When Allen Ginsberg was living in Harlem and going to Columbia in 1947, he rushed into the office of the College English Department one day and announced to a clump of professors having coffee or a smoke before class, “I have just seen the light!” Most of the professors smiled or turned away or mashed out cigarettes and went to their class, but Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize poet and popular Prof, asked the excited Ginsberg “What was it like?”

When I interviewed Ginsberg more than forty years later for my memoir of New York in the Fifties, he affirmed that the experience of “the light’ did not come from any drug but from reading the poetry of William Blake. He also noted that Van Doren, the only professor who was interested in hearing about it, “had a spiritual gift.” Van Doren was a poet himself.

When I heard my writer friend Susan Neville read Ginsberg’s poem “Sunflower Sutra” a few days ago at the taping of my WFYI radio show “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour” I felt high myself, without the aid of any substances. I think others present must have felt something similar, regardless of how they described their reaction to her reading. The magic of it was enhanced by a lovely and sensitive accompaniment from the saxophone of Sophie Faught and the piano of jazz musician David Amram.

As one man from the audience emailed the next day “the woman who read the poem with Dave and Sophie accompanying was a real high point treat.”

The music provided a beautiful background for the poem, and Neville’s reading was itself an artful rendering – it was as if she struck each word with an understanding of it, a sacred regard, that raised the language to a higher level of perception, a true “high” of appreciation.

For a few precious moments, I think we were lifted; I think we believed the message of the poem’s finale –

We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed and hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

Amen.

Bless you Allen, David and Sophie.

My old friend from New York in the Fifties, jazz musician David Amram, has not only played French horn with Dizzy Gillespie, he is a composer of symphonies, chamber music, choral works, a flute concerto for James Galway, the movie score for the first “Manchurian Candidate” and “Splendor in the Grass,” conductor of The Philadelphia Symphony, and author of Offbeat: Creating With Kerouac.

This guy is the original “Energizer Bunny.” He never runs down. I pride myself on being pretty productive at eighty-five, but Amram is two years older, and I’ll never catch up. Compared to him I feel like Grandma Moses. He still seems to have the energy he ran on in 1956 when he began collaborating with Kerouac, combining jazz and poetry at coffeehouses and bars around The Village. This was an era long before the internet, when “storytelling was still practiced as a people-to-people activity,” and Amram says proudly he was “a prize student at the University of Hang-out-ology. “ (An alternative lifestyle to the I Pad, Snapchat and Instagram.)

David met Jack at some of the BYOB (“Bring Your Own Bottle”) parties in The Village, and their jazz-poetry sessions led to their collaboration, with Alan Ginsberg, of a Beat Home Movie with the title of Ginsberg’s poem “Pull My Daisy.” The making of the film was a collaboration with their circle of friends, including poets Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky and Ginsberg, and painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neal, and it’s the main story told in this up-Beat book. David wrote the music, Jack did a beautiful spontaneous narration of the friends acting out an improvisation of their lives, and David wrote the music and appeared on film. When it was finished, David told Jack that “our last three weeks [of filming and partying] were like the famous painting by Hieronomus Bosch, Descent into the Mouth of Hell.” He later added, with humungous understatement, ”it’s never going to look like Lassie Come Home or Gone With the Wind.”

“I Hope buy clonazepam india not,” said Jack. “I want it to be like us! I want it to look and sound and feel like us.”

It does.

And if you’re not entranced by the often stoned-out antics of the Beats at play, be careful to look and listen to Amram’s story, for there are diamonds of art here like the diamonds that Kerouac found when he looked closely at the sidewalks of New York.(My old friend Rev. Norman Eddy of The East Harlem Protestant Parish, saw those diamonds as he walked the sidewalks of Spanish Harlem. You can see them too, if you really look.)

Some of Amram’s talks with the jazz musicians of New York in the Fifties, reminded me of insights of writers of very different scenes and styles. Kurt Vonnegut (a fan of The Beatles) often told aspiring writers not to write “for the world,” but write as if you’re addressing one person. He said he always wrote as if talking to his beloved sister Alice.

Charlie Mingus, the great bass player who Amram played with at The Five Spot [mecca of jazz in New York in the Fifties] advised David to “Just find one person and play for that person all night long. . .All you need is one person in your whole life to really be listening.”

What a blessing that Amram, with all his great stories and music, is coming to my hometown of Indianapolis to play at The Jazz Kitchen on June 4, and on June 5 will join me on “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour” [already sold out but will be aired later on WFYI] to talk about New York in the Fifties, and play jazz classics of our era. To add to the occasion, he will be joined by our own star saxophone player, Sophie Faught, and her trio. That is the best birthday present I could have for The Big 85.

Tickets for the Amram concert at the Jazz Kitchen on June 4 are available here.