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WHEN TWO GENTLE GIANTS of American Jazz met for the first time in early 2006 on the stage of an historic Baptist church in Mobile, Alabama, the auditorium rang with their mutual musical attraction and their harmony of spirit.
Now 83 years old, Lil Greenwood's commanding stage presence; her vocal style, projection and range; and the unrelenting personal warmth which propelled her to success around the world as a lead vocalist with such original jazz greats as Duke Ellington and Ray Charles have grown only sweeter and stronger with the years.
She's at her best now in so many ways.
During a break in these recording sessions, the preacher's daughter from Prichard, Alabama, who never smoked, drank alcohol or used drugs, but spent much of her life in the company and companionship of long-gone jazz greats who did, meditated comfortably in the classic lotus position on a studio sofa to the amazement and envy of limber young musicians who had just been outside for a smoke.
David Amram, anointed by The Boston Globe as the “Renaissance Man of American Music”, has more than 100 classical compositions and thousands of performances to his credit. At age 76, he combines a farming lifestyle in Putnam Valley, New York, with a full schedule of performances around the world in nearly every musical form and forum, from classical, jazz, country and blue grass, to the folk music of two dozen different cultures.
 When David appeared in Mobile with his 12-piece international string chamber music group chamber group in 2006, he had readily agreed to the request of his hosts, the Mobile Chamber Music Society, to include Lil on the program singing Gershwin's “Summertime”. And when he closed the evening with his version of “Deep River”, Lil couldn't just sit through it. She rose from her seat on the front row and began to sing. David, wearing his ever-present 75 years of memorabilia on chains around his neck, jumped the four feet from the stage and arm-in-arm with Lil; they concluded the concert in an impromptu “Deep River” duet.
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When Lil and David met in Mobile, I already was planning the production with Lil of Back to My Roots. David's enthusiastic enlistment in the project, of course, would lend it huge new dimensions. Lil is but the most recent in David's lifelong diversity of musical relationships with a virtual Who's Who of 20th Century World Music.
David has collaborated with such notables as Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Jack Kerouac, Betty Carter, Odetta, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Tito Puente. On a recent visit to Mobile, he was hurrying back to New York where The David Letterman Show needed his French horn that afternoon and a week after that, he was with Willie Nelson at Farm Aid.
 His movie scores include Splendor in the Grass and the original Manchurian Candidate. David's flute concerto, Giants of the Night premiered in 2002 with James Galway. A recent commission, A Little Rebellion: Thomas Jefferson, premiered at the Kennedy Center with E.G. Marshall narrating and David conducting members of the National Symphony Orchestra. He currently is working with author Frank McCourt on a new composition, Missa Manhattan, celebrating the rich tapestry of cultures which have immigrated to New York over the past 300 years.
David also was appointed Composer-in-Residence for the New York Philharmonic in 1966 and is listed by BMI as one of The Twenty Most Performed Composers of Concert Music in the United States from 1974 forward.
With all of that, David says "Back to My Roots is one of the happiest, warmest and most invigorating experiences of my life."
Harold (Buz) Rummel
Mobile, Alabama
January 2007
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