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No More Walls Full Description
David Amram has "composed over 100 orchestral and chamber music works, written two operas and done scores for more than thirty productions of the New York Shakespeare Festival and several films ..." reads the blurb inside this pretentiously packaged but musically diverse double album. Amram has also written an autobiography, toured as a conductor and solo performer with symphony orchestras ... and jammed in Greenwich Village Jazz and bouzouki joints with his own small group and with Middle Eastern musicians. "There are no more walls in music," he says, and the album lays it on a little thick in spots trying to prove just that. The first of two records in the album consists of "classical" works for chamber orchestra, and is to me the least interesting of the two. Amram's music for strings and woodwinds casts a longing glance backward at the disappearing tail end of romanticism. It sounds pre-Varese, pre-Ives, contemporary perhaps with late Debussy. The scoring is sophisticated, and the readings are the epitome of professionalism; the music itself is pleasant and captivating enough to put a work like "Autobiography for Strings," in Amram's words, "in the repertoire of many orchestras throughout the world." Still, there is an inescapable air of deja vu implicit in the music; somewhere, you've heard it all before. Amram's jazz group is also extremely professional, but while Amram himself is no avant-gard-ist, his improvisational side is more spirited and engaging than his somewhat over-polite chamber works. The group achieves extra coloration through the addition of West Indian percussionists, Middle Eastern instruments and instrumentalists, and Amram's own assortment of miscellaneous instruments, including various ethnic flutes, bouzouki and kazoo. Baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams is on hand for some robust solos, and Amram's playing on french horn, while not in a class with the work of french horn master Julius Watkins, is interesting. The blend of unusual tone colors, West Indian rhythms, "little instruments" like the kazoo, and saxophones, brass, piano, bass, guitars, and jazz drums works well on "Wind from the Indies" and "Tompkins Square Park Consciousness Expander," making these two tracks a better advertisement for "No More Walls" than the juxtaposition of a record of improvised and popular music with a record of chamber music. Unfortunately, the remaining tracks bring down the overall level. Amram's impromptu guitar duet with Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "Going North," is barely competent on Amram's part; Elliot flatpicks rhythm behind his hesitant lead. "Pull My Daisy" has lyrics by Kerouac and Ginsberg and a vocal by Lynn Sheffield that's as Broadway as you care to imagine. And Amram's two Brazilian-inspired pieces, "Sao Paulo" and "Brazilian Memories," are, like the chamber music, pretty but somewhat pallid when compared with their sources. Amram plays for free in the parks of New York and at benefits for
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