David Amram

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (tag on back and spine wear)

David Amram is one of the genuinely difficult figures to place in the landscape of postwar American music - a French-horn player of considerable ability, a conductor, a composer, a collaborator with Jack Kerouac on some of the earliest jazz-poetry performances, a student of Vittorio Giannini, and a practitioner of a kind of musical pluralism that predated the term "world music" by several decades. He had performed and studied in Morocco, India, South America, and Cuba before either practice was fashionable, and he wove what he found there into a compositional language that defied the academic categories of his time. The Triple Concerto, issued by Flying Fish - the Chicago-based folk and roots label that occasionally reached into adjacent experimental and contemporary territories - documents Amram at his most structurally ambitious, a work for three soloists that draws on the full range of his cross-cultural experience. A composer who deserves considerably more sustained attention than the pigeonhole of "Beat generation collaborator" has ever allowed.