Vibrations: A Memoir

David Amram has played and rambled and galloped and staggered through a remarkably broad sweep of American life, experience, and creative struggle. The Boston Globe has described him as “the Renaissance man of American Music.” Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film Pull My Daisy in 1959, combining Amram’s music with Kerouac’s narration. Amram, honored as the first Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic, has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Nancy Griffith, Johnny Depp, and more.

Vibrations is the story of one boy’s adventures growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs, misfitting in the Army, barnstorming through Europe with the famous Seventh Army Symphony, exiling in Paris, scuffling on the Lower East Side, day-laboring—often down but never out—finally emerging as a major musical force.

With its stage-setting foreword by Douglas Brinkley and a new afterword by Kerouac biography Audrey Sprenger, this new edition is not to be missed.

David Amram has played and rambled and galloped and staggered through a remarkably broad sweep of American life, experience, and creative struggle. The Boston Globe has described him as “the Renaissance man of American Music.” Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film Pull My Daisy in 1959, combining Amram’s music with Kerouac’s narration. Amram, honored as the first Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic, has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Nancy Griffith, Johnny Depp, and more.

Vibrations is the story of one boy’s adventures growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs, misfitting in the Army, barnstorming through Europe with the famous Seventh Army Symphony, exiling in Paris, scuffling on the Lower East Side, day-laboring—often down but never out—finally emerging as a major musical force.

With its stage-setting foreword by Douglas Brinkley and a new afterword by Kerouac biography Audrey Sprenger, this new edition is not to be missed.