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November 22, 2024 60 mins

David Amram is a distinguished composer who composed the scores for many films including "Pull My Daisy" (1959) considered one of the most important experimental films of the 20th century, "Splendor In The Grass" (1960) and "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962). He composed the scores for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare In The Park from 1956-1967 and premiered his comic opera "12th Night" with Papp's libretto. He also wrote a second opera, "The Final Ingredient, An Opera of the Holocaust," for ABC Television.

He has collaborated as a composer with Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ormandy, Sir James Galway, Langston Hughes and Jacques D´Amboise and as a musician with Thelonious Monk, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson, Dizzy Gillespie, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Betty Carter, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paquito D´Rivera, Tito Puente and Jerry Jeff Walker.

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Episode Transcript

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(00:00):
Welcome to listening with China Blue.

(00:03):
This is a podcast that focuses on how listening not only informs us about what is occurring in the world around us,
but also helps us connect with others,
build stronger businesses,
strengthens our mental health,
and become more creative and compassionate individuals.
As more and more people practice attentive listening in a community,

(00:23):
it becomes a community building practice that
strengthens our mental health as we learn from our neighbors.
I will be interviewing people from all walks of life to learn how listening has informed them in their field,
and help them to make intelligent decisions.
They will be artists, musicians, composers, dancers, business people,

(00:46):
psychologists, neuroscientists, and Buddhists, to name a few.
About me, I'm an internationally exhibiting sound-based artist.
In my work, Discovering Unheard Sounds,
I realized that the core component that drove my work was simply listening.
That realization put me on the path of speaking about and helping people learn to become better listeners.

(01:11):
I began with leading sound walks,
which I continued to do in the upstate New York region to help people learn to listen from nature.
And now, tune your ears to this podcast to learn about the power of listening.
And do pay attention until the end for further information on how to start your own listening practice,

(01:34):
share it with others, and to support listening with China Blue.
Today, we are speaking with David Amram.
David has composed the scores for many films, including "Pull My Daisy," "Splendor in the Grass," and "The Manchurian Candidate."

(01:55):
He composed the scores for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park,
and premiered his comic opera Twelfth Night with Papp's libretto.
He also wrote a second opera, "The Final Ingredient, an Opera of the Holocaust," for ABC Television.
He has collaborated as a composer with Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ormandy, Sir James Gallway, Langston Hughes, and Jacques D'Amboise,

(02:23):
and as a musician with Thelonious Monk, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson, Dizzy Gillespie, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Betty Carter,
Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paquito d'Rivera, Tito Puente, and Jerry Jeff Walker.

(02:48):
David, I am so honored to have you here today. Welcome.
Thank you, China.
It's so great to hear you and see you.
And you know, I've been thinking so much about your work in relationship to listening to the Beats.
You have this long history of working with the Beat poets, and especially with Jack Kerouac.

(03:14):
And wanted to talk to you about what that was like and listening to their free verse,
which was the style of the Beat poetry that was influenced by the cadence of jazz.
So do Tell me more about it.
Well, if I could start off by quoting Duke Ellington when he was asked,

(03:43):
"Mr. Ellington, can you give some good advice to young musicians or young people who would like to understand this ever changing music that we call jazz,"
or any kind of music that requires quite a bit of attention?

He said (04:04):
"listen." That was all he said. He could have written the title for your whole project because what he said about listening.
And then, of course, they said, well, tell us more. And he said, "No, that's all I've got to say. Listen."

(04:26):
Wow.
He was referring, I think, especially to instrumentalists who wanted to play this music and just couldn't figure out what to do when you had to stand up and there was no music on paper.
Or if you weren't that good a dancer and came to the dance hall where he played,

(04:52):
and you wanted to feel at home with the music, but you couldn't perhaps dance well enough to get out there and do that, you could listen.
And the idea of listening is so important in every aspect of our lives, and especially when doing music, listening.

(05:21):
And it was because of that when I first met Jack Kerouac and prior a few seconds before ever doing anything together,
(he look like an unemployed French lumberjack at this bring your own bottle party)

(05:41):
he handed me a sheaf of papers right from his pocket. He took it out of his pocket and handed me.
I guess it was some kind of poetry and then took it back before I could read it.
Oh, no!
And he started reading saying play." And I picked up the instruments that I had with me.

(06:03):
And sure enough, by listening, it was almost as if I couldn't go wrong.
And I felt psychically, if that makes any sense to your listeners, because they can't describe it,
but I could intuitively feel him listening to me and drawing something out of me that I didn't know that was there.

(06:34):
And I felt at the same time that by listening to him and trying to accompany the music that was in his poetry,
that it told me what to do. When I wrote the opera "Twelfth Night," Joseph Papp had taken the libretto,

(06:59):
which he wrote (that's the words that a composer sets the music) and chopped down Shakespeare's play
so that the opera would be two hours long rather than 20 hours long by doing the whole play.
And I thought, good Lord. Then I started reading (just to myself).

(07:24):
And then I tried to imagine listening to Shakespeare himself or a wonderful actor
that would take those beautiful words and say them so that you could hear them,
as well as read them and feel them. And it just told me what to do.

(07:52):
So listening in a certain sense is an intuitive thing where you surrender yourself
to the music that's already in the poetry.
when I read about what you've done with music of the sounds from the

(08:17):
different planets, even imagining them makes your imagination try to listen to something that you
haven't even heard. I think that listening is the key to everything. One of the great signs
that I had during the Depression growing up, I wasn't depressed, it was during the 1930s,

(08:43):
because I was born in 1930. So when I was eight, nine, 10 years old, it was still the 19,
right in the heart of the Depression. Sometimes we would go with my father,
we weren't working on our farm, we'd go to the airport and watch the local airport, watch the
planes land and take off. That was exciting. And then we'd go down to the railroad, close by on

(09:09):
Somerton Springs and listen to the great sound of that Crusader, the Silver Streak (train) of its day
that went from Philadelphia to New York. And you'd hear that wooh, wooh whistle of the steam engine. It was
loud and was moving fast. And hearing the railroad tracks and then the whoosh as the train

(09:31):
disappeared and the whistle got more distant. And I used to listen to that whistle when I was up in
a little room in the attic at the farmhouse and hear it off in the distance. And it made me dream
of going to New York City someday on that train, hopefully, to do something, to see a band or see

(09:52):
an orchestra or do something that I had seen in movies, but had never seen in real life. And
one of the great things, of course, not at the Somerton Springs Station, which had a little
station house, but the places where railroads ran through the countryside, which it was then,
you go to some country place that had those crossbars so that you wouldn't hopefully

(10:17):
get hit by a train. And a sign that was a square, but it was put at an angle
like that. And it would say, "stop, look, and listen." And the idea was, of course, you're supposed to
stop, first of all. Then you're supposed to look to see if the train was coming, assuming that

(10:44):
maybe the crossbars didn't work. But mostly to listen, because if you did, you'd know that that
train was on the way. So listening was also a part of something that you learn to do living on a
farm as a child, with the sounds of the animals. When I used to milk the cow, I could hear it mooing

(11:11):
in a certain way. And when I would hear it mooing, because it knew it was going to get fed, and it
knew it was going to get milked, it was very comforting, almost like a friend calling me or
speaking to me, and hearing the chickens and the ducks and all the different animals, and the wild
animals all conversing, was pretty amazing. One of the extraordinary things in listening, besides

(11:39):
the hearing cell phone, which I'll turn off, is, and I recommend all you listeners in this program,
if you have a cell phone, please turn it off. Thank you. One of the things that I really learned
about listening was when I went with a group of Native American people, I was conducting the

(12:01):
Fairback Symphony, and I played with Floyd Red Crow Westerman, they said, we'd like you
to come out, and we're going to show you how to talk to some mooses. I don't know the plural of
moose, mees something like that. At any rate, they made that sound (lips smacking), some kind of a sound like that,
and sure enough, the moose answered them. I said, whoa. In other words, they could speak the moose

(12:28):
language enough to communicate to get a response. So they said to me, look, you live on a farm now
and outside of Peekskill, called Peekskill Hollow Farm on about nine miles from the town of Peekskill.
They said, you live on a farm there, right? I said, yes, I wanted my kids to have that experience,

(12:52):
you know, of seeing hard work and all that stuff and being in the 4-H. And they said, well, don't
birds, a lot of birds come there? And I say, yeah, well, we have chickens and ducks and turkeys.
And they said, we mean the birds that fly around, the wingets, we call them, they get there by wing
power. So we don't call them two-legged or four-legged, we call them wingets. I said, oh,

(13:18):
sure. And they say, well, do you have any wires? I said, don't they sit up on a wire? I said, yeah,
they sit there all day long. They said, when you get back, play all those little whistles.
Why don't you see if you can talk to them?
So I tried. They just looked at me quietly.

(13:45):
For about 10 minutes, I tried to do everything that I thought was a bird call to get their
attention. Then I psychically felt them saying, is he kidding? I realized then they gave a little
whistle and they all took off. I said, wow. I said, they could speak by listening to one another.

(14:14):
Bird talk. That was a language I didn't know anything about except the cliches of what was
supposed to be a bird call that was not something I was listening to the birds carefully enough to
replicate. But I think that it made me aware that listening also requires a state of mind and

(14:40):
humility to be able to hear much less comprehend or speak all the different languages that are
there, whether you know them or not. Just like reading about your sounds that you make with
with the sounds of planets make. I loved reading about it and I'd like to hear it,

(15:05):
but it makes me understand that I know nothing about that and that maybe I would listen and
hear it and not understand it. Well, and getting back to the Beats, you had mentioned to me that
Kerouac was influenced by how people spoke in Lowell (Massachusetts). Absolutely. There was a definite Lowell

(15:29):
accent. And when you hear the film "Pull My Daisy" that he did the narration for (which he did
spontaneously rather than trying to sound like a great English thespian) which he could do.
And what the character scene suddenly sounded when he played it. When he introduced it was a silent

(15:52):
film. But most of the time he just sounded like a guy from Lowell. And when he used to always say
to me, I'm an author, not an author, an author, Davey, I'm a writer. Why don't they read the books
I've written rather than the books about me? He had a definite way of speaking, which people

(16:17):
speak if they are from that particular place. And the United States and the world, I guess,
for that matter, used to have a way where you could almost identify where someone was from
by the way they speak. One of the tragic things that's happened recently

(16:40):
is that many people have forgotten what we would call dialects or incorrect ways of speaking,
and that they're all beautiful and all precious. There are a lot of people who are studying
regional speech (now). Alexander Schneider, the great second violinist in the Budapest string

(17:04):
quartet and a wonderful conductor said, there are many ways of playing this Mozart string quartet,
different than I do, than we do, but they're all correct. And by that he meant when you listen to
them, if you felt something, it was correct. So the idea of listening, I think you always strive

(17:31):
to get the highest way of speaking the language, but then you have to understand what's considered
to be dialects are also beautiful and also correct because you're listening to the psychic history
of the people who speak that way. In French, if you try to study the way they speak French at the

(17:56):
École de Lyon, the highest level, on peut parler parfaitement le français et en plus,
toujours le subjonctif est la plus parfait. Well, when you go to Montreal, they say,
ah je sais que l'Indien français, il parle une autre espèce de français totalement.

(18:19):
People would, sometimes Parisians and especially New York City snobs that never been to
been to France or to Montreal and don't realize that they're both great, don't understand that
there's about 10 different Québécois accents and that speaking what they call joual, which is
considered to be an incorrect dialect, is just as beautiful as français propre.

(18:47):
When I conducted the Montreal Symphony, we had a woman who took me to school after I'd lived
in Paris for a year and spoke new French fluently to start all over again. So when I would say
bienvenue au concert mes amis, welcome to the concert by French, she says, no, no, David, you
will say for the children correctly, bienvenue au concert mes amis. And I got a free eight years

(19:15):
that I conducted the orchestra session in how to speak French as if I were a French diplomat.
I didn't quite make it, but I loved doing it because it reminded me of
listening to French being spoken by someone who

(19:37):
spoke French well and made me realize that you can get into habits of speaking differently.
And also made me understand the dilemma of many American politicians like Mr. Bush, where he said, "they gotta speak American and take them
french fries and put them down the toilet and poured wine down the toilet, dude, they gotta

(20:00):
speak English." And I think he was right. First of all, and he should have applied that to himself
so that he could learn to speak English properly. And secondly, when he spoke in a faux Texas accent
and all of his other family members spoke in the boarding school Eastern Seaboard establishment,
Groton School of parlance, they spoke a certain sort of imitation of

(20:32):
English as is spoken by the well-to-do people. When you go to London, even today,
the minute someone opens their mouth, you can tell what class they're from, more or less.
Of course, of course.
But of course, when you go to Manchester and then you get North, man, that's a whole different scene

(20:59):
entirely and just as wonderful. And sometimes the sound of the language, is very subtle,
it disappears. When I came back from Cuba and I spoke Spanish, as I learned,
aprendí a la Espanola, la calle, me veo con los músicos latinos, I learned to speak

(21:21):
Spanish in the street, en la calle, from the los músicos latinos, the musicians who play Latin music.
Latin music, very often people who never spoke to me because they all spoke English,
wouldn't speak to me in Spanish since I was not from that culture, would say,

(21:44):
I said, “hey, baby, que paso ming.”
Como? What? I said,
I said,
Excuse me, por favor, más despacio, más despacio, soy un gringuito viejo. Please quite
slower. I'm an old gringo, slower. So they said, “hey, baby, que paso ming?”

(22:12):
I said, como se dice ming in English? What does mingn mean in English? They said ming
is ming, man. In otherwards, they were using the word man and saying ming. The rest, “hey, baby, que paso ming.”
was “hey, baby, que paso man." Because in that style of speaking informally, there was a

(22:34):
different way of doing it. And all of that relates to Jack spoke.
I promise not to get off the track. But when Jack spoke, he used the rhythms that you would hear
in the cadences of jazz. So he was, rather than saying, I went down to the store and bought

(23:02):
myself some biscuits because I knew they'd taste good. He would say, I went down to the store,
bought myself some biscuits because I knew they'd taste good. And there was a certain cadence,
many, many forms of cadence that came from a way of speaking or singing where you tried to stay

(23:26):
within a rhythm. A lot of that came from the magnificent cadences of the sanctified church.
And because most people of the Caucasian persuasion don't have the privilege of going to a sanctified
church or the desire or the realization that they might learn something about a whole part of America

(23:52):
that's a blessing to the world and the way we speak and the way we live. You hear this fantastic
use of the English language combined with all the traditions and everything that everybody has been
through that goes to that church and the spirit of it. And when you hear the preachers,

(24:18):
and when they start talking about an Old Testament story and tell it in a certain way and they start
off very slowly and build up to this fantastic crescendo, it's just so inspiring and so beautiful.
And it's the rhythm of the speaking, the way, the use of the language. This is something that Jack

(24:44):
somehow picked up in Lowell and when he went to Booty Street and he heard the great jazz artist
play, this influenced him as a writer and as a person. And I think it influenced all of us.
I don't think honestly that most of his contemporaries had a remote idea of what he was

(25:06):
doing because none of them really listened to jazz and surrendered themselves to the beauties
of that and subtleties of that music except for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso to an
extent because he respected it and Gary Snyder certainly respected it and you could hear. And

(25:28):
they also were tuned in to the European classics and most jazz artists also were interested in the
European classics. So when we talk about listening, they were among the first people aside from
musicians that I would meet when I was playing with Extra Horn way before I was playing with

(25:51):
Extra Horn with the National Symphony. I was sort of the orchestra mascot. I would sit up there and
listen to the different ways the soloists would play and when the Philadelphia Orchestra came
and listened to how the flute player, the great, great flute player and also Mr. Kincade and Marcel

(26:19):
Tabito, the oboe player, when they played, whoa. But if I wasn't trained by other musicians
to listen closely to how someone was playing something that I was already familiar with,
I would have missed that language that they created which came from their life and their way

(26:41):
of interpreting what's on paper. And the same thing was true with Jack and with Kerouac. Sometimes
some of the so-called beat style of reading is a caricature of what would be church-oriented style

(27:04):
of speaking. And that's only because caricatures and what they now call appropriation is really
damaging because you're taking something and misrepresenting it. Now one of the things that
all the great musicians told me, including the great African American musicians I was blessed

(27:27):
to play with, was be yourself. Play how you feel it. Be you. Don't try to imitate us. You'll never
be us. Be yourself. Take from us the root and then create your own, what you have to offer.
And I think this was true in Jack's reading. I don't think he ever thought about that but you

(27:52):
could hear that influence. You also heard, if you played close attention, aside from his lowly way
of speaking, that he was still someone, as he himself said, I speak in English but I dream in
French. There was a certain French-Canadian influence in how he spoke. And when you go up to,

(28:16):
especially in the province of Quebec, get outside of the big city of Montreal, you hear people
that still speak the various forms of joie and you hear a wonderful, beautiful musical way of
speaking that's different. And that was in what he did too. And I think all of those elements of his

(28:37):
listening to his own ancestral heartbeat and the beauties that surrounded him in the new world
and then going to Moody Street and leaving his family that still spoke French and leaving all
the people and his buddies and the football team like the Consales family. The old folks still spoke

(29:00):
Greek and he was around or they spoke English with a certain accent. All of that influenced him as
well. And this is something that you learn about if you're interested enough to use listening powers
and then think about what it is that you listen to. And I wanted to interject that he provided the

(29:28):
improvised narration over the film Pull My Daisy. And I was wondering, you know, Pull My Daisy is
considered the most important experimental film of the 20th century. And, you know, this is a film
that you composed for and was... And I was in it too. An actor in it. So tell me about your experience

(29:53):
putting together Pull My Daisy. It has so many of these interesting facets. Well, I think the reason
why they didn't film anybody being thrown out of the window was because it was a silent film.
Gregory Corso leapt off the fire escape once to run out on the street and tell some poor woman in
a convertible, I'm Fabian van Gool, a movie star, you can come up here, I'll make you a star, baby.

(30:18):
She listened to him and started the accelerator and sped off because he just realized he was nuts.
But one of the reasons was Alfred Leslie, who directed it, who was a terrific painter and never
directed a film, spoke in a very... He was Mr. Bronx when he was a bodybuilder. He was a...

(30:44):
But when he spoke, he didn't sound like a guy from the Bronx. He would speak very calmly and
authoritatively saying, please, Alan, do not take your pants off again when the cameras
point towards you because that's not what the scene is about. He would speak very... As if he were

(31:11):
a hostage negotiator speaking to a bunch of kindergarten dope fiends, which was probably
what most of us would have been considering if anybody had covered the... I wouldn't say
rehearsals, just the insane... I wrote about that in my book, Offbeat Collaborating with Kerouac,

(31:32):
called Spontaneous Combustion, the chaotic making of Pulled by Daisy. We just had a three-week
stoned out party and our only thought was to see, since it was a silent film, if we could make Robert
Frank, who was heroically using his little 16-millimeter camera on a wooden tripod,

(31:55):
and he would laugh till tears were flowing down his cheeks, but he wouldn't shake the camera.
And one of the sad things is that they never recorded any of the goings on that were happening
during the filming of the jokes and insults and crazy stuff that was being yelled and shouted at

(32:16):
and shattered at. But I remember not only Jack's amazing spontaneous narration, but also the fact
that Alfred, who somehow directed that, and he was the director because he had a place, and we put
slugs in the fuse box so they could have enough light to film it, and listening to his soothing

(32:42):
tones, trying to create some sense of order as if we were actually making a film. He actually had an
idea. And the 50 hours of clowning around were chopped down to 27 minutes. And then he came in
and took what we did and made it, Pratchinick was his name, an editor, made it 28 minutes long.

(33:08):
Jack saw the ruination of what was actually written down on paper as being a play that we
were supposed to do and improvised the whole narration to the point where it made it look like
we planned it that way. And I think it was Larry David who said it best when he was asked,
when you made Seinfeld, how did you dare make a pilot for HBO with just a bunch of people sitting

(33:35):
around in an apartment doing nothing, just hanging out? And he said, well, our inspiration was the
film Pull My Daisy. We decided we'd make a television pilot and then a series out of nothing
because Pull My Daisy was a film about nothing. And this was what he said. Interestingly enough,

(33:59):
the wife of the, in the film, the wife of the minister was Alice Neel. No one knew about Alice
Neel except us. We were all just a bunch of friends, unemployed friends hanging out, hoping
someday we could get our work appreciated. And Alice was terrific as an actress. The guy who played

(34:20):
her husband, the minister, was Richard Bellamy who had a little thing called the Green Gallery,
which is where all the painters went who couldn't get with Sidney Janis. He was wonderful and
terrific. The Alan Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Peter Olavsky, myself proved that we were not actors by
our non-performances. Larry Rivers was the only person that was that well known, aside from Jack,

(34:47):
because Larry Rivers had been in the $64,000 question. And being on television, people were
sort of familiar with him. So when the film came out, needless to say, no one was interested,
no one was impressed. And by 1950, by 1959, people were not aware enough of Jack to,

(35:09):
I'm just turning this off, I'm sorry. Turn the whole thing off completely. Sorry, folks. By
1959, Jack's star had kind of diminished and he was more or less out of fashion, not to people
that loved reading his books, but to the pop schlock world. And so the only well-known person

(35:34):
in terms of selling the film would have been Larry Rivers, who was a terrific painter. And
he acted, and because he was supposed to play Neil Cassidy, when you see the film, you say, boy,
he can really play that alto saxophone. Actually, that was Sahib Shahab, who I got to play the alto
part, who watched Larry's Fingers, and said, hey, I don't have to hear it to play like it. He said,

(35:59):
I can watch his fingers, I'll just play my stuff. And he sounded incredible. So I went to hear him
sound like Charlie Parker was playing or something. So I said to Larry, I said, how did you like that
scene when you were playing the saxophone? He said, I never sounded better. But it was the,
in the case of Sahib doing that, it was, I played the French horn, they just did what I used, but

(36:24):
the saxophone playing was extraordinary because Sahib Shahab, a great, great alto player who's
I played with with Oscar Pettiford's band and in his own group, I was an old friend, he could see
Larry's fingers moving. And he could listen to what, probably what Larry would have liked to

(36:49):
have played and played, and it just sounded wonderful. And I only mention that because
you wouldn't think that the art of listening would extend to being able to watch someone else
playing on a silent, without any sound, and make it look and sound like it was really happening.

(37:16):
That's so interesting to hear it from your viewpoint. And while you were telling me about
that, I was thinking also about how you had mentioned before about your work doing improvisation
and with Dizzy Gillespie and Monk. And I wanted to hear a little bit from you about

(37:44):
in the process of doing improv, listening must be a critical part of that.
Of course, because when I would ask in the beginning, they'd say, come on and sit in.
If you weren't in the band, they'd let people sometimes invite people to come and play on the
tune at two in the morning. I'd say, what key is it in the response? You'll hear it.

(38:11):
You'd say, well, what's the tempo? You'll hear it. Then the other thing is, well,
what are the core changes? You'll hear it. And then they just start playing.
And if you didn't know what to do, you just lay out until you were given the

(38:34):
signal it was your turn to play. And if you couldn't hear it by then, someone else would play something.
And it was terrifying, but very instructive. When I played with Charles Mingus, my first job,

(38:55):
in New York, two or three weeks after I landed, coming off of a student ship,
as older than a student, just by a fluke, I was playing in Paris and these guys came by and sat
in with us and said, we're going. So anyway, I got a free trip back and I had the GI Bill to go
to Manhattan School of Music. So I was to study classical music, and I was to study classical

(39:21):
music, and I had Mingus come and had me come and play French horn in his quintet. Jackie McLean,
incredible musician, would sit there and listen, and Mingus would sing us all of these parts that

(39:43):
he had in his head of a composition that he'd written. And it wasn't just a 32 bar tune. He'd
sing us the inner voices, the harmonies, parts, everything of a whole piece. I said, wow. I said
to him, Mingus, that's incredible, man. You got all that stuff in your head. He said, well, we'll
see how incredible it is tonight when you play it. And I said, are you really? He said, yeah. He said,

(40:10):
we come here to create. You come tonight, you rehearse at home. So we would go there,
then we'd play something completely different that he hadn't even planned on doing. Sometimes
he wouldn't tell us, he'd just start playing. Then I got together with Jackie one night,
and I said, Jackie, remember that part? You went, and you went, and you said, don't talk about that

(40:40):
stuff, man. I said, what do you mean? He said, that's sacred stuff. He said, that's supposed to
happen. You don't know where it came from. That's a mystery. It's from someplace else. But we don't
talk about that stuff. That's sacred stuff. I said, wow. And what I meant, what he meant,

(41:01):
was that in listening, you have to be prepared, as you do in every second in life, for anything
to happen, and to relate to it accordingly at the moment. When I would play with some of the great
jam sessions with some of these wonderful musicians, a bunch of basketball players came. One guy came,

(41:26):
I think, from the Harlem Globetrotters. He said, man, you should come and see us play. I said,
well, I've seen you on television a lot of times. Great. He said, no, no, come and see us. He said,
that's our jazz. Some of those amazing things that we do are planned at the moment because of what
someone else dictates and makes us do something we could never do or replicate because the moment

(41:52):
dictates what it is we're supposed to do. And I think so much in jazz emphasized that point.
When Miles Davis said, there's no wrong notes in jazz, he certainly didn't mean that you could just
do anything. He meant if you play something that was not correct, you would use that as an

(42:19):
ornamentation to go to the correct note. Or Charlie Parker took it to the real extent when he said,
which I'm sure your listeners have heard, says if you hit a real big wrong note, play it three or
four times, then the people will feel that you meant it. So that's kind of the idea. If you're

(42:44):
listening, you're discerning for some kind of a path that leads to something that becomes correct.
Franz Kline explained that best when he said, to survive in the arts in America,
you have to learn to slide into shortstop. I said, what? What? He said, no, I said,

(43:09):
that's against the rules. He said, not if you do it. You say, here I am.
If you do it about 20 times, that becomes part of your way of dealing with the situation. It's the
same thing, I think, with listening. That if you listen hard enough, as they say in the Bible,
the crooked becomes straight. The crooked path becomes straight. That's in the Bible is something

(43:34):
like that. Or you just slide into shortstop. Yeah. But I think that the thing that a lot of people
in our era back in the 50s thought was that in jazz, people were just wiggling their fingers

(43:56):
around and saying anything. And really, it came from hours and weeks and months and years of looking
for notes and phrasing that fit into the harmonic structure of any particular tune.

(44:17):
And secondly, what all the old jazz players told me was, anytime you're playing a song,
you know, which we used to do in those days before people composed their own pieces to play upon,
that you had to learn the lyrics of that song so that when you were playing, it was almost you

(44:38):
could help the listener to hear what you were doing by taking the words which are in your mind
and making that a basis for the music that you're playing. And that was something that Jack
really understood. One time when I did some for his nephew, Jim Sampas, we took a tape,

(45:01):
which we never did use of him singing Funny Valentine. And sure enough, when I listened to it,
he did a real...very slowly. And I said, then he paused and then he started singing over it,

(45:28):
but there was nothing he was singing over. Sure enough, I could hear it. He was singing
all the right chord changes in his improvised little solo that he sang with no accompaniment.
So he didn't have any chords to base his improvisations on except in his head. So he was

(45:49):
listening in his mind to what a piano or a guitar player would be playing so that he would know
what the harmonies were and he knew where they were. He could actually hear that. And he knew
where the harmonies were. And he was one of the first writers that wrote about Monk and Charlie

(46:11):
Parker and Dizzy Gillespie back in the 40s when he wrote on the road his descriptions. The one
section I do all the time, which I did with him called Children of the American Bob Knight, and
he has, and it's amazing, somehow he got it. And it's because when he went, you knew he was paying

(46:36):
attention and listening. And when he came to hear me play before we even met, I never realized that
was the guy until he reminded me. He said, no, man, I was at the Bohemian. I heard you play there at
before. I was with so-and-so. I said, good Lord, I didn't know that was you. And he said, no, he said

(46:56):
when he, and after I got to know him, whenever he was there, you felt something when you were playing,
even if people were stoned out of their head and talking and making noise or were just trying to
borrow money from someone or score some dope or whatever. Somehow you always felt the rare, rare

(47:17):
person that might be listening to the music and played for them. And sure enough, you could always
feel whenever he was in a place because he was listening, really like a terrific listener.
And I only mention that because in our society, someone who sits quietly and listens is considered,

(47:43):
that's a sign of weakness or being a nerd or being inarticulate or being antisocial.
And the reality is listening is the most powerful thing that you can do.
And also, if anybody's listening to what you're doing, you have to give them great respect

(48:06):
and gratitude for being able to listen. And great respect and gratitude for what
it's being said too. Well, that's hopefully, and most important, if someone is really listening to
you, it makes you play or speak or think better yourself because you're not surrounded by the

(48:37):
usual thing of whatever the response, the charming response that we get after you've unloaded your
heavy philosophic tome on someone and their response is, whatever. And that's a wonderful,

(49:00):
wonderful catchword for changing tempos or for changing the conversation or for saying, shut up.
Or for saying, shut up. Sometimes, or to show your indifference to what's been said.

(49:20):
You know, as you're talking about this, I was thinking about the fact that you had said earlier
in an earlier conversation we had, you spoke about the radiators in your house
and how the sound of their spewing somehow led you to polyrhythms and syncopation.

(49:46):
And can you bring the audience up to speed on those thoughts? Because that was really
an interesting segue that you made. Yes. Well, sitting in the little farmhouse,
aside from listening to birds and the various animals cooing, mooing, and occasionally

(50:08):
frightening, fighting with each other or escaping the peril from the other animals who were going to
eat them. Because in the farming world, there's a lot of what we would call cannibalism going on
among the various species. A lot of friendship and community, but also a lot of what we consider to

(50:32):
be homicide and violence. You know, it's when the animals get hungry, they'll eat anything.
And so will people, but animals even more so. But specifically, when you weren't hearing those
heavenly sounds, we had the old steam radiators in the farmhouse and being on the top floor,

(50:57):
I was able to hear that clickety clack of the radiators.
And all of these different sounds. And I really got to enjoy it.
And then I heard big Sid Catlett and Gene Koopa and these other terrific drummers play

(51:18):
and the big bands play. And then I'd hear the drum solo and I could hear what we call syncopation,
which is more, means more than one rhythm at the same time. And bong, bong, bong, bong. If you have
a syncopation, you go bong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong.

(51:45):
You know, all the different wonderful rhythms that are there in the Wa-Wan Kou in Cuba.

(52:08):
All these different things.
And somehow they fit together.
And you learn those different patterns and then you hear the people improvising.
Then when you get like I was lucky enough to do with Los Muñuquitos de Matasas the

(52:29):
last time I was in Cuba, and I knew the four basic components of the Wa-Wan Kou, so I knew
if I heard one of them I'd know where everybody was at.
They didn't play any of this traditional stuff because they knew it in their minds.
They were, I said, whoa.
But still I could feel it was totally together.

(52:53):
And one of the players said, hey, David, you've got a good foundation, but you're on use the
uba-ding.
I said, what's the uba-ding?
Uba-ding, uba-ding, uba-ding.
I said, oh, oh.
So I called up Alfredo, the wonderful Arturo O'Farrill, the great pianist, bandleader,

(53:21):
and the son of Chico O'Farrill, who's a master.
I said, am I doing it right?
Uba-ding.
He said, you got it, baby.
He said, I said, it's in the right place.
He said, yes, but it's floatable.
I said, oh, in other words, if you knew the right place, you could also put it someplace
else and it would be OK, too.

(53:43):
And everything would adjust to that.
So I realized, you know, when I asked Paquito de la Vera about that, he said, no, I said,
they have sometimes what they call the doctors, the doctor of the clave.
He said, those are the specialists.
And sometimes you can find to do it either way.

(54:04):
When I was there and I hadn't been there in Cuba 39 years old, I played with the musicians
from there constantly.
But I heard a lot of things that I thought I knew had changed and advanced in certain

(54:24):
ways.
And when I hear different kinds of music, I find I can hear the same thing and it sounds
different.
You know, listening is an ongoing process and it's a wonderful, wonderful thing to
do.

(54:45):
I always thought that Beethoven didn't lose his hearing.
I just thought he finally said, I can't stand it anymore.
So he just figured he didn't want to hear all that talk and all the conversations and
criticism and jealousy.
So he just figured he just cut out everything.

(55:06):
And when they said that he couldn't hear, he probably just figured I'd rather cool it
and not.
And I did this happen because that was just sort of a joke.
But in real life, when I worked with Sessu Hayakawa in a play about a Japanese general

(55:27):
that an officer and an American young pilot landed on the island and neither the young
American pilot or the Japanese officer knew that the war was over, they were trying to
figure out how to get along with one another and they were supposed to still be mortal
enemies and found a way to do that anyway.

(55:51):
And the director was extremely nasty and picked on the other poor actor who was a younger
guy and not well known, a fabulous actor.
And he picked on me a little bit but then he gave up because I was too positive thinking
for him.
I just said yes, yes, just do what I wanted to.
So we got to Philadelphia.

(56:13):
Suddenly I said, can I see Mr. Hayakawa?
I was going to try to say something to him or just put a thumbs up.
And they were saying, well, yes, of course, I didn't use the Stanislavski method.
Rather, it was in this incredible conversation with someone from Channel 12, I remember that.

(56:33):
I said, wow, Mr. Hayakawa, I didn't know you spoke English.
He said, of course.
He said, but I realized that this director had severe emotional problems.
So I just thought I would short circuit any bad feelings by making him assume that I couldn't
speak or understand a word of English.

(56:59):
And I said, wow, he was listening to all that.
You have to listen to all the screaming and shouting at the other poor actors.
Interesting.
I didn't mean to get off the subject, but that's my specialty.
But in the theater, working also when I would write music, especially for dramatic plays,
I always felt I would look and listen to the actors and how they spoke.

(57:27):
And if you did that, you almost would know what to write.
John Frankenheimer told me in The Manchurian Candidate, he said, the film will tell you
what to do.
So in the one scene, I couldn't figure out that famous scene where they had the slow
pan and the women that looked like they were all in a Savannah, Georgia tea party suddenly

(57:54):
turned into North Korean soldiers and they had one person shoot his friend in the head.
I said, what the hell is that?
And he said, I have to make the audience feel that they're what it's like for those people
to be using psychotropic drugs and be brainwashed.

(58:18):
And he said, you have to do that with the music.
So I started listening in my head, imagining, imagining if I was there and I knew what to
do, something I'd never done before or since.
Sort of the harpsichord playing a sounding like an Arnold Schoenberg outtake of a bad
Viennese waltz and piccolo screaming.

(58:40):
I just picked the most unbearable, awful, wrong notes I could.
And someone said, wasn't that hard?
I said, no, because I spent my whole life listening, searching for the choice notes,
as they say.
So I just took everything that when I listened to it in my mind, I thought was wrong and

(59:04):
it created the right feeling for an insane moment.
Oh, how beautiful.
And you know, David, it's the perfect moment to interject that I'm sorry I could listen
to you forever, but we have run out of time.
Good.
Good for your metal piece.

(59:26):
Perfect moment to stop.
And I send you and your listeners all my respect and love.
And it's the thrill to be on your program.
And I can hardly wait to see it and everything else that you do to and your own music, which
is terrific.
Oh, thank you so much.
This was so exciting.

(59:46):
Thank you for listening to this episode of Listening with China Blue.
I hope it inspires you to build your own listening practice.
This begins as a daily practice of attentively listening without judgment.
And ask yourself, what is your version of silence?
If you want to learn more about me and my work, go to chinabluart.com and please follow

(01:00:11):
me on Facebook and at Instagram.
Thank you.
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