AMERICA AT LARGE:Composer David Amram has always loved boxing as much as his own art, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

SINCE DAVID Amram describes his girlfriend as “a free-thinking sociologist PhD who is writing a book on Kerouac”, it might have seemed a match made in heaven, and once she had moved into his house up in Putnam Valley there wasn’t much she could do about her complaint anyway.

“Before I met you,” she told Amram, “I always thought you were a multi-faceted, sensitive composer. I was shocked to find that you are a Bohunk hick who lives on a farm and watches boxing!”

Amram was to have met up with me for Lou DiBella’s boxing card at BB King’s Blues Club last night, where the piece de resistance was the New York debut of Guillermo Rigondeaux, the undefeated Cuban featherweight trained by Freddie Roach.

“I got called in to play overdubs for Pete Seeger’s new record, which is a thrill, but it means I can’t make the fight tonight,” wrote Amram in an apologetic e-mail yesterday morning.

Over the past half-century Amram has established himself at the forefront of American composers. His work ranges from the avant-garde (his collaborations with Jack Kerouac in several Beat Generation-era jazz-and-poetry sessions, as well as the music for Kerouac’s 1959 cult documentary Pull My Daisy) to the popular (film scores for Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, for The Manchurian Candidate, and for Kazan’s The Arrangement) to the classical (he has written two operas, and was chosen in 1966 by Leonard Bernstein to be the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence). And he has always moved easily between the worlds of folk, jazz, and classical music: one of his symphonies was Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie, and his flute concerto Giants of the Night was commissioned and premiered by James Galway.

Amram’s affinity for boxing is less well known, but he was hooked early in life when he listened on the radio when Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling and then saw Louis knock out Lee Savold, and has never strayed far from the sport. Even during his Beat era, Amram regularly walked from his Greenwich Village digs to the National Maritime Union Hall for the Friday night club fights there.

The night of May 24th, 1968, posed a particularly agonising conflict, which he resolved in Solomonic fashion. He dutifully arrived at Carnegie Hall, where one of his compositions had been included on that evening’s programme. At its concluding note, he raced, in white tie and tails, down to Madison Square Garden to watch Bob Foster win the world light-heavyweight title from Dick Tiger, and then dashed back to Carnegie Hall and was in his seat when the concert concluded, with no one apparently the wiser.

The eclectic Amram, who composed the music for the Broadway stage version of Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront, has over the years played with everyone from Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie to Seeger, Odetta and Willie Nelson, not to mention just about every important symphony orchestra in the world. Before the Irish author’s untimely death last summer, he and Frank McCourt were collaborating on a new setting of the Mass Missa Manhattan.

He played piano at the victory party the night Jose Torres won the light-heavyweight title, and Torres and Schulberg were guests at Amram’s 1979 wedding.

In his early years in New York, Amram became friends with Archie Moore, Sandy Saddler and Ezzard Charles. He also enjoyed a long-standing friendship with the old welterweight Johnny Bratton, who was a regular at Birdland in the heyday of that famed jazz club.

At Amram’s invitation earlier this month, I’d dropped by the Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village, where he was recording a live album that included a jazz quintet (at one point backing actor John Ventimiglia, who read the concluding pages of Kerouac’s On the Road), a recital from Amram’s Splendor in the Grass score and a world music piece called Meandering in Mandarin, performed in part with Chinese wind instruments.

It was afterward that he reminded me of a classic 1968 Larry Merchant column from the sports pages of the New York Post called “From Beethoven to Boxing”, which chronicled a wild, Kerouac-like odyssey in which the columnist accompanied the composer on a mad, 550-mile round trip between Glens Falls, New York (where Amram’s opera Twelfth Night was premiering) to the Spectrum in Philadelphia, where the colourful Gypsy Joe Harris was fighting the reigning middleweight champion, Emile Griffith, in a non-title fight.

Then, as now, Amram liked to arrive early so as not to miss the preliminary bouts: “I’ve known too many good musicians who went undiscovered,” he explained, and was always optimistic about catching one of their fistic equivalents in an undercard fight.

Although Harris’ unconventional approach to boxing put off many traditionalists, Amram likened it that night to “a style of survival”.

“You can see he was the little kid on the street who had to improvise to survive,” Amram told Merchant. “It’s like a jazz musician without a lip. He has to develop a style within his limitations. Sometimes, with hard work, they become better than natural musicians. Beethoven wasn’t a natural, either. Mozart woke up in the morning and wrote beautiful music; Beethoven had to struggle and slave.”

In describing his affinity for the sport, Amram told Merchant, “One thing I don’t enjoy are brawlers. They remind me of musicians who can’t play well, so they play loud”.

Gypsy Joe Harris, by the way, won a decision that night in what turned out to be his final fight. A subsequent eye exam revealed that he’d been legally blind when he beat Griffith. The Pennsylvania Boxing Commission lifted his licence, and he never fought again.

Amram waited for Merchant to finish and file his fight story, and then it was back into the car and off to Glens Falls, a journey interrupted by one pit stop wherein, recorded Merchant in his “Beethoven to Boxing” column, Amram “got out of his car, squatted on his hands ‘to let the blood rush to my head and wake me up’, jogged six laps around a gas pump and drove off into the night”.

What is somehow overlooked in the telling of the composer’s zany devotion to the sweet science is that of the sportswriter driving through the night to an opera premiere.

A day later the odd couple found themselves at the Saratoga Center for the Performing Arts, where Amram appeared on a panel that included composer Aaron Copeland and sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, along with a fellow Merchant described as “a pompous critic”. The pompous critic had, for whatever reason, decided to make Amram the target of his wrath, but, said Merchant, the “philosophical sparring session with the critic ended with the audience bursting into applause for an Amram counter-punch”.

Or, as Amram himself described it, “He had me on the ropes, and I knocked him out!”