At 95, Amram maintains a schedule that would be daunting to men half his age, with generosity, charm, and youthful panache. At Dizzy’s Club this week, and in celebration of his November 17 birthday, he warded off bad reviews: if you improvise, you have no material to get wrong, he joked. The audience, including Arturo O’Farrell and Barbara Kopple ate it up.

Known to me in beat literary circles, Amram, adorned at the neck with an assemblage of multiple pipes, appears in the Robert Frank/Alfred Leslie film Pull My Daisy, from a play by Jack Kerouac. Amram composed the music for its anthem– and the music for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate, yes, the original one with Angela Lansbury, and hundreds of songs and symphonies. 

On piano, vocals, flutes, percussion, Amram kicked off his set with his classic rendition of Sonny Rollins’ “St. Thomas” dating back to 1955 when he performed with Rollins and Charles Mingus at the original Café Bohemia on Barrow Street. Stories accompanied Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” a tribute to Terry Southern in Paris when he composed “Bards of Montparnasse,” and Phil Ochs’ “When I’m Gone.” Accompanied by his band, Jerome Harris on guitar, Rene Hart on bass, Kevin Twigg on drums and glockenspiel, and his son Adam Amram on congas, the delightful evening closed with the Pull My Daisy anthem, an Amram composition with words by Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s favorite composer, he asserted, was Bach.

Of course, Amram knew everyone. Chatting with well-wishers after an hour of music, he spoke lovingly of Sheila Jordan, the jazz vocalist who died recently. He knew her from 1955, and performed together from time to time over the years. He remembers when she and then husband Duke Jordan welcomed baby Tracy, his generous appreciation of others unfaltering. In fact, that’s what his birthday celebration is all about. We pray, this tradition does not die.