When I was a boy growing up in Indianapolis in the 1940s I loved listening to “The Ink Spots” on the radio. They were a pop vocal group who became internationally famous in the 1930s and 1940s, and in 1939 their hit song “If I Didn’t Care” sold nineteen million copies; in 1989 they were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame.
I had no idea they were from Indianapolis. I had no idea that one of their original members, Jerry Daniels, once taught music at Crispus Attucks – nor did I realize the music department of that high school was as highly regarded as their Oscar Robertson team that twice won the state basketball championship.
I knew that guitarist Wes Montgomery and trombonist J.J. Johnson were from Indianapolis, though I didn’t know that they got their start on Indiana Avenue, nor did I know that Indiana Avenue had once been the seedbed and performance center of some of the great jazz musicians in this country – Indianapolis natives who were ventolin evohaler online known throughout the world, though not by the white population of their hometown. Such are the fruits of segregation.
I learned about this from Aleta Hodge, a former fellow writer on The Shortridge Daily Echo, who is writing what promises to be an important book called Indiana Avenue: Life Along and Near the Avenue and a Musical Journey from 1915 to 2015 (Ragtime, Blues, Jazz, Spiritual, Bebop, Doo Wop, Motown, Opera and Hip Hop.)
Aleta is a guest on “The Uncle Dan Story Hour” that will air on WFYI (90.1 FM) on Monday night, August 14 at 9PM. Be sure to tune in on this, the last of our nine shows scheduled by WFYI. Other guests are poet Tasha Jones, Cindy Booth of Child Advocates, and Pam Blivens-Hinkle of Spirit and Place.
This may be our finest hour. (Our time slot will be taken over in the fall by Andrew Luck.)
Tune out with your mental memory of our star saxophonist Sophie Faught playing her plaintive rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
When I finished my first book, a journalistic account of Spanish Harlem (Island in the City) I eagerly started writing a novel – that was my dream. I was nurtured on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the literary stars of the nineteen-fifties, and I could recite from their work as readily as I had once recited the Boy Scout Oath and The Pledge of Allegiance. I once won a bet for dinner at a fancy French Restaurant in Manhattan because I knew the last line of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (not, as the loser had insisted “Isn’t it nice to think so?”)
I was writing magazines articles to make a (subsistence) living, but I made time to write the first fifty pages of a novel and eagerly sent it to my always supportive agent. He praised it and sent it off to Houghton Mifflin, who had brought out the journalistic book. I fidgeted and drank and prayed while I waited for a response, and finally my agent called and said the publisher had invited me to come to Boston from New York at their expense and have lunch with their editor-in-chief and managing editor at Locke Obers (where JFK liked to have his lobster stew.)
“Is this good news or bad?” I asked my agent.
“It could be either,” he said.
It was bad. Over lobster thermidor (which I have never eaten since, though I am rarely in the kind of places that serve it), the head honchos of one of the country’s leading publishers told me – as one succinctly put it – “We think you’re a fine young journalist, but you’re not a novelist.” I later wondered why they might not have said “we don’t like the fifty pages you sent us,” but perhaps they felt that sample was conclusive enough.
I was devastated, but I knew one older buy antibiotics gonorrhea chlamydia writer I greatly respected who I knew believed in me, and she gave me encouragement and hope. I have often found that it only takes one person to believe in you and your dream. On top of that, I literally had a dream in the form of a novel. It was a confirmation of the old line “I have a novel in me.” I woke up elated, and sat on a bench in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village and listened to cheerful birds at dawn, above the rattle of the Seventh Avenue Local.
Although “I had a novel in me,” it wasn’t easy to get it out. It took ten years of false starts and new beginnings and hundreds of pages tossed, in between writing more articles and journalistic books to make a living, and finally a foundation grant from out of the blue that gave me a year’s time to concentrate on the novel alone.
My still faithful agent sent the novel to ten publishers, and three liked it, but only one of them really loved it. (Again, it only takes one.) That novel, Going All The Way became a selection of The Literary Guild, made the Time magazine bestseller list, became a movie, was republished and is still in print (and is now even an e-book.)
I believe my “lesson” applies not only to novels, but to dreams of any kind, including your own identity. People now fight for that, too, and all of these battles are worth fighting, many of them far more difficult than writing a book. Kurt Vonnegut said: “There’s only one rule I know, babies – Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.” I second that, and I add one more that I think my friend Vonnegut would also endorse: “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are.”
Sophie Faught plays saxophone with David Amram on piano.
Most of us who heard David Amram in concert at The Jazz Kitchen, and talking and playing more music on “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour” will not soon forget the good “vibrations” he left. Not only his music remains in my head, but also his talk, his humor, his open-ness and genuine encouragement to others to create, whatever their art, their passion.
David brought his percussionist, who happens to be his son Adam, whose bongo playing was an added delight, and Adam told us after the concert “Dad was really on fire” the nights he was here in Indianapolis. For all the distinguished work he has done, from playing with jazz masters like Charlie Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie, composing a flute concerto for Sir James Galway, writing music for movies like the first “Manchurian Candidate and “Splendor in the Grass,” creating music for performances of Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park in New York, and plays by Arthur Miller and Paddy Chaevsky, conducting The Philadelphia Symphony, he has never “sold out,” never put money or prestige or honors ahead of doing the work he was “called to do,” the work he knows in his heart is his duty to create and perform.
L-R: Drummer Kenny Phelps, Producer Pat Chastain, Roadie Adele Chastain, Bass player Nick Tucker, Saxophonist Sophie Faught, Roadie John Chastain, Uncle Dan Wakefield, Percussionist Adam Amram, Star All-round Jazzman Extraordinaire David Amram, at Tim Brickley’s Rehearsal Studio.
You can get a number of his great CDs on the internet, and if you want to keep his vibrations in your head and heart, I urge you to read his first book – Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram. He writes like he plays – all out, from the heart, and he has you hanging on his every cliff of creation to see at the last minute that the concerto will be put on, the poetry reading with Kerouac will find an audience, the opera for television will go on the air in spite of all network obstacles; Amram and his music will prevail. An early mentor told him “It’s going to be a long, long road… It’s never going to be easy.” That only spurred him on.
I have known Amram since I heard him play at the Five Spot in the Bowery in 1957, the hip jazz mecca of the era. His jazz group played for the publication party thrown by GQ magazine for my memoir New York in the Fifties and he talked and played on the documentary film of the same name. He came to play and talk to my class on “New York in the Fifties” at Florida International University, which was always the highlight of the year. My all-time favorite Amram concert was the one he gave for the fourth grade class of my God Daughter, Karina Corrales, at Kensington Park Elementary School in Miami. He arrived like Santa Claus, carrying a large pack on his back. In the pack were more than 25 native instruments from folk cultures all over the world, and he picked ones to play and talk about to Karina and her class.
He used the work of American authors whose work he loved – like John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac – to serve as text for the music he composed for “A Year in Our Land,” a cantata that premiered at Town Hall in Manhattan. It was his “Thank you to the America I had dreamed of in my heart and mind and soul” and he wrote in Vibrations that as he listened to the music “”I didn’t even know if an America like the one described by these authors could ever exist anymore… And I felt a great sadness when I thought of how all this had been forgotten and ignored. I hoped the cantata might remind us of who we were.”
David still keeps reminding us of who we were at our best and who we still can be, and at 86 he isn’t slowing down, any more than the writer Gay Talese is slowing down at 85. Amram writes about the vibrations he felt when he was playing at a literary party and a beautiful woman asked him to dance: “We began dancing and that old feeling came over me. I thought I was being electrocuted.”
