For Colorado Public Radio's interview with me and David Amram please click here and search for the keywords "Sprenger," "Amram," "Kerouac." For my exhibit of Amram's life and work, Rising Young Composer, please click here.
When I was seventeen I fell in love with Jack Kerouac, both the stories he wrote, as well as all the stories about his life. Which led me to David Amram, who was, of course, a part of Jack Kerouac's stories, as well as a part of his life. I first noticed David in that famous photograph of the cast of Pull My Daisy, that one where Gregory Corso and Larry Rivers and Jack and David and Allen Ginsberg all sit crammed in a booth in some diner, taking a break in between takes. Then I read Vibrations, David's 1967 memoir, with the program notes to his cantata A Year In Our Land, printed inside the front cover. Then came an old article I found in a library bound copy of Life magazine.
Under the headline, "Rising Young Composer," the article starts, "David Amram, his teeth clenched with conviction, delivers a warning, 'Anyone who expects me to be an introspective cosmic sourpuss to prove I'm a serious composer had better forget it.' The article continues: "As for being a sourpuss, (David Amram) tackles a set of snare drums with the bravado of a Buddy Rich, breakfasts on rice, almonds and peppermint-flavored tea and goes lumbering down Park Avenue in a battered Land Rover." What can I say? For a girl who loved Jack Kerouac, David Amram was a find, as brilliant and as artful as Jack, but lesser known, less a part of the popular American imagination, at least to me at seventeen. At the time, I didn't really know anything about classical music, about jazz. But I knew cool when I saw it and David Amram in that 1967 edition of Life magazine was impossibly cool. Unabashedly enthusiastic, generous, uncompromising, he was everything I wanted to be: An artistic genius living in 1950s New York.
Today I laugh when I think about how that article enchanted me, because at the time it was already twenty-years old. In 1987 David was no longer a "rising young composer," but an "established, respected" one. He had long moved out of New York City and was married, a father, all facts about his life that I had no idea about when I first found his story and photograph in that library bound copy of Life magazine. Such are the power of stories and photographs, especially published ones. They forever freeze a person in time, lasting far longer than the actual person, the actual time itself.I know this truth well, since today, amazingly, I know David Amram in life and not just Life magazine. Around three years ago, I met him after asking him to participate in my course, Jack Kerouac Wrote Here, Crisscrossing America Chasing Cool and we quickly became pedagogical collaborators, putting together a series of lectures and courses not only about the writings of Jack Kerouac and the sociology of American cool, but also, the often discordant relationship between our respective disciplinary homes, his being the arts, mine, the academy.
Then, just this past summer, I suddenly found myself, along with writer Bill Morgan and two of my students from the University of Denver, Andrea Wood and Ashley Vaughan, taking on the task of building David's archive, which, eventually, a library will catalogue and store. This means sorting through literally every article ever written about David Amram (including that one in Life magazine), along with all of his personal papers and writings and photographs and scores and films and programs and playbills and recordings of music, the articles dating back to around 1954, David's papers, 1935.This is, without question, brutally exhausting work. Partly because there are literally hundreds of thousands of papers to sort through and partly because as we do this, David is still very much alive, watching us. Still to literally have access to every piece of paper by or about David Amram, not to mention, David Amram himself, is nothing less than a thrill for me. Especially since today, I am practically the same age David was in that photograph I found twenty years ago when I was seventeen. Finally, today, in my imagination, at least, I've feel as if I've caught up.
I try to talk about this with David all the time, of what it might have been like had we met and had been the same age. But this conversation doesn't really interest him. For David, age is all at once an inevitable and unimportant truth about who we are. That is, he is, quite simply, who he is today, David Amram at seventy-five, the exact same person he was in his late thirties, only older. He doesn't see himself as being anything more or less than who he was then. And as for what it would have been like to meet me then, the question just seems silly to him. "Audrey," he always says calmly. "You weren't born then." "Charlie Parker," he goes on to say, "always said 'now' is the time." "Let's talk about now," he says. "Not 'then.'"
So we talk about "now" and I think about "then." I can't help it, especially when I'm surrounded by all of these papers. This was something some journalist wrote about the David of "then" in an article not unlike the one published in Life magazine. It starts with a quote from David: "'Writing music is a very sedentary profession. Still, I am more active composing than chopping wood. I am sitting but my mind is soaring.' The journalist continues: "Amram speaks French and German and is learning Spanish and modern Hebrew and Swedish. 'I have to,' he says. 'I have a Swedish girlfriend.' He is not married. He can't afford it. 'I am old fashioned,' he says. 'I think a man should support himself and his family. Artists who marry wealthy women pay for it.'"I can't begin to figure out where I would fit had I been alive then. It's more likely I'd be the "Swedish girlfriend" rather than the trust fund wife, but to be honest, I'd really rather be neither, given the choice, I'd really rather be David.
More from that article: "David Amram is a Philadelphian in his mid thirties, a tall young man with unruly hair. He has been playing jazz since he was twelve and he started composing at fifteen. It goes on to list all his credits, then: Amram says he no longer writes incidental music. 'No more background music. From now on only foreground music,' he says. He is starting now on a big orchestral work, 'I've commissioned myself to write it.' He concluded thoughtfully, as he went home to watch television. Cassius Clay in the heavy-weight championship fight."
David is still tall, his hair still unruly and he still comes home to watch boxing. Which teaches me that there is absolutely no reason to wish that I was born into a different time. Everything we long for and want in the world is right here. We just have to know where to look for it and, more importantly, live it. Which is harder, of course, but not impossible. Not if we start from the question of why it is we care.For Henrietta Smithson and all she gave up