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6/17/05

thank you for having an amram room. much hipper than george washington slept
here. all cheers and hope to get back for a sundowner and monstro hot dog
at nathans soon. all blessings

-david amram

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5/5/05

DEAR BLAIR;
THANK YOU FOR YOUR NICE INVITE. MY SCHEDULE IS SO CRAZY AND I AM BEING
CALLED FOR SO MANY WELL PAYING GIGS THAT I DONT DARE HOLD THE DATE YET, at
least THIS FAR IN ADVANCE. I HAD A WONDERFUL TIME WITH all of you, AS DID
NIKOLETTA, AND I LOVED SEEING BAIRD AGAIN, AND TOLD COUNTLESS REMAINING OLD
FOLKS (from the Era Baird and i come from) ABOUT HIS NEW FILM SCRIPT, AND
ALL THAT WE DID WITH YOU. It was a fun time and i know that there will be
more you come. Nikoletta told me that she had a rendezvous with you both in
LA. She is now in island of Dominica, working on new Johhny Depp film.

I am just back from a great whirlwind trip to Braga Portugal, and as usual
didn't sleep much because there was so much to experience in such a short
time, but it was so fulfilling, I feel energized!! I am happy that I have
paid all my taxes, because it was our very own US State Department who
sponsored my appearance at an international event at the University in Braga
Portugal, where I presented, (in my fractured
Brazilian-Philadelphia-Greenwich Village accented Portuguese) how the
loosely knit community of all of us who loved music, painting, the written
and spoken word were all part of every other artist's and any other
interested person's life, during the middle 50's in New York, San Francisco
and Paris, and how all this was the foundation of what later was called the
Beat Generation. And that Kerouac was our reporter, in addition to the
brilliant work he did in revealing his own roots in the 30's and 40's, and
his self discovery through his journeys in life. Everyone there. young and
old, seemed to grasp the essence of his writing, and the spirit of many of
the other artists from this period,

There were no morbid wallowers of gloom and negativity looking for Beatnik
stereotypical trash. They all seemed to know that Jack and all of us were
part of a much larger picture. It seemed that everyone who attended the
programs I presented was interested in our Era in terms of what we had to
offer as artists. It looks like that at long last,..... The times are more
than just a'changing. It seems that The Times have changed!!! In 2005, we
have finally caught up with the 1950s!!! And when a good thing happens, it
is never too late. It is always right on time.

On the final day of the conference, I had a screening of the classic Beat
1959 documentary silent film, Pull My Daisy, with Kerouac's spontaneous
narration and my music, (in which I also appeared as Mezz McGillicuddy, the
deranged French horn player). While many of the professors and students
there spoke impeccable English, they all said that they had never heard
anything like Jack's wild improvised narration before, where he plays
different characters to compliment the images of this silent documentary
film, making up everything on the spot as he went along. I did this too of
course, as I always do, when i performed for them, improvising rhymed
lyrics, and explaining to them how this was part of the culture of our Era,
when musicians would travel together and sing and scat to one another during
endless hours on the bus or when we were packed into a car, driving hundreds
of miles to a gig in some far off place, and that Jack was drawing on that
tradition as well. And how this constant daring and living in the now made
it possible for us in our formal written down work to be much better editors
of what we created, because we could revise what we did by having a sense of
whether or not it appeared to be spontaneous and natural, because we had a
senses of the natural by spending time away from writing it down and living
it. I also gave a concert of World Music and jazz, showing how classical
composers from Tchaikoswky, Copland and Brahms, to Bartok, Gershwin and
myself all lovingly honored folk traditions in formal classical works. And
I read from my two books Vibrations and Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac,
both of which are both going to be translated into Portuguese(!!!) I also
be read a little from the third one I am writing, as well as showing my
caricatures from the recent New York show of art created by members of the
so-called Beat generation. I also performed with local poets, accompanying
them, as I did with Kerouac and so many others since, and had local
musicians participate as well in concerts.

So at 74, I am blessed to be able to share with others some of what has
been shared with me, and feel honored that I can represent some of the
beautiful contributions which have been made by American artists of many
disciplines and genres, with people from around the World. Braga and the
surrounding countryside of Northern Portugal is a wonderful place, with
special qualities and feelings that go back to pre-Roman times, close to the
border of Spain. Braga still retains much of this ancient feeling, with its
cathedrals, churches, narrow cobblestone streets, calm pace, fabulous wines
from the lush vineyards which surround the town, all surrounded by rolling
mountains and an ever-present feeling of pre=Roman ghostly spirits in the
quiet but intense warmth of the people from there, who seem to have an inner
flame that is always slowly burning, combining an ever-present deep sadness
from long ago with a quiet sense of joy when in the company of others. A
lot of the conversations take place in a non-verbal way, by looking into
people's eyes, as they look at one another and then look at you, and when
recognition of this way of communicating takes place, you are no longer a
foreigner but become part of the family. The hearty handshake is replaced
with a gentle kiss on both cheeks as a way of sharing a hello or good-bye.
And having a meal is almost like a holy ritual, where good feelings are
shared by all, and done at a leisurely pace, with incredible food.

A group of traditional dancers performed one evening at the three day event,
presenting the Pauliteiros, an ancient Celtic-based stick dance, where men
do incredible group dancing which resembles the English Morris dances,
combined with sticks being struck by the men as they weave through various
mazes of dance patterns, striking each other's sticks, while doing steps
that are a cross between the highland fling and Balkan and Central European
folks dancing, accompanied by old bagpipes that combine Arabic scales with
Celtic melodic patterns. Songs are sung in Mirandesh, an old dialect from
the town of Macedo de Cavaleiros in Northern Portugal. Mirandesh is also
spoken in Galicia in Spain. It is the remains of an ancient language, and
like the dances an d the music, is a history lesson that raises more
questions than it answers, leaving you eager to know more about this special
place. I can hardly wait to go back, and there are plans to have me do more
there in the future.

Before Portugal, I was in Portsmouth New Hampshire, where I kicked off the
first-ever Jazz/poetry festival ever held in New England, and had a chance
all weekend to collaborate with some wonderful musicians and poets, almost
all except for myself are from this beautiful seacoast area of New England.
We played an a great old 128 year old theater, with a coffee machine
backstage all full of rust, mold surrounded by half-eaten bags of moldy
stale potato chips rotted salads, containers of yogurt with green hairy
Penicillin fungus, and one unopened can of SlimFast which I opened and
drank, because I figured it was the only hepatitis-free nourishment
available (and drinkable) staple available, all of which was right out of
the Lenny Bruce text-book 1950s descriptions of decrepit backstages of on
the endless trail of American provincial rundown show-biz venues. But the
jam session and screening of Pull my Daisy was fantastic, and I preceded the
screening by giving a thumbnail anthropological account of how we all
somehow got then film made, and then played the title song. All the local
musicians soloed up a storm, which included a kid bass player and 73 year
old ex-airline pilot playing some incredible 1950s style trumpet, and
atmosphere of the old theater gradually changed from a ghostly relic of the
late 19th Century and turned into a 1950s loft party-bring-your-own-bottle
weekend celebration, and the film took on a whole different tone, following
our jam-out introduction before the film was screened. The big movie screen
and really fine sound system made the film more impressive than usual, and
Kerouac's amazing spontaneous narration filled the theater. His Lowell
Massachusetts accent was the same as the way 99% of the audience from nearby
Portsmouth New Hampshire still speak. After the film was shown, I played
some more and than went out in the lobby to sign books and records and spent
two hours hanging out with people even older than me. And others of all
ages, even high school students all were movin' and groovin' for the very
first-ever SeaCoast Jazz/Poetry Festival. It was all organized by a
musician, Larry Simon, who, in addition to his regular concerts as a
bandleader, has presented poetry/music readings throughout New England for
years, and he has created a whole network of musicians, poets and cultivated
an appreciative audience as well as attracting some terrific artists,
ranging from renowned poets like Pulitzer Prize winning poet Charles Semic
while including high school kids and retirees, many of whom like Charles
Semic, are participating in this festival.

Because I had done the first-ever jazz/poetry readings ever done in NYC in
1957, with Kerouac, and poets Howard Hart and Philip Lamantia in October of
1957, i was asked to come to this one as the featured musical guest, after
pioneering these events 48 years ago in NYC with Kerouac (even though at the
time we always did it just for fun), never dreaming that it would become
something now viewed as one of the foundations for Spoken word, Hip Hop and
a resurgence of musical and literary collaborations of all kinds around the
World. Because of this new awareness of what we did, I am now being invited
to other festivals of this nature in Europe, Asia and across the USA and
Canada, in addition to the ones I have always done. Still, here in an old
19th Century refurbished theater in Portsmouth New Hampshire, forty minutes
from where Kerouac was brought up, it was a special feeling to be part of a
new festival based on what we did so long ago, and a completion of a circle
and the start of a whole new series of adventures. Almost fifty years later,
it was another first.

I told the audience how I was sure that so many from our Era, most of whom
are now longer here, would be happy to see this kind of local festival being
created in 2005, and presented and received in sun a joyous celebratory way,
And that all of us would hope that what we did a half a century ago and
those of us lucky enough to still be here are still doing today, would
hopefully inspire everyone to be creative and work hard at whatever they
love to do in life, and to keep developing their skills and encourage
creativity on others. There were a series of other events, all of the same
high quality. People, in the audience and on stage, ranged in age from
teen-agers to those older than me, and none dressed like Beatniks. It seems
that finally, the sediment of the Beat Stereotype, which diminished us all
50 years ago, has finally settled to the bottom of the sludge pile of our
junk culture's landfill.

Now only the beauty part remains.

The work and the spirit are still here, standing on their own merit, to
illuminate the cultural landscape, all of which should encourage all to
pursue excellence throughout life and realize that you never give up,
because........ A thing of beauty IS a joy forever.

After the marathon was over Sunday after noon, April 17th, I drove back 265
miles to the farm, and the next day went to see all the folks at the Guthrie
Foundation to finalize details about the new composition Symphonic
Variations on a Theme by Woody Guthrie which they have commissioned me to
write for them. The night before I left to go to Portugal, I went with
historian and friend Doug Brinkley as his guest, along with Sean Penn and
his wife to the premiere of the new film starring Sean and Nicole Kidman,
The Interpreter, which is being endorsed by the United Nations, which and
opened the Tribeca Film Festival. It was a terrific movie. Then I drove
home, packed and made it to the airport to fly to Braga Portugal for the
festival, and finally GOT SOME SLEEP (on the plane ride), after I made
corrections on my orchestral score of Symphonic Variations on a Theme by
Woody Guthrie, which I did while the other passengers were snoring. After
Portugal trip, I have to work in Denver, Florida, Wisconsin, Chicago, and
then this Summer a bunch of festivals, but finally will have more time at
home where I can put in non-stop days to finish my new symphonic work (which
I am writing and orchestrating on the road as well in hotel rooms and
airports between performing and speaking) and feel blessed to be able to do
what I love to do, and hope to do it better!

I send cheers and wishes for your health, happiness and continued energy for
the fine work you do, and look forward to seeing you soon, and also please
send my best to you¹re sweetheart the actress/teacher/fabulous Old Vic
sounding when speaking King's English who fooled me my first night into
thinking she was from London!! And of course my salutations to the crack
shed and staff of Nathan's Coney Island, where the heavenly grease form the
unforgettably delicious aromatic Sundowner still is clogging my arteries!!!

As they say in Portuguese...... A te logo um beijinho grande e até brêve

-David Amram