From NYT profile
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, op-eras, 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.
----
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 inter-view, 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!'"
On This Day (11/25):
No comments:
Post a Comment