David Amram
When you are accompanying someone, you are listening to them the way you listen to a Bach Chorale, where four parts are going on at the same time, all of which are gorgeous melodies, all being played simultaneously.
When today's generation reads Jack's books or they listen to the music created by some of us, I believe that they see there is a different way of approaching today's life and today's sometimes seeming hopelessness that can provide answers.
When the Actors Studio was beginning to get into its heyday, the Stanislavski Method was tarred and feathered in the same way beatniks were as a result of Marlon Brando's wonderful role of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire.
When he was reading, I would submerge myself into whatever it was he was reading, and I tried to anticipate what would happen next.
What I have tried to do during the course of my lifetime is honor many of the people who influenced and inspired me, and in the process of honoring them it will hopefully create even more interest in their work, as well as being a thank you letter from me for their support when I was very young.
We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
This was the kind of attitude that dogged our time, where they said Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were playing wrong notes, that Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell didn't know how to paint, that they were just hurling paint cans against the wall.
This was 46 years ago, and I played mostly French horn and some piano and percussion.
They were basically informal get-togethers that were open to anybody who happened to come by and walk in, from a street person to a potential art collector who would hear through the grapevine that artists were having a party.
There are a lot of wonderful things created in our culture that have been ignored that can speak to them.
The Upper Bohemia people wore tuxedos in an art gallery, and Lower Bohemia was all of us.
The reality is that Brando was a tremendously accomplished classical actor well before he even studied Stanislavski, but because of one role, he was typecast the rest of his life as somebody who was mumbling and fumbling.
The painter Jackson Pollock studied with Benton and was an authority on American Indian sand-painting.
The other thing is you really have to want to submerge yourself into this situation.
The idea of the peace movement and of people who spent their entire lives trying to have a more egalitarian, just society, suddenly became swamped by the record industry, by the new rock and roll culture, and by the idea of not trusting anyone over thirty.
The fact that we even did it is a miracle, because we used to do our readings on park benches or in people's apartments, or in the Cafe Figaro or some bar at 3:00 AM - whatever we felt like doing.
The atmosphere was wide open in those circles that we traveled in.
That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done.