Musician Who Worked With Willie Nelson, Jack Kerouac Talks Golden Age of West Village

GREENWICH VILLAGE, NY — David Amram was best friends with Jack Kerouac, performed around the world with the likes of Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, and was mentored by Dizzy Gillespie, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Jackson Pollack. He is an irreplaceable piece of the puzzle that was the West Village in its prime. So he knows a little bit about what makes someone "cool."

But the idea of "cool" to Amram isn't about who you know, and it's not about your status.

"It's not about what you are, it's about who you are," he says.

That version of "cool" to Amram was what it was like to live in Greenwich Village from 1955 to 1996. It's also what he'll be reflecting on when he receives the highest honor from the nonprofit music organization Greenwich House at its annual arts benefit this November.

Amram, 85, has a resumé jam-packed with movie score compositions (he wrote the iconic score to the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate"), operas, and jazz and classical collaborations he's performed with Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and a host of other legends you'd want to name-drop.

But it's clear that even though his biography is highly brag-worthy, Amram harbors the steady mentality that the most important thing in life is just doing what you love. And he says the Village was the living, breathing example of that.

Amram moved to New York City in 1955 and found that the Village was an "oasis away from that hustle and bustle of Manhattan," its streets booming with creativity — some of it crazy, some genius. He describes his life in the 1950s as going from bar to bar and playing music with dozens of different genres of musicians in just one night.

"In the Village, they were more interested in building a life than building a career, and that's something that has stayed with me my whole life," Amram says. "The rat-race mentality of New York City was much less severe in the Village. There was an interest in quality and caring and sharing as more important than status."

A sense of "cool" in the '50s was not about being "cold and uncaring, and uninvolved," he says, an idea that's prominent among millennials today.

"The idea of cool is being able to maintain your humanity in the most wretched of conditions," he says. "It just meant in those days somehow to survive and to maintain some kind of humanity ... to understand the nature of adversity. Part of the idea of 'cool' is to not allow yourself to be squashed or diminished, or worst of all, feel you're worthless, because of how people might perceive you."

Amram spent most of his life in the Village as part of an immersive communal art and music scene. He describes the Village community in the '50s as struggling artists who helped each other survive, which sometimes meant giving each other meals when the other was starving. He really hopes that communal spirit, where everyone knew and helped one another, will live on for New York's future generations.

Amram is way more interested in being filled up with other people's knowledge and experience than going on and on about his days hanging out with Kerouac and Seeger in the Village.

The composer lived in his apartment on Sixth Avenue for more than four decades, but he was kicked out in the late 1990s when, he says, "My lawyer told me that my landlord and the judge were friends, and the whole block was thrown out."

His landlord had tried to kick Amram out for years before he was successful. "I'd run up the stairs to my walk-up and I could see in my landlord's face that he was like, 'My god, he's never gonna die, we'll never be able to raise the rent!'" Amram joked.

Amram refers to that type of real estate greed in the West Village, one New Yorkers all over the city are familiar with, as people going "full greed ahead."

But Amram's Village spirit helps him sympathize with everyone, even landlords who want to make a buck, he says.

He now lives in Beacon, New York, but he visits the city often. He says he lives in the West Village in his heart, and he sometimes stays with his three kids, who all live in Brooklyn.

Amram just finished composing a new classical piece after months of work, and he is juggling writing his fourth book with touring all over the world to perform.

"I really believe our gig is just to try to do what we feel we were put here to do, and leave the whining and complaining for other people," he said. "Being a whinologist, a blamologist, or an acute narcissist is already an overcrowded field. Practice that old time Village religion and do something better."

The benefit to honor Amram is set to take place on Nov. 3 at the Rosenthal Pavilion at New York University's Kimmel Center at 60 Washington Square Park South. On his 86th birthday, Nov. 17, he'll be jamming out at Cornelia Street Cafe starting at 8 p.m. The cafe is just one block from where Amram started out with the Charles Mingus Jazz Quintet in the fall of 1955 for his very first gig in New York City at what he calls the "now-long-gone" Café Bohemia.

Photo credit: Courtesy of David Amram Archives