Out of Sight and Sound - The Free Spirits Reunion

Jim PepperFest 2013 Aug 7 - 10 schedule published

Jim PepperFest update: American Indian Movement

We are honored and very happy to announce a partnership with American Indian Movement (AIM) Portland Oregon Chapter. AIM Portland volunteers will provide public safety and security services for the Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival, August 7 – 10.

From the official American Indian Movement website:

A Brief History of the American Indian Movement

by Laura Waterman Wittstock and Elaine J. Salinas

In the 30 years of its formal history, the American Indian Movement (AIM) has given witness to a great many changes. We say formal history, because the movement existed for 500 years without a name. The leaders and members of today's AIM never fail to remember all of those who have traveled on before, having given their talent and their lives for the survival of the people.

At the core of the movement is Indian leadership under the direction of NeeGawNwayWeeDun, Clyde H. Bellecourt, and others. Making steady progress, the movement has transformed policy making into programs and organizations that have served Indian people in many communities. These policies have consistently been made in consultation with spiritual leaders and elders.The success of these efforts is indisputable, but perhaps even greater than the accomplishments is the vision defining what AIM stands for.

Indian people were never intended to survive the settlement of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere, our Turtle Island.  With the strength of a spiritual base, AIM has been able to clearly articulate the claims of Native Nations and has had the will and intellect to put forth those claims.

The movement was founded to turn the attention of Indian people toward a renewal of spirituality which would impart the strength of resolve needed to reverse the ruinous policies of the United States, Canada, and other colonialist governments of Central and South America. At the heart of AIM is deep spirituality and a belief in the connectedness of all Indian people.

During the past thirty years, The American Indian Movement has organized communities and created opportunities for people across the Americas and Canada. AIM is headquartered in Minneapolis with chapters in many other cities, rural areas and Indian Nations.

AIM has repeatedly brought successful suit against the federal government for the protection of the rights of Native Nations guaranteed in treaties, sovereignty, the United States Constitution, and laws. The philosophy of self-determination upon which the movement is built is deeply rooted in traditional spirituality, culture, language and history. AIM develops partnerships to address the common needs of the people. Its first mandate is to ensure the fulfillment of treaties made with the United States. This is the clear and unwavering vision of The American Indian Movement.

It has not been an easy path. Spiritual leaders and elders foresaw the testing of AIM's strength and stamina. Doubters, infiltrators, those who wished they were in the leadership, and those who didn't want to be but wanted to tear down and take away have had their turns. No one, inside or outside the movement, has so far been able to destroy the will and strength of AIM's solidarity. Men and women, adults and children are continuously urged to stay strong spiritually, and to always remember that the movement is greater than the accomplishments or faults of its leaders.

Inherent in the spiritual heart of AIM is knowing that the work goes on because the need goes on.

Indian people live on Mother Earth with the clear understanding that no one will assure the coming generations except ourselves. No one from the outside will do this for us. And no person among us can do it all for us, either. Self-determination must be the goal of all work. Solidarity must be the first and only defense of the members.

In November, 1972 AIM brought a caravan of Native Nation representatives to Washington, DC, to the place where dealings with Indians have taken place since 1849: the US Department of Interior. AIM put the following claims directly before the President of the United States:

Restoration of treaty making (ended by Congress in 1871). Establishment of a treaty commission to make new treaties (with sovereign Native Nations). Indian leaders to address Congress. Review of treaty commitments and violations. Unratified treaties to go before the Senate. All Indians to be governed by treaty relations. Relief for Native Nations for treaty rights violations. Recognition of the right of Indians to interpret treaties. Joint Congressional Committee to be formed on reconstruction of Indian relations. Restoration of 110 million acres of land taken away from Native Nations by the United States. Restoration of terminated rights. Repeal of state jurisdiction on Native Nations. Federal protection for offenses against Indians. Abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Creation of a new office of Federal Indian Relations. New office to remedy breakdown in the constitutionally prescribed relationships between the United States and Native Nations. Native Nations to be immune to commerce regulation, taxes, trade restrictions of states. Indian religious freedom and cultural integrity protected. Establishment of national Indian voting with local options; free national Indian organizations from governmental controls Reclaim and affirm health, housing, employment, economic development, and education for all Indian people.

For more information about the American Indian Movement:

http://www.aimovement.org/

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Website: www.jimpepperfest.net

Evening concert series tickets are on sale now:

Reserved seats $ 25

Season Pass $ 95

http://jimpepperfest.net/buyticketsnow.html

Jim PepperFest 2013 to feature National Museum of the American Indian exhibit IndiVisible: African - Native American Lives in the Americas

The National Museum of the American Indian’s traveling exhibit IndiVisible: African - Native American Lives in the Americas will make its first Portland appearance at the 1st annual Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival, August 7 – 10 and then will return to Portland through October – November for an extended run at Portland Community College’s Cascade Campus, in the heart of the City’s historically segregated African American neighborhoods.

Admission to the IndiVisible exhibit at Jim PepperFest 2013 will be free to the public, open 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Wednesday – Saturday August 7 – 10, at Parkrose HS Performing Arts Center in NE Portland.

We will be requesting donations of two items of nonperishable food for the Oregon Food Bank.

Jimi Hendrix, rock legend

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” 

—Jimi Hendrix

The rock-and-roll innovator Jimi Hendrix often spoke proudly of his Cherokee grandmother. He was one of many African Americans who cite family traditions in claiming Native ancestry. Photo: Courtesy Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas was produced by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). The exhibition was made possible in part thanks to the generous support of an anonymous donor and the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

From the National Museum of the American Indian:

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas

A place of belonging. A true sense of home.

All people share this desire. For those of dual African American and Native American heritage, this powerful sense of home has been difficult to find. Because they have not fit into society’s established racial categories, they’ve been denied a true sense of belonging.

Despite this challenge, the life experiences of African-Native American peoples have become a vital part of our American identity. Faced with centuries of government policies and laws that systematically oppressed and excluded them, they came together to find creative and effective ways to fight back. They established new, blended communities that drew strength from sharing traditions and philosophies. And, for more than 500 years, with their music, dance, craft, and food, African-Native Americans developed deeply rich cultural expressions that made an indelible mark on American life.

For centuries, African American and Native people have shared cultural traditions and practices, united in common struggle and forged relationships, families and unique ways of life throughout the Americas. But at times, racist policy and prejudice divided these communities and denied their shared heritage. Notable figures in U.S. history with dual African American and Native American ancestry include Crispus Attucks, Langston Hughes and Jimi Hendrix. By focusing on the dynamics of race, community, culture and creativity, “IndiVisible” examines an important and often overlooked aspect of American history.

Since its premiere on the National Mall in 2009, the exhibition has traveled to museums and cultural centers across the country, including the Chieftains Museum in Rome, Ga.; the Standing Bear Museum in Ponca City, Okla.; New Mexico State University Museum in Las Cruces, N.M.; the California African American Museum in Los Angeles; and the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Ala.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian opens a 20-panel banner exhibition, “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” focusing on the seldom-viewed history and complex lives of people of dual African American and Native American ancestry. Through the themes of policy, community, creative resistance and lifestyles, the exhibition includes stories of cultural integration and the struggle to define and preserve identity.

The exhibition addresses the racially motivated laws that have been forced upon Native, African American and mixed-heritage peoples since the time of Christopher Columbus. Since precolonial times, Native and African American peoples have built strong communities through intermarriage, unified efforts to preserve their land and by taking part in creative resistance. These communities developed constructive survival strategies over time, and several have regained economic sustainability through gaming in the 1980s. The daily cultural practices that define the African-Native American experience through food, language, writing, music, dance and the visual arts, will also be highlighted in the exhibition.

A 10-minute media piece is featured with interviews obtained during research and work on the exhibition with tribal communities across North America. Site work was conducted in Mashpee, Mass. with the Mashpee Wampanoag community, in Los Angeles with the Creek and Garifuna communities, with the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Okla., and at the Tutelo Homecoming Festival in Ithaca, N.Y., which welcomed the Cayuga, Tutelo and Saponi Indian Nations.

“The topic of African-Native Americans is one that touches a great number of individuals through family histories, tribal histories and personal identities,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee), director of the museum. “We find commonalities in our shared past of genocide and in the alienation from our ancestral homelands, and it acknowledges the strength and resilience we recognize in one another today.”

“The National Museum of African American History and Culture is proud to have contributed to this important and thoughtful exhibition,” said museum director Lonnie Bunch. “African American oral tradition is full of stories about ‘Black Indians,’ with many black families claiming Indian blood. However, there have been few scholarly treatments of this subject which, in the end, expresses the basic human desire of belonging.”

The exhibition was curated by leading scholars, educators and community leaders, including Gabrielle Tayac (Piscataway), Robert Keith Collins (African-Choctaw descent), Angela Gonzales (Hopi), Judy Kertèsz, Penny Gamble-Williams (Chappaquiddick Wampanoag) and Thunder Williams (Afro-Carib).

The accompanying exhibition book, “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” edited by Gabrielle Tayac, features 27 essays from authors across the hemisphere sharing firstperson accounts of struggle, adaptation and survival and examines such diverse subjects as contemporary art, the Cherokee Freedmen issue and the evolution of jazz and blues. The richly illustrated 256-page book is available in Smithsonian museum stores and through the Bookshop section of the museum’s Web site at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/bookshop

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES)

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Jim PepperFest 2013 tickets are on sale now:

http://jimpepperfest.net/buyticketsnow.html

Volunteer:

https://sites.google.com/site/jimpepperfest2013/

Sponsor Jim PepperFest 2013 and help us make history:

Contact: Sean Aaron Cruz

music@jimpepperfest.net

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Master drummer Ra-Kalam Bob Moses to hold master class

Among the four members of the legendary, pioneering jazz-fusion band The Free Spirits coming to Portland in August to celebrate their friend and bandmate Jim Pepper is world-renowned master drummer and educator Rakalam Bob Moses.

“Drummer, composer, artist, poet, dancer, visionary, nature mystic (Rakalam) Bob Moses's life has been a continuous quest for vision, spirit, compassion, growth, and mastery in a multiplicity of art forms.”—New England Conservatory

Bob will arrive in Portland in time to conduct a master class in doing what he does (time and place and other details TBA) before taking the stage Friday and Saturday evenings August 9 & 10 for the historic reunion concert of The Free Spirits. And then he’s off to tour Australia and New Zealand.

This will give you a sense of what you don’t want to miss:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgQo4ADFGx0

Photo by Andrew Hurlbut

“I can see two major traditions or trains of thought colliding and merging in my music.

“One is the path of the nature visionary; one who can travel without moving, to and through various dimensions and planes of reality. In my life I have seen through the veils, kissed butterflies, envisioned animated three-dimensional scenes and stepped into those scenes, talked to and played with spirits of other worlds, past, present and future. I have been a flower, a mountain, a raging river, a stone….

“The other tradition or stream that I swim in is the Great River of African Music in all its manifestations: the importance of clave’, groove, swing, rhythm, dance, hip-shaking, rhythm and rhyme sublime, shadows and light by day, by night, Jazz, Funk, Rhythm and Blues, Hip Hop, Rap, Reggae, Calypso, Zouk, Soukous, Samba, Afro-Cuban, Salsa are all psychically if not geographically emanating from Africa….

“So the streams merge and become one vast, deep, infinite music:

“Music with groove but no walls

Music with soul but no boundaries

Music with roots but no ceilings

Music of hope and love and humor”

                                  --Rakalam Bob Moses, from When Elephants Dream of Music

–on Bob Moses’ When Elephants Dream of Music:


"Bob Moses has now emerged as the possessor of one of the grander imaginations in America's true classical music. No orchestral composer of this scope, mellow wit, and freshly distinctive range of colors has come along since Gil Evans."-Nat Hentoff, Modern Recording and Music

“Bob Moses, composer, drummer, poet, artist, conceptualizer, inspirer of people, has created a musical environment that is balanced between discipline and freedom, compositional design and spontaneous inspiration. A party with a purpose. This album is original, soulful, funny…and very special. I hope a lot of people get as much enjoyment from it as I have”. –Gil Evans

–on On Time Stood Still

"Leave it to Moses, a multi-directional shamanistic groovilator, to put all the pieces together. On Time Stood Still, another sprawling production of DeMille-ian scale, he seamlessly blends Monk, funk, tap, hip hop, bebop, big band, blues, Bahia, Tanzania, and the avant garde into one organic package while paying homage to the spirits of Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Jaco Pastorius."-Bill Milkowski, Down Beat

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Website: www.jimpepperfest.net

Native Arts & Cultures Foundation supports Jim PepperFest 2013

“You must not forget me when I’m long gone, for I loved you so dearly….”

--Jim Pepper, Remembrance

We are very happy to announce that the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation has become a sponsor of the Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival.

The Native Arts & Cultures Foundation is a 501 (c) 3 philanthropic organization dedicated exclusively to the revitalization, appreciation and perpetuation of indigenous arts and cultures. The Native-led national foundation supports American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native artists and communities.

This advertisement will be printed in the Jim PepperFest 2013 souvenir program:

About the Foundation

The Native Arts & Cultures Foundation (NACF) is a 501(c)3 philanthropic organization dedicated exclusively to the revitalization, appreciation and perpetuation of indigenous arts and cultures. The Native-led national foundation supports American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native artists and communities.

Created after decades of visioning by Native peoples, the arts and cultures foundation provides support to the field and fosters creativity amongst Native peoples through grantmaking, convening, advocacy and research.

“The arts have always played a significant role in Native cultures, and are a powerful path for connecting one generation to the next. Thanks to the generous support of the Ford Foundation and others, we were able to launch this important new organization. Thanks to ongoing donations, we're able to carry out our mission to provide support to artists and organizations to help our cultures flourish. We look forward to fostering opportunities that help create positive social change in communities across the nation,” said Foundation President/CEO T. Lulani Arquette.

Thank you for your interest in the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
11109 NE 14th Street, Vancouver, WA 98684

Phone: 360-314-2421 Fax: 360-718-2553

info@NativeArtsAndCultures.org    www.nativeartsandcultures.org

Jim Pepper, Quebec City Powwow, circa 1980

Jan Michael Looking Wolf & Friends August 10

We are very happy to announce that Jan Michael Looking Wolf and Friends will headline the Flying Eagle Main Stage on Saturday, August 10, at 5:00 p.m., closing out the series of free concerts for Jim PepperFest 2013.

Jan Michael Looking Wolf has a lot of friends, as you can see in this live performance of his NAMA Record of the Year Live as One at the 2010 Native American Music Awards.

We are all related….

http://youtu.be/d2UpToByjfw

The action will then move indoors to the Parkrose HS Performing Arts Center Theater for the final evening concert of Jim PepperFest 2013:

Rise of The Free Spirits, pt 2

Historic reunion concert of The Free Spirits

Featuring

Larry Coryell – Ra-Kalam Bob Moses

Chris Hills – Columbus Chip Baker

And Special Guests, including

Barry Bergstrom, tenor saxophone

And

John Trudell and Bad Dog

  

Visit www.JimPepperFest.net

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Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen to introduce Joy Harjo

“You must not forget me when I’m long gone, for I loved you so dearly….”

--Jim Pepper, Remembrance

Oregon’s Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen to speak opening night

Paulann Petersen

We are very happy to announce that Paulann Petersen, the State of Oregon’s Poet Laureate, has accepted our invitation to speak and will introduce Joy Harjo to the audience on opening night, the evening of Wednesday, August 7.

Paulann has long been an admirer of Joy Harjo’s poetry, and also has fond memories of her time as a student of Jim Pepper’s mother, Floy Pepper, at Richmond Grade School.

Following Paulann’s remarks there will be the long-awaited performance of:

Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band

Featuring Larry Mitchell and Grayhawk Perkins

Find out more about Paulann Petersen here:

http://www.oregonpoetlaureate.org/paulann-bio.html

http://www.paulann.net/index.php

Visit www.JimPepperFest.net

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John-Carlos Perea remembers Jim Pepper

I was first introduced to the music of Jim Pepper while studying for my undergraduate degree in Music at San Francisco State University. At that time I was listening to John Coltrane and also to pow-wow and Native American flute music. I knew there was a connection there but I did not understand how to make that connection in my playing and in my life.

I spoke to saxophonist Francis Wong at that time about my interests and he loaned me his copy of Pepper’s Dakota Song. That loan led me to research Pepper’s discography and eventually to Pepper’s performance of Coltrane’s “Naima” on Everything is Everything featuring Chris Hills. Hearing Pepper play “Naima” helped me finally make that connection between jazz and intertribal Native American music, a connection that set me on my own career as an electric bassist, cedar flutist, singer, and composer.

Pepper’s music sets a precedent in jazz and Native American music for the way he crossed back and forth between straight-ahead, fusion, avant garde, and many other styles. When I listen to Pepper’s playing and composing I also hear bravery and fearlessness. He understood the importance of “Witchi Tai To” as a peyote song but he also saw the importance of rearranging it into the new song that circulates globally today in so many different versions and styles. I feel grateful to have learned these lessons from Jim Pepper and I am happy that the Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival will provide a space to remember Jim Pepper and to present new music inspired by him in the future.

http://www.johncarlosperea.com | https://soundcloud.com/johncarlosperea

John Betsch remembers Jim Pepper

“We met the summer of 1966 at a jam session in NYC with Chris Hills and a couple of others whose names escape me, and I was stunned by his sound and spirit. He was complaining about his chops and that special horn that I eventually took to Selmer for repairs, beginning their special relationship, and which is now in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

“We remet in 1981 at a festival in Austria when he was with Don Cherry and I was with Archie Shepp, Mal Waldron and Santi Debriano, who became key players in our lives later. We realized we were neighbors in Park Slope and thus began our close association, playing together in the Park and at the home of Gordon Lee where Jim was staying.

“When we both moved to Brooklyn our friendship continued to grow and at his and Caren's apartment I met Pura Fe among others. When I moved to Europe in 1985, invited by trombonist Marty Cook, Marty and I began bringing Jim over for tours a year or so afterward.

“Through the Munich associations with ENJA and TUTU Records things began to take shape with tours and recordings with first Marty's quartet with Jim's Portland friend Essiet Essiet, then with Ed Schuller on bass, and later the quartet with Ed and Mal Waldron, Santi and Kirk Lightsey, Claudine Francois with whom I was living near Paris and finally guitarist Bill Bickford.

“The Mal Waldron--Ed Schuller band literally made people cry: three different people came to me after gigs and said, "I was crying and didn't know why".

“My personal high water mark was a gig in a club near Vienna where Jim finally relocated: when we did the songs from the ‘Comin and Goin’ recording, everybody in the club sang all of the words. I will never forget the look on Jim's face when he turned around and looked at me with a ‘Do you believe this shit?!?!’ look on his face.

“When I developed a tumor on my right shoulder bone and Jim's lymphoma forced us into being on chemo at the same time, we decided to phone each other every Monday morning and talk about our experiences. We called each other "the brothers we never had" because of both having sisters as siblings and our musical and personal relationship remains the most special of my life.” – John Betsch, June 21, 2013, Paris, France.

Hear this great band here: Jim Pepper, Mal Waldron, Ed Schuller, John Betsch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baHlCnTlGCw

Remembering Jim Pepper...Floyd Red Crow Westerman…a note from David Amram

David Amram on the right

From 1956-1959 when I was a member of the great bassist Oscar Pettiford's big band, we would often go to his house after playing at Birdland and he would show me dances and sing songs he learned as a boy in Oklahoma.

And he talked about the great trombonist Big Chief Russell Moore, Jack Teagarden, pianist Mary Lou Williams  and other masters of jazz who like Oscar had Native American heritage and how the various nations comprising what was known by most people as all being  "American Indians", each had their own music, their own language and their own history. 

And Oscar always had pride in his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, and felt that jazz and the community it created of players and listeners was an extension of the harmony articulated in the old saying "Respect, Love and Sharing-The Indian Way."

Back in the 50s, Oscar had two French horns, Julius Watkins and myself, as well as a harpist, and Oscar occasionally playing cello.

"Maybe this will hip the symphony cats to opening up their minds as well as their ears" he used to say, when we would talk about Jazz, Native American music  and all the sincere forms of music built to last that  were mostly ignored by the classical music establishment as well as the Pop and rock world.

"Someday, if our band hits it, we won't be going to them, they'll be coming to us."

Oscar passed away in 1960 and we never got the chance to work with any symphony orchestras, but in every symphony I ever worked with, the classical bass players all knew and revered Oscar Pettiford. 

When I met Jim Pepper in the 60s, he knew all about Oscar and shared the same interest in having the treasures of jazz and Native music receive the same respect awarded to the treasures of European classical music.

Jim and I crossed paths many times over the years, and musicians I worked with like Mal Waldron, Colin Wolcott and Don Cherry all loved his music and his spirit. We also appeared together in many benefit concerts for Native American rights during the years I played as the accompanist for Floyd Red Crow Westerman.

In the summer of 1990, Jim was the featured artist in a concert we did at Prospect Park, where I conducted the Brooklyn Philharmonic in an evening celebrating Native American music and jazz. Jim was his usual dynamic self and when the concert was over, Jim and his group played almost an hour more and the whole symphony stayed to listen.

He left us way too early, and in 1993, we did a memorial tribute to him, which included his mother reading Chief Seattle's famous speech, accompanied by the orchestra.

I wish I could be there to lend my support and am so happy that Jim is receiving this honor. 

I have been blessed to know and play with three of the people at this concert...Joy Harjo, Pura Fe and John Trudell, and I know how happy Jim would be to have them there as well as the original members of "The Free Spirits."

Jim opened up a lot of doors to take people to places that they had never been before, and we all have to work to keep his legacy alive and open more doors for young people to inspire them to live their lives creatively and make a contribution to the world while we are here, the way Jim did.

Thank you, Sean Aaron Cruz for your years of hard work to make this dream a reality, as well as to all the people in Portland for sharing the gift of Jim's creations with the world with the first Annual Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival.

David Amram

Putnam Valley, New York

June 10, 2013

___________

David Amram (born November 17, 1930) is an American composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, and author. As a classical composer and performer, his integration of jazz, folkloric and world music has led him to work with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, Pepper Adams, Leonard Bernstein, Sir James Galway, Tito Puente, Mary Lou Williams, Joseph Papp, Arthur Miller, Arturo Sandoval, Stan Getz, Pete Seeger, Elia Kazan, Christopher Plummer, Ingrid Bergman, Odetta, Lord Buckley, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Allen, Machito, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Allen Ginsberg, Nina Simone, Gregory Corso, Bob Dylan, Steve Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Thelonius Monk, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, Levon Helm, Betty Carter and Jack Kerouac. In the early 1950s, he was encouraged to pursue his unique path by mentors Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, the New York Philharmonic's conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, Miles Davis, Aaron Copland, Gunther Schuller, and visual artists Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning andFranz Kline. Today, as he has for over 50 years, Amram continues to compose music while traveling the world as a conductor, soloist, bandleader, visiting scholar, and narrator in five languages. –Wikipedia

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David Amram – Floyd Red Crow Westerman – Lakota Rabbit Dance Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TQdSU_5Co0

David Amram with Dizzy Gillespie and friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j69jBSwi-f4

David Amram, "Mama Don't Allow No Music", at Woody Guthrie Folk Festival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVIGS_3meXU

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