Let's try the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th
Street. You've already played for their art openings, David. [so
maybe I don't really need to tell you the address?] The artists
all remember you from your stint this past winter at the Five
Spot with your quartet. They know your scores for the Free Shakespeare
in the Park you just started composing [because they're precognitive
when it comes to their adoration of your work?], and they've
heard you with Mingus. [p. 13]
This kind of kiss-kiss dialogue is repeated endlessly throughout
Offbeat-both in the pages of reminiscences of his performances
and conversations with Kerouac and in the later sections, which
deal with more contemporary events-mostly undertaken in the writer's
honor. In their tête-à-têtes, Kerouac
and Amram constantly compare their work favorably with "Bach,
Bird and Berlioz" who they seem to feel were also wronged by
their contemporaries. And they alternately berate those Philistines
who don't apprehend the consummate beauty of Kerouac's scrolls and
Amram's scores and remind themselves how often the real cognoscenti
have assured them of the visionary magnificence of each improvised
rhyme and horn ditty. An unwelcome pathos accompanies Amram's successive
pleas that the reader engage in something akin to this mantra: "They
were smart! They read Shakespeare! They were serious about our art
and could discuss it intelligently! They weren't anything like Maynard
G. Krebs!"
There's a particularly painful description of an event in 2001 in
which Amram convinces a 16-year-old disciple to forget his dreams
of meeting a supermodel and concentrate, like Jack did, on creating
spontaneous art. Actor E. G. Marshall is brought forth as an effusive
fan of Amram's, and Steve Allen (he who demonstrated his own "openness
to alternative viewpoints" by once shutting Dalton Trumbo out
of a political fundraiser in California) is canonized for both his
reportedly unerring memory of the bop era and his pianistic skills
(!). Even unambiguous flops, like Kerouac's famous bombing at the
Vanguard in December of 1957, was the fault of a "freeze"
emanating from the musicians there who "didn't know what he was
capable of doing". Interestingly, this conscious chill occurred
in spite of Amram's repeated claim that "All musicians loved
Jack"—a universal affection reportedly stemming from the
writer's unparalleled powers of listening and understanding jazz performance.
Celebratory events are judged according to their quotient of the Kerouacian
qualities of soulfulness and being "down home". Everyone's
wife is beautiful and gracious, everyone's daughter is devoted. Worst
of all, each new Amram composition or improv and every Kerouac scat
(we are given no transcriptions of these, unfortunately) is
said to be a masterpiece of its type. Every performance is hailed
as phenomenal, extraordinary, life altering. This sort of thing can
grow wearisome, as can the regular pounding of beatnik poseurs and
suburban voyeurs. In addition, there is the occasional anachronistic
placement of contemporary phrases, like "elevator music"
or "baaad", into dialogue ostensibly occurring in the late
50s. In sum, the book suffers significantly from an abundance of blarney
and from being a self-made paean to the memoirist as well as to Kerouac
and other friends. This aspect is exaggerated by over-the-top cover
blurbs from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, and Frank McCourt—three
individuals who are heaped with garlands within the pages of Offbeat.
In spite of all these shortcomings, however (and the heavy redundancy
resulting from Amram's reproduction of several previously published
remembrances that differ only slightly from newly minted passages),
it's hard not to like both Amram and his portrayal of the so-called
beat scene. Amram is obviously a total sweetheart whose hyperbole
can be traced in equal parts to a child-like sincerity and to his
devotion to a talented friend who was lost to him in tragic fashion.
Several recollections in the book are great fun, especially Amram's
recounting of the cuckoo creation of the silent film Pull My
Daisy, which consisted largely of the trashing of a New York
City apartment to the accompaniment of Amram's music and Kerouac's
improvised narration. Allen Ginsberg is affectionately portrayed
as a bit of a left-wing scold, and Gregory Corso comes off as a
horny, wisecracking commentator on contemporary mores, something
like a poetic precursor to Seinfeld. Kerouac is described as quite
knowledgeable about music, someone who could both improvise on the
piano in the style of Beethoven and remember a theme to an Amram
cantata years later-after hearing it only once. Amram paints him
as shy and diffident about everything except his talents. When filmmaker
Alfred Leslie asks Kerouac how he can be sure that his first improvisatory
narration to Pull My Daisy can't be improved upon, the novelist
answers, "Because I'm touched by the hand of God." He
seems to be searching for love not only among barmaids in New York,
but at his Lowell home, where his mother always came first. He's
sensitive to criticism, but he never responds in kind. He seems
seriously to have wanted to do oratorios with Amram based on fantasy
baseball and football. He often seems sad or needy, especially at
those times we know he must have realized he would never actually
be able to stop drinking-in spite of his regular vows. Amram makes
a credible case for their joint spontaneous creation of "poetry-and-music"
sessions in the mid-50's being the basis not only of rap and hip-hop
music but also of spoken word events and poetry slams.
For all the fifties nostalgia, the main feeling one is likely
to encounter upon finishing Offbeat is the desire to have
been present at several concerts a bit later on. Some of these involved
Kerouac directly, but others-particularly the1965 premieres of Amram's
cantatas A Year in Our Land and Let Us Remember and
the television broadcast of his opera The Final Ingredient-were
influenced only by the novelist's text suggestions and persona.
(Let Us Remember, based on the poetry of Langston Hughes
was premiered at the same concert in which Edward G. Robinson narrated
another, unnamed work: after the show, wag Gary Goodrow accosted
Robinson with a heavy, fake Irish brougue, and Robinson escaped
the scene by doing a Little Caesar imitation.) This was a wonderfully
productive period for Amram, during which it became clear that he
was a fine composer in his own right and didn't need to lean on
Mingus, Taylor, Kerouac, Hughes or anybody else. Now in his seventies,
Amram remains a tireless performer, composer and storyteller, but
without more recordings of his work, his light could fade. Even
so, it will never go completely out, and not just because of some
Raffi tune or the steady stream of works on Kerouac and his compatriots
that hit the bookstores with each passing year. There's just too
much talent, love and chutzpah in both the composer of In
Our Land and the author of On the Road for either man
to cease to inspire those who will take the time to listen, who
will look closely for the diamonds lying deep within the sidewalks
of Old Manhattoes.
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