An Evening with DAVID AMRAM

Hygienic Art, New London Music Fest, Mystic Independent Theater and Hozomeen Press are proud to partner in presenting a special evening with David Amram featuring a rare screening of the film Pull My Daisy (featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and narration by Jack Kerouac). Amram is a multi-faceted artist who has worked in nearly any genre you could name. He partnered with Kerouac on some of the first jazz/poetry readings e...ver to be held.

David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works, many scores for theatre, film and opera, and has conducted symphony orchestras on every continent except Antarctica. He is also recognized as a celebrated jazz, folk, Latin, Middle Eastern, African, Celtic and Native American music artist for more than fifty years; considered a musical progenitor of `world music’ (decades before the term existed); and has even recorded a country album with himself as singer, guitarist, composer and lyricist. The Boston Globe has described him as “The Renaissance Man of American Music,” while the New York Times has labeled him "A One-Man Folk Festival…who was multi-cultural before multi-culturalism existed!"

A pioneer player of jazz French horn, he is also a virtuoso on piano, numerous flutes and whistles, percussion, and dozens of folkloric instruments from 25 countries, as well as an inventive, funny improvisational lyricist and scat singer. He has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, who chose him as The New York Philharmonic's first composer-in-residence, with Joseph Papp, who chose him as the first composer-in-residence of New York's Public Theatre and Shakespeare in the Park, while also collaborating with Langston Hughes, Dizzy Gillespie, Dustin Hoffman, Willie Nelson, Eugene Ormandy, Budd Schulberg, Thelonious Monk, Norman Corwin, Candido, Charles Mingus, Sir James Gallway, Lionel Hampton, Hunter Thompson, Alan Ginsburg, E. G. Marshall, and Tito Puente. One of Amram's recent works "Giants of the Night," commissioned and premiered by Sir James Galway, is a flute concerto dedicated to the memory of Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac and Dizzy Gillespie, three American artists whom Amram knew well and worked with.

Over the past 60 years, David Amram has performed and/or recorded with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Pettiford, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Kenny Dorham, Betty Carter, Stan Getz, Patti Smith, Gerry Mulligan, Willie Nelson, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Vassar Clements, Odetta, Tito Puente, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Earl Fatha’ Hines, Johnny Depp, Warren Zevon, Ray Barretto, Jerry Jeff Walker, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Pepper Adams, Mongo Santamaria, Pete Seeger, Thad Jones, Steve Martin, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, John McEuen, Los Papines and Machito, in addition to hundreds of amazing indigenous musicians and singers from all over Africa, Asia, South America and Europe.

His two most recent orchestral works are "Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie" commissioned by the Guthrie Foundation which premiered September 29, 2007; and Three Songs: A Concerto for Piano and Orchestra which premiered in January of 2009. In 2008, Amram was chosen as the composer-in-residence for the Democratic National Convention's in Denver.