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Walking the Trail of Beauty: Advice to Aspiring Journalists
From: Columbia University
| By:
David Amram |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
As a renowned jazz artist, composer, performer of world music and occasional journalist, David Amram has pursued a dynamic, eclectic career path. Amram, however, views his own life according to the Native American philosophy of "walking the trail of beauty"--following where his interests lead him. Whether composing music or writing, Amram seeks to really become a part of an environment, gaining access and insight into the inner workings of stories--their beauty, subtlety and lasting value. For Amram, composing jazz music, writing a piece of journalism, building new media content and even painting all center on the same basic skills of good storytelling--improvisation, collaboration, multiple media and interactivity. |
 just turned 69, and in my entire life I have tried to combine the formal--in terms of the European tradition--with the spontaneous, the informal and the folklore, which is the world tradition. Traveling around the world to play music, I have found that people in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and even in parts of the United States have a feeling of their own cultural roots, their own form of expression and their own storytelling. I think you who work in journalism will find it especially interesting that these people feel they are telling classic tales. |
The Indian way
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| From left to right: David Amram, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Adira Amram, Alana Amram. | |
Before I play a Native American song, I'd like to open with a nice cyberspace note. While I was an artist-in-residence at the Country Day School of La Jolla, California, I went to see Floyd Red Crow Westerman, a wonderful Native American singer, actor and a childhood friend of Vine Deloria. An extraordinary journalist, writer, author, teacher and a spokesperson for Native American life, Vine has written many, many books, including God Is Red, Christ Died for Your Sins and We Talk, You Listen. He has Ph.D.s in law and divinity. Floyd and Vine are both Lakota Sioux from South Dakota. Vine said that since Floyd and I had played so many benefits for American Indian people over the last 40 years he wanted us to come to a special event. |
Every year, all the old-timers get together to tell stories, talk about their history and share their legends. Sometimes people from the scientific and academic world come to see these old legends describe what it was like to get through the age when the glaciers were here, way back 25,000 years ago. Their stories--how they lived, what was there, what the topography was like, what the sky was like, and the position of the stars--all hook up with everything that scientists from the European scientific tradition can ascertain about what it was like 25,000 years ago. These stores are miraculously still intact. |
"So, David," Vine said, "as a journalist, you can't bring pencil and paper. You can't bring a notebook. You can't bring a tape recorder, a camera, a video camera; you may just bring yourself with respect." And I said that it's amazing everybody is able to retain those hours or days and nights of stories. He said, "That's the Indian way, Dave. If you can't remember it, you didn't get it." So I said, "Vine, can I write that down, 'cause I don't want to misquote or misrepresent you." |
In 1969, journalist and author Pete Hamill interviewed me at the Village Gate, asking what piece I was playing. He said, "I want to get it right, Dave." Pete, who also knew me as a friend, wrote down very carefully the title of the solo I could sing when I was a kid. I remember him taking the trouble to do something, which to me would have negligible value. In fact, I felt that I myself had negligible value. So I said, "Well, Vine, I want to get what you said right." I did write it down for that reason. |
I thought it was a really extraordinary way to think about the work that journalists are doing. To realize that sometimes, in certain cultures and certain positions, if you can retain something without writing it down, without the act of a camera, it can help to enhance what you are doing in terms of getting and ultimately telling a story. You can become part of the whole environment and community, really getting the story that would never be told in your presence otherwise. That's one thing I've learned from traveling all over the world, playing and listening to music, hearing stories and swapping tales with just about everybody in the world. |
I'd just like to start off by playing a wonderful Native American song that Vine and Floyd taught me. It's a theme that I used in a piece I wrote for the Philadelphia Orchestra. But, long before there was the Philadelphia Orchestra, there was and always will be this enduring music. |
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| David Amram plays a Native American song. | |
What I try to do with a lot of my symphony music is take from my real life experiences. Incidentally, I've never brought a tape recorder or a camera anyplace in the 40 years I've been playing with Indian people. I wait for them to show me, and 10 or 15 years later I finally learn it. This is one of those beautiful songs. |
Playing the drum and making his debut on 361 degrees of high technology is professor of good vibes and new journalism, as well as flame drum player, Dr. John Pavlik. |
From that little song I was able to write a 32-minute composition for the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was based on a kernel of something that I never wrote down, that I never learned in school and that--until I notated it--had never been written down. |
Composing from life
I'm writing a piece now for James Galway called "Giants of the Night." Each movement in the piece is dedicated to a real person, whom I was lucky enough to know and play with. I dedicated the first movement to the memory of Charlie Parker. I was blessed to know Charlie Parker in 1952 and was lucky enough to play with him a little bit. The second movement I wrote in memory of Jack Kerouac, whom I played with a whole lot. Jack also knew Charlie Parker. The third movement is in the memory of Dizzy Gillespie, whom I met as a kid. He let me sit in with him from 1951 until he passed on. |
On a certain level, I consider myself to be a kind of a reporter even when I'm a composer. When I'm writing down the music, I try to incorporate elements of my own life. You might call it art. In academic circles they call it absolute art. That means you don't have to know the title or anything about the composer and the music off of the paper will still sound as good. |
My challenge in that role is the same challenge that journalists face when writing for a newspaper or magazine, or doing a news report on television or on radio. You are speaking about an event and an experience, not trying to tell your life story or be psychoanalyzed in print or on the air. Rather, you try to put out a story or message. Composers are in the same position. |
From the Renaissance era through the nineteenth century, and for some in the twentieth century, painters were in the same position of trying to tell a story. They tried to make a picture that got behind what everyone took for granted to see some of the inner workings--the beauty, the subtlety and the lasting value. That's one of the things that reporting and journalism can do on a level that I think is very often overlooked or discarded. |
There is always that discrepancy between journalism and artistic writing. Sometimes people say, "Well, he or she is just a journalist, not a real writer." Fortunately, those walls were breaking down long before Norman Mailer's school of New Journalism. Mailer really just showed up at the event, rapping away and writing about it. It was a lot of fun to read and very interesting. It was not necessarily objective journalism, but that was not what he was really concerned with doing. |
I wrote the music for Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. that was on Broadway in 1958. It was a different era. An extraordinary person, Archibald MacLeish was the Librarian of Congress, a very well-known poet, and he taught at Harvard University. We both were interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer. After the interview, the reporter came up to him and said, "You know, Mr. MacLeish, I'm a poet, too. I feel so bad. I couldn't make a living doing that. I've kind of given up. I have a good job here with the Philadelphia Inquirer, but I feel almost as if I've sold out or that I'm not really doing what I should be doing in life." |
Archibald MacLeish said, "First of all, if you are writing, having your writing read by people and telling a story, then you are doing God's work to begin with. Secondly, you can continue being just as good a poet even if nothing ever gets published for years and years." And then Archibald MacLeish spent about five minutes telling him every type of job that he had held in his life, including what he was dong at that moment--writing a Broadway play, teaching at Harvard and being the Librarian of Congress. |
Archibald MacLeish explained that even though his poetry had been published, what he had gotten for it wouldn't even have covered his rent. That didn't make him less of a poet. Actually, he felt that all of the other things he had done to survive made him a better poet and a better person. They made him someone who was more engaged in the general society. That's something I always remembered too when I had my succession of day jobs. |
I still do all these different things--as a composer, as a player of jazz, as a performer of world music and as someone who conducts music--so that I can be able do the things that I love to do with the people who I love. |
If you examine what I have done with my life, with all my different careers, I would probably be put in the schizophrenics ward or some kind of psychotic section. To me, it was always a straight path and it still is at the age of 69. I try to go for what's beautiful. The American Indian people say, "Walking the trail of beauty." Anytime something gives me a good feeling, anytime something is meaningful, or anytime I figure I can contribute, learn or give something back, I'll do it. |
If you don't get a job with network television or the New York Times or Time magazine or win the Pulitzer Prize your first year it doesn't mean you should retire. When you are working with a real small paper, a small TV or radio station, or even if you are doing something else entirely and still trying to get that journalistic gig, don't be bummed out by what it seems the world is or is not giving you. |
The important thing is to keep pursuing what you love. Keep honing and developing those skills. Always find a way to practice them. As a musician you can go to jam sessions or hootenannies. There are words for such sessions in every language and every culture of the world. You can do the same thing as a writer--writing at home, or writing for an event or writing to help someone out. As they say in the vernacular for musicians, the really important thing is to keep your chops in top form--to keep your ability. |
If you can continue to do that, then you are not really losing any time. You might be losing income, or recognition, or some kind of career move at one point or another. But it doesn't make you any worse off if you are in between what you would like to do. |
Everyone else--your friends, relatives and people who have advised you--may say, "You should be. You are not. Look what he/she's got. You should be this and that. Why don't you give up and go into computer science, or work in an advertising agency, sell used cars, or join some other form of respectable activity that might be easier to get a job in right away." They probably mean well. They might love you. They might even be correct. But as Dizzy Gillespie and Jack Kerouac and a lot of other people I admire told me, "Hang out with somebody else." Find one person, just one person who can be supportive of what you are doing. |
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