Clearwater Foundation Honors David Amram with 'Power of Song Award' Tonight, 11/9

The Clearwater Foundation honors David Amram with the Power of Song Award tonight, November 9 at 6:30 PM at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space, located at 95th and Broadway, New York City. 

The evening begins at 6:30 PM with the World Premiere of Lawrence Kraman's film David Amram: The First 80 Years. The Music portion begins at 8:30 PM.

Performers include Pete Seeger, Paquito D'Rivera, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary),Tom Paxton, Henry Butler, Guy Davis, Josh White Jr, Face the Music, David Amram, and others to be announced.

All proceeds benefit Pete Seeger's Clearwater. 

David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works and two operas, in addition to the music for 22 Broadway plays and many classic film scores, such as Splendor in The Grass, The Manchurian Candidate, and the beat generation film classic Pull My Daisy, in which he collaborated with Jack Kerouac.

A pioneer jazz French horn player, he is also a virtuoso on piano, numerous flutes, whistles, percussion, and dozens of folkloric instruments from 25 countries, while acclaimed as the pioneer of 'World Music’ in America. He has collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Barretto, Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton, Thelonious Monk, Tito Puente, Langston Hughes, Odetta, Dustin Hoffman, Willie Nelson, Nina Simone, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Patti Smith, Josh White, Jr., Johnny Depp, Pete Seeger, Steve Martin, and with indigenous musicians around the globe. Leonard Bernstein, chose him as the New York Philharmonic's first composer-in-residence; and Joseph Papp, chose him as the first composer-in-residence of Shakespeare in the Park, and during that period together they wrote the opera Twelfth Night.

In 1977, Amram's band, featuring Ray Mantilla, joined Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines and Stan Getz’s bands for an historic concert in Havana -- the first US/Cuba musical exchange since the revolution. Amram composed "In Memory of Chano Pozo" for the occasion, and was joined onstage by Los Papines, Paquito d'Rivera and Arturo Sandoval. Amram later created a symphonic version of the piece which he has performed for 34 years with orchestras around the world. In 2012, Amram will be conducting his latest composition, “Symphonic Variations on a Song By Woody Guthrie,” with symphony orchestras across America during the year-long Woody Centennial Celebrations, including a live recording of the symphony with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra on September 22nd.

Today, as he has been doing for over 50 years, Amram continues to compose music while traveling the world as a conductor, soloist, bandleader, visiting scholar and narrator in five languages. He is the author of three books: Vibrations; Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac; and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat; with his forth book, David Amram: the First 80 Years, to be release in 2013.

Lawrence Kraman’s feature film documentary David Amram: The First 80 Years will be released in 2013. Meanwhile, Andrew Zuckerman’s book and new feature film documentary Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give To Another includes David Amram as one of the World’s 50 Elder Thinkers and Doers.