"Hanging Out"

with

DAVID AMRAM

at

The Jack Kerouac Festival

Lowell, Massachusetts

September 1994

I think it's nice to just meet people and hang out with them. It's like different parts of a person can come out when they hang out, and the most important thing is a person's soulfulness, their conduct and feelings about who they are, and how they relate to other people, and what they feel they're here on earth to do.

It's true that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the other Beats, all came from radically different backgrounds. Yet we just liked to hang out with each other, because we had the vision of trying to see a more beautiful America. We hoped we could do something;and yet we were told, "No, no, you can't. You're a boorish, Neanderthal person who is wasting your time. You're betraying art and culture."

The one thing we had in common, is that we were classically-oriented. Jack Kerouac could have been a college professor, he knew literature, music, art, and history. Allen is a college professor now, but back then, people might have thought he was wild. Yet he was like a walking encyclopedia of knowledge. I've always been an avid, underground scholar myself; playing jazz with Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, and Charlie Parker, as well as classical and Renaissance music, and while also doing painting and reading.

We were all what people would now consider intellectuals, but we would never dare say that then, because we were trying to use our intellect with the spirit. We wanted to have the heartbeat first, with the mind following the heart and the spirit, with that as the path to lead us. People, considered to be intellectuals then, were more or less trapped by a society that didn't care about intellectual or spiritual things; they were stuck in a university or institution where they were neglected, abused, and ignored by society, and often considered to be worthless themselves. So if these people, who were being tortured and ignored by society, saw someone who was supposed to be intellectual going a different way, thought, "Well, my gosh, if these wild men and women get out there too much, I might lose my job too, and we'll all end up on the soup line." So it wasn't really anybody's fault.

I never understood that until I looked back, and saw that's just how it was. We weren't trying to be radical or different. We just all felt that we had a calling. I would rather have worked, as I did, in the Post Office, doing manual labor, and anything I could to survive. All the jobs that Jack had, and Allen had, doing different things, and still trying to pursue our art.

At that time the idea of the intellectual, the artist, poet, composer, writer, was someone who'd be off in the corner, and make it as difficult as possible for the student to get even one grain of knowledge. So I'd go and hang out with Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Monk, and a lot of other great musicians. They were my teachers, as well as people I met on Indian reservations, Middle Eastern musicians, and all kinds of painters and writers. I got my education through people who knew so much, who wanted to share with me; the inference being that I'd pass on what I learned to someone else who was eager to learn.

That's all that Jack ever wanted with his books, like what's happening for him now. People don't think about Beatniks any more. They pick up his books, and love them so much, they tell their friends, "You've got to read this catl" That's all he ever wanted. He said over and over that he didn't want to be known as the "King of the Beatniks," because there never was such a thing. He wanted people to appreciate his work, his books. So I feel it's a blessing in my lifetime to see that's happening with my work. People are discovering my music and playing it, because I get reports from my publisher about people playing my concertos and chamber music, conducting my symphonies, and doing my operas, and I don't know any of them. That's a good sign. It means I don't have to be around, that what's been written on paper has a life of its own.

It's a constant university of "Hang-Out-ology," as I like to call it. I have four honorary doctorates of music, which I consider to be doctorates of "Hang-Out-ology," because that's how I've learned everything; from others who know more than me. Then I try to pass on the little bit I know to other people. In that process, you keep learning yourself. The New York Times recently said that I was "a pioneer of World Music," and "multicultural before multicultural even existed." It's real gratifying that my work is getting recorded and played all over the world by people that I don't even know any more. I'm honored by that, but if it weren't for Jack Kerouac, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, the painter Franz Klimt, the composer Edward Vargas all of whom encouraged me to pursue the path that I'm on. I don't know if I'd be alive today, or have had the courage or the energy to do what I was doing all these years, when no one was interested, and a lot of people thought that I was ceffifiably "insane" to be doing what I was, rather than making a bad imitation of European art.

My hope is to encourage everybody to do what feels right in their heart, and also at the same time to be receptive to others, to work at it, and not despair. James Baldwin, the great writer, and an old friend and neighbor, said after he became acknowledged in regard to the time he was scuffling, "Dave, whatever you do, there's one advice I've learned as a writer. Always keep a carbon copy." He said, "Because sometimes 20 or 30 years down the road, what everybody said was junk and rejected, you're going to end up using, or someone is going to want it." So always keep a copy. If 35 people say no, that's their privilege, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's no.