Saturday Music Club on Sunday: David Amram

www.davidamram.com

To note that David Amram is a protean talent is to beggar his achievement...an innovator, gifted composer, performer and educator in nearly every field of music he's turned his hand to, he also has performed with similarly gifted revolutionaries within those varying traditions, and this is a very thin sliver of even what's poachable on web video, much less all he's recorded and seen others record.  He's also almost too generous with his time and praise of those who hope to further recognition of his work, as when he wrote in to comment here on a previous post about third-stream soundtrack writing. (I, as I've noted here before as well, was in the audience for the performance below with Dizzy Gillespie and a band of young lions, and was almost as blown away when Amram wrote his comment as I was to meet the man face to face at the reception after that first Thelonious Monk Memorial Concert in DC in 1987.)

Other Amram posts: Third Stream album reissues
Soundtracks: Third Stream


American Routes is a PRI, not an NPR. radio series.

Sunday's "Forgotten" Soundtracks: 3rd Streamers John Lewis (ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW) and Dave Brubeck (MR. BROADWAY) for crime drama, David Amram's Beat

Jazz scores, or at least jazz-flavored scores, for crime drama were almost inevitable by the latter '50s, and some items, most obviously Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme" but also (a little later) Duke Ellington's score for Anatomy of a Murder, were major hits. So, after John Lewis had taken charge of what had been the Milt Jackson Quartet, and remade into the Modern Jazz Quartet, losing Kenny Clarke as drummer but gaining the more sympatico Connie Kay by then, and while the MJQ was setting about to beat the world as the proudest carriers of the banner of Third Stream Music (the European classical tradition and jazz being streams one and two, which mingled in the third, suggested Gunther Schuller in a notable essay), Lewis continued to look for challenges...a large group including MJQ members under the direction of Lewis scored a UN-sponsored short film, Exposure; the MJQ scored a European film, No Sun in Venice, and Lewis was called upon to score a 1959 American dramatic film, based on a novel by Ziff-Davis veteran William P. McGivern and starring and produced by Harry Belafonte and directed by Robert Wise, Odds Against Tomorrow. A hell of a film, with the most over the top ending of any crime drama I've seen yet (even in the age of excess in such matters as we live in now), and featuring some compositions that would become chestnuts in the MJQ repertoire...in fact, the MJQ recorded their own interpretation album, issued at various times as Patterns and as Music from Odds Against Tomorrow and currently offered at an exorbitant price by Amazon for a CD-R they will burn for you, when not erasing books from your Kindle or refusing to sell you books by publishers whom they don't like. And, speaking of exorbitant, the prices being hung on copies of of the 1991 cd of the original soundtrack would pay for an excellent stereo component...sorry I missed that item, for at least two reasons. But, here is the contents of the cd:
1. Prelude To Odds Against Tomorrow (01:44)
2. A Cold Wind Is Blowing (01:20)
3. Five Figure People Crossing Paths (01:40)
4. How To Frame Pigeons (01:04)
5. Morning Trip To Melton (03:09)
6. Looking At The Caper (02:01)
7. Johnny Ingram´s Possessions (01:08)
8. The Carousel Incident (01:44)
9. Skating In Central Park (03:29)
10. No Happiness For Slater (03:56)
11. Main Theme Odds Against Tomorrow (03:24)
12. Games (02:17)
13. A Social Call (03:53)
14. The Impractical Man (03:00)
15. Advance On Melton (01:58)
16. Waiting Around The River (03:51)
17. Distractions (01:25)
18. The Caper Failure (01:23)
19. Postlude (00:45)
Total Duration: 00:43:11
Track listing contributed by Dick van Oosten
--and it's notable that the performances by Harry Belafonte are missing, as he interrupts Mae Barnes as she performs "All Men Are Evil" (and she walks off the bandstand accusing Belafonte's character of definitely being evil):


...though the cues that include the MJQ augmented by the likes of guitarist Jim Hall and pianist Bill Evans are definitely collected here. Here's the scene with "A Social Call":


The Patterns album:
A1 Skating In Central Park 6:08
A2 No Happiness For Slater 5:20
A3 A Social Call 4:46
B1 Cue #9 5:05
B2 A Cold Wind Is Blowing 7:31
B3 Odds Against Tomorrow 3:32
--also features a track called "Cue #9," missing from the sountrack album, but audible in this scene (Odds the film is an early credit for Wayne Rogers and Zohra Lampert):


But perhaps the only recording I can find to snag from the MJQ album is this (and the sound quality isn't optimal, but it's worth hearing):


Well, if there was any band specializing in Third Steam music that was doing better financially than the MJQ, it was the Dave Brubeck Quartet, who in 1959 achieved the first "gold" album in jazz history, and whose pianist/leader was engaged to write the musical cues and themes for a 1964 return of Peter Gunn's Craig Stevens to network television, Mr. Broadway. The Brubeck Quartet also recorded an album of their interpretations of the cues, Jazz Impressions of New York (with one track from those sessions, "Toki's Theme," reslotted for the Jazz Impressions of Japan album instead). Here, among a charming array of mostly jazzy themes (including the McBain series 87th Precinct and the Roy Huggins/Anthony Boucher [Kraft] Suspense Theater), is "Mr. Broadway" with an organ dubbed in over Brubeck's piano part, but otherwise featuring the DBQ:

(and here's a quieter version, with a Lengthy coffin nails ad attached.) Here's the DBQ album version, a track that has had much more success than the one-season series. The New York album has one real dud of a recording, "Broadway Romance," but more of that quartet (Paul Desmond on alto sax, Gene Wright on bass, Joe Morello on drums) doing excellent work at the height of their popularity, such as this:


Coming, like Gunther Schuller, from the classical side of the Third Stream ferment, but with strong Beat movement connections (such as his friendship with Jack Kerouac that led to his participation in this film), David Amram would go on to have his greatest commercial success as a film-score composer with 1963's The Manchurian Candidate--but in 1959, was putting together the music for Pull My Daisy:


The second (and perhaps final) of a series of Interim "Forgotten" Soundtracks posts while Rick Robinson reorganizes his collection, causing temporary suspension of his regular Saturday Soundtracks feature.