David Amram’s East Village Ramble

Important Announcement

Due to the forecast of rain and thunder on Sunday, we have taken the decision to have David Amram give a talk instead of a tour about the East Village. The event will take place in the heart of the East Village at La Sala de Pepe and offers the chance to chat with David in relaxed surroundings. A virtual East Village Ramble.

La Sala de Pepe y Foto Espacio
73 Avenue C
New York, 10009

A Walking Tour Through Sixty Years of Art, Theater and Music That Changed the World Forever.

"The Lower East Side – now called the East Village – still has its unique spirit and we honor the Village by honoring that spirit as part of New York's history,” says David Amram, Artist Emeritus of The Village Trip, who has lived and worked across both Greenwich Village and the East Village. His sixth-floor walk-up on East Eighth Street was a late-night gathering place for Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Pettiford, Randy Weston, Pepper Adams, Cannonball Adderley, Elmo Hope, and Mary Lou Williams, as well as poets, painters, and artists.

“The East Village was where I met Jack Kerouac, Joe Papp and Woody Guthrie in 1956. And all the others I have collaborated with since also had roots in the East Village. To all of us, anything below 14th Street was Greenwich Village!”

Bring your cameras and iPhones so you can relive this unique walking tour with your friends and family!

It’s no exaggeration to say that David Amram has been at the center of the Downtown arts scene for well over a half-century. He knows everyone, and he’s a walking, talking encyclopedia.

With David as guide, we will see where many of the great young painters of the 1950s (now acclaimed worldwide) lived and worked. We’ll see the Emmanuel Baptist Church where Joe Papp and David first collaborated on a production of Titus Andronicus in the fall of 1956 – the beginning of the New York Shakespeare Festival.

We'll visit Charlie Parker's last home on Avenue B, and many of the places where jazz flourished after 1957, when Cecil Tylor and David changed the Five Spot from a neighborhood Bowery bar into a center for jazz in New York, where Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young and many others played.

We'll go to Tompkins Square Park where, in the 1950s, Ukrainian bandura players, folk, Latin and jazz musicians jammed together harmoniously. In the late1960s, the Park became a refuge for Flower Power refugees before, in the ‘70s, civic groups restored a sense of community and it became a neighborhood park once more. In the ‘80s, as rents skyrocketed, the Lower East Side became the East Village.

We'll see the studio where painter Alfred Leslie hung out when he directed Robert Frank's film Pull My Daisy with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, and of course Amram, who wrote the title song, with Jack Kerouac improvising the narration. Today the film is seen as an example of life on the Lower East Side.

We'll also see the old and new locations of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where brilliant young poets, playwrights, musicians, actors, dancers, and activists restored pride and interest in the gifts they brought to the City from Central America and the Caribbean. We'll see where CBGBs and the Filmore East flourished and brought a whole new flavor to rock music with a resurgence of the traditional blues, funk, rock, punk and electronics – all in the neighborhood where the Yiddish Theater once reigned supreme!

If ever there was an embarrassment of riches, it’s in the East Village. Explore it in the company of the man who lived there and has so many tales to tell.

• David Amram