David Werner Amram III was born November 17, 1930, in Philadelphia, the son of the legal scholar Philip Werner Amram and grandson of another David Werner Amram, also a lawyer and legal scholar. He spent much of his childhood on the family farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, learning Hebrew and cantorial melodies from his grandfather while working through classical piano, which he started at seven. He tried trumpet before settling on the French horn, an instrument with almost no jazz precedent at the time. He studied at Oberlin Conservatory in 1948 and 1949, then took a bachelor's degree in European history from George Washington University in 1952, playing horn with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington from 1951 while he finished the degree.

Drafted in 1952, Amram spent his service in Europe, playing French horn in Army bands and in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, which had been founded that same year and was based in Stuttgart. Off duty he found the European jazz scene instead. In the autumn of 1954 he recorded six sides at the American Forces Network studios in Frankfurt with a group built around trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and guitarist Attila Zoller, issued as a 7-inch EP on the tiny Presto label. In Paris on March 17 and 18, 1955 he cut three separate dates in two days: Don Rendell and Bobby Jaspar's Rencontre à Paris for Swing, Jaspar's own Plays... Gone With The Winds, and two sessions with Lionel Hampton's pickup French band alongside Sacha Distel, René Urtreger, and Nat Adderley, released as Crazy Rhythm on EmArcy and Lionel Hampton And His French New Sound on Barclay.

He moved to New York later in 1955 and enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, studying composition with Vittorio Giannini and Gunther Schuller and conducting with Dimitri Mitropoulos, while paying rent on the bandstand. He played French horn in Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop at the Café Bohemia and in Oscar Pettiford's orchestra at Birdland, and he was in Pettiford's horn section for both Oscar Pettiford Orchestra In Hi-Fi (ABC-Paramount ABC-135, 1956) and its February 1958 sequel, sharing the chairs with Julius Watkins, the only other horn player then working regularly in jazz. The rest of the decade brought a steady run of unusual dates: accordionist Mat Mathews's Gentle Art Of Love (Dawn, 1956) with Herbie Mann and Art Farmer, Mathews's 4 French Horns Plus Rhythm (Elektra EKL-134, 1957), a Teddy Charles-supervised session for Rudy Van Gelder on May 18, 1957 that turned up years later under three different titles, the Sal Salvador Quartet's Colors In Sound (Decca DL 9210, 1958), and Kenny Dorham's Blue Spring (Riverside RLP 12-297), recorded January 20 and February 18, 1959 with Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. His own first leader date came in between: The Eastern Scene, a quartet co-billed with tenor saxophonist George Barrow, recorded January 16, 21, and 30, 1957 and released by Decca.

The same years put Amram at the center of the downtown literary scene. In 1957 he staged what is generally counted as New York's first jazz and poetry reading, at the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th Street, with Jack Kerouac, Howard Hart, and Philip Lamantia. Two years later he wrote the score for Pull My Daisy, the 28-minute short directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie from a Kerouac text that Kerouac then narrated live over the finished picture; Amram also appears on screen as the horn-playing character Mez McGillicuddy, and Anita Ellis sang the title song. He and Kerouac kept working together for more than a decade, and Amram published an account of it in 2002 as Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac.

While the jazz work continued, Amram was building a parallel career in theater, film, and concert music. Joseph Papp commissioned incidental music from him for a 1956 Titus Andronicus, the start of an association that produced scores for 25 New York Shakespeare Festival productions through 1967. He was composer and music director at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater from 1964 to 1966, writing for Arthur Miller's After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. His film work arrived in a concentrated burst: The Young Savages and Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass, both released in 1961, then John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 and Kazan's The Arrangement in 1969. A score he wrote for Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May was rejected and replaced with one by Jerry Goldsmith. His one-act opera The Final Ingredient, set in a concentration camp, was televised by ABC in 1965, and the comic opera Twelfth Night, to a libretto by Papp, followed in 1968. In 1966 Leonard Bernstein picked Amram out of roughly 100 candidates to be the New York Philharmonic's first composer-in-residence, a one-year post created for him.

From the late 1960s onward Amram treated the whole world as source material, traveling for the U.S. Information Agency and other sponsors to Brazil in 1969, Kenya in 1975, Cuba in 1977, and the Middle East in 1978, and eventually working in more than 35 countries. The Cuban trip was the consequential one. In May 1977 he sailed from New Orleans aboard the Daphne with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Earl Hines in the first group of American musicians permitted to visit Cuba since 1961; a live Havana performance of his "En Memoria de Chano Pozo" with members of Irakere, including Arturo Sandoval and Paquito D'Rivera, anchors the resulting album Havana/New York. His own records from this period gathered whatever he had picked up: No More Walls (RCA Red Seal, 1971), Subway Night (RCA Victor, 1973), At Home / Around The World (Flying Fish, 1980), and Latin-Jazz Celebration (Elektra Musician, 1983) all mix jazz horns with oud, dumbek, shanai, Andean flutes, and Cuban percussion. He ran young people's and family concerts for the Brooklyn Philharmonic for more than 25 years and became director of the International Jewish Arts Festival on Long Island in 1982.

Amram has written more than 100 orchestral and chamber works and four books, including the memoir Vibrations (1968) and Amram@90: Notes from a Promising Young Composer (2022). He remains active in his mid-nineties: in April 2026 he traveled to Ohio State University for the Wind Symphony's premiere of a wind-band version of his This Land: Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie, and he was billed to open the Hudson River Music Festival at Croton Point Park on June 14, 2026.

Amram's central claim on jazz history is simple and hard to overstate: with Julius Watkins, he made the French horn an improvising voice rather than a section color, and he did it in the two hardest rooms available, Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop and Oscar Pettiford's big band. The horn has no keys, a treacherous overtone series, and a tone built for blending rather than cutting, which is why the discography of jazz horn soloists before 1955 is essentially empty. Amram's answer was to play it lyrically instead of trying to make it bark like a saxophone, which is audible on the six French-horn tracks from the May 18, 1957 Van Gelder session, where he and Watkins trade lines over Hampton Hawes and Curtis Fuller. He refused the standard mid-century separation of jazz from concert music, studying with Gunther Schuller while gigging at the Café Bohemia, and his Triple Concerto (1974) makes the argument literally by writing a jazz quintet, a woodwind quintet, and a brass quintet into the same orchestral score. The later records widen the frame further, absorbing Cuban, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Appalachian material well before "world music" was a marketing category. BMI has listed him among the 20 most-performed composers of concert music in the United States since 1974, which is a fair measure of where his weight actually sits: the jazz playing is a real and continuous thread, but the composing is the larger body of work.