David Amram
That is something that I was trained to do when playing jazz, always think ahead.
That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than what is out there.
So, we went to the Brata Gallery and they welcomed us there.
So, having been turned down there, we decided to do it at the Brata Art Gallery, where I was known. On occasion they would ask me to play the horn or bring some musicians to play.
One of my first heroes was Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1937, when I was six years old, I was taken to hear them, and I fell in love with that whole group of musicians and all the music I heard, including the performance of Peter and the Wolf.
McLeish considered Corso a genius.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.
In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing. You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change.
In Kerouac's case, after one book came out, On the Road, he was hailed as the greatest new novelist since Thomas Wolfe.
In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.
In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.
I would listen very hard to what he was reading, and on the spot create music that the readings gave me ideas about.
I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.
I was part of it, and I am still part of it today in terms of what it means to a whole new generation of people who are interested in the enduring energy, achievements, spirit and creativity that exemplified our era.
I never knew whether Jack was reading something that he made up on the spot or if it was something of his own. There may be something by Walt Whitman in there, or maybe a fragment of a poem by Hart Crane, or something from Shakespeare, Beowulf or Chaucer.
I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last.
I just wrote a new piece for the flutist James Galway, Giants of the Night Flute Concerto, which was written in memory of Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac and Dizzy Gillespie.
I jammed with Monk and Bird and played and recorded with the bands of Mingus, Oscar Pettiford, Lionel Hampton, Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Dorham and many great players at venues that were often attended by just a handful of people.
He heard me play with Charles Mingus before we met and knew Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - a lot of the same people I did - all of whom appreciated him as much as I did because he was such a down-home, egalitarian person.
Gregory Corso began to study the classics while he was in prison and became self-educated through living in the streets.