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Offbeat
The book title is concise. Accurate. David Amram composes and conducts an upbeat validation of the raw and beautiful Jack Kerouac and was there as a friend when Jack died in his literal and literary arms. Amram is a true friend to art and on of the few men I can personally call a role model for modern times. Amram's first book, out of print, but readily available, is titled Vibrations. Vibrations is a symphony of the first 50 years of David's collaborative life. David cleaned up his eating act and has lived to tell the amazing stories of those who died soooo young from internal and external abuse. Blow, Davey blow your horn. <
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>(February 22, 2007, comment written in Bellingham, Washington)

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"OFFBEAT" IS ON TARGET!
This book has been sorely needed for a long time. David Amram, composer, conductor and player of a vast array of insturments and musical styles is literally one of the hardest working people in the music business. Somehow, he found the time to write an incredibly detailed account of what creative life was like in New York in the 1950s and 60s. Not only does he recount specific events, such as the making of the film "Pull My Daisy" and the first-ever jazz-poetry collaboration in New York, he has also recalled conversations that took place while those events were going on. He also gives us enthusiastic accounts of the many events inspired by Jack Kerouac and his work since the writer's death in 1969; events that show the wide-ranging influence Kerouac has had on contemporary culture. Just as important, Amram has also successfully dispelled what he calls the "Beatnik Myth" that for years portrayed Kerouac and cohorts as something completely different than what they were. (The story Amram relays about the day Jack died, in which reporters badgered him and others with inane questions about the "King of the Beats" illustrates the tragic way Kerouac was thought of and treated.)

Many of the great musical and literary personalities of the mid-20th Century are mentioned and quoted in this work, ranging from Leonard Bernstein, to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk all the way to the composer Edgar Varese and conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, Amram's mentor and Bernstein's predecessor as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. They all add a great deal of color to the narrative, which can be as exhilarating a read as Kerouac's fantastic trip across America in "On the Road".

Not only is Amram one of the hardest working people in the music biz, he's also one of the nicest and most gracious. It was a great pleasure and honor to have met him during a concert and at a reading of OFFBEAT this past spring. For anyone even mildly interested in Kerouac and his contemporaries, this is THE book to read, written by someone who was there. And after reading it, you may be MORE than mildly interested in Jack Kerouac, a man who truly was an original.

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Self-congratulatory blarney, but sweet, somehow
For a substantial number of non-aficionados, David Amram's name is familiar today only from a line in a Rafi 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. Amram was also a good buddy and frequent collaborator of Jack Kerouac's, and his new memoir "Offbeat" 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 Ginsburg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and David Amram, were precursors of flower children in being particularly gentle and constitutionally opposed to formality or exclusivity. 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, and 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 wall s 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."

This kind of thing is repeated endlessly throughout Offbeat-both in the pages of reminiscinces of his performances and conversations with Kerouac and in the later sections, which deal mostly with events undertaken in the writer's honor. An unwelcome pathos accompanies Amram's successive pleas that the reader engage in something akin to this mantra: "They were smart! They were serious about our art and could discuss it intelligently! They weren't anything like Maynard G. Krebs!" 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 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, it's hard not to like both Amram and his portrayal of the "beat" scene. Amram is obviously a 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 Ginsburg 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. Amram paints Kerouac as diffident about everything except his talents. When filmmaker Alfred Leslie asks him 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." 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 of spoken word events and poetry slams.

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. 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.