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David Werner Amram III was born November 17, 1930 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1948–1949, and earned a bachelor’s degree in European history from George Washington University in 1952. In 1955 he enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied under Dimitri Mitropoulos, Vittorio Giannini, and Gunther Schuller. Under Schuller he studied French horn.

As a sideman or leader, David has worked with Aaron Copland, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Jack Kerouac, Sonny Rollins, Lionel Hampton, Stan Getz, George Barrow, Jerry Dodgion, Paquito D’Rivera, Pepper Adams, Arturo Sandoval, Oscar Pettiford, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Dorham, Ray Barretto, Wynton Marsalis, and others that included a wide range of folk, pop, and country figures.

In 1956, producer Joseph Papp hired Amram to compose scores for the New York Shakespeare Festival, the next year staged one of the first poetry readings with jazz, and in 1966 Leonard Bernstein chose Amram as the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence.

He went on four international musical tours to Brazil, Kenya, Cuba and the Middle East. He conducted a 15 piece orchestra for Betty Carter’s What Happened To Love? album, became an advocate for music education. He composed scores for the Elia Kazan films Splendor in the Grass, and The Arrangement and for the John Frankenheimer films The Young Savages and The Manchurian Candidate.

French hornist and pianist David Amram, who also plays Spanish guitar, penny whistle, sings and composes, has recorded nineteen albums as a leader and twenty-eight as a sideman.

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