Dave Kamien Division

Background

Kamien was born David Leo Silverman on July 22, 1928, in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Mechanicville. He played evening piano engagements at Fantauzzi’s Venetian Restaurant by age thirteen and learned brass instruments in the Mechanicville High School band.

In 1945, Silverman entered the Eastman School of Music and graduated with a major in composition and a minor in conducting. He toured the United States with childhood friends Chris Izzo and Cynthia Woodell in the Revelers. In his early twenties, he legally adopted Kamien, the original family surname. He later enrolled at Mannes College of Music and coached singers at New York City Opera.

Early Career

Kamien landed work as a score-copier for Arnold Arnstein, a New York music copyist who supervised score preparation for Broadway and concert productions. In 1957, Arnstein assigned Kamien to the original score for West Side Story, the Broadway musical with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Kamien received a Fulbright scholarship later that year to study and teach at Kölner Musikhochschule. He served as assistant conductor at Cologne Opera under Hans Knappertsbusch and Wolfgang Sawallisch.

Kamien remained in West Germany at the close of the Fulbright appointment. In the mid-1960s, he established a freelance career as a composer, conductor, and vocal coach. He wrote advertising music for Lancôme, IBM, Varta, Diamant Mehl, and Bioclear, along with scores for industrial films and West German broadcasters.

1970s

In 1971, Kamien scored Ich bin ganz Ohr, a 35-minute radio play by writer Barbara König, produced jointly by WDR and SDR under director Günther Sauer. He also scored Der Fall Eleni Voulgari, a ZDF television drama directed by Nathan Jariv about a Greek political prisoner held under the military junta.

Kamien scored Münchner Kindl, a 1972 Bayerischer Rundfunk episode of the ARD crime series Tatort that introduced Gustl Bayrhammer as Munich police inspector Melchior Veigl. Kamien also scored four 1973 episodes of the WDR crime anthology Die Kriminalerzählung, which adapted stories by writers including Julian Symons and Margery Allingham.

In November 1973, Kamien served as musical director for the German-language premiere of Kurt Weill and Paul Green’s antiwar musical Johnny Johnson at Schauspielhaus Bochum. He rearranged the Weill score and translated the song texts with director Joachim Preen. 

Kamien returned to pop recording in 1976 with Peggy March, an American singer who reached the top of the US chart at age fifteen with the 1963 single “I Will Follow Him.” March developed a parallel German-language career and won the 1965 Deutsche Schlager-Festspiele with “Mit 17 hat man noch Träume.” She moved from New York to Munich in 1969 and remained active in the West German schlager and television circuit through the Seventies.

In 1976, Kamien and Andy Adison wrote “Happy Birthday, Amerika” for March as a US Bicentennial project. Kamien produced the German recording and an English version titled “Happy Birthday, America”; Lynn Kamien co-wrote the English version. EMI issued the two versions on a promotional single prepared for Seagram’s Seven Crown.

The Division

In 1976, Kamien formed the Division as a sixteen-piece jazz/rock/soul ensemble at Folkwang Musikhochschule, Essen, at the request of several students. The ensemble included trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, saxophonists Hugo Read and Wollie Kaiser, trombonists Jürgen Königs and Uli Launhardt, drummer Willy Ketzer, and guitarist-saxophonist Bernd Adamkewitz.

Markus Stockhausen (b. 1957, Cologne) was the son of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and pianist-pedagogue Doris Stockhausen. He began piano lessons at age six and entered Cologne Musikhochschule in 1975 for piano and trumpet studies under Robert Platt and Manfred Schoof. Stockhausen also formed the jazz-rock group Key with saxophonist Hugo Read and bassist Rainer Linke. In 1976, he performed in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sirius at the Einstein Spacearium in Washington, D.C., as part of the US Bicentennial celebrations.

Read (b. 1954, Heinsberg) received piano lessons as a child. He took up flute at fourteen and alto saxophone at sixteen, then entered Cologne Musikhochschule in 1972 to study flute and classical saxophone. He joined Markus in Key, which appeared at the 1974 Frankfurt Jazz Festival. Later that year, Read joined the orchestra of German jazz bandleader Kurt Edelhagen.

Wollie Kaiser (b. 1950, Königswinter) first played guitar and sang in a late-Sixties rock group, then switched to saxophone and concentrated on jazz as a self-taught reed player.

Willy Ketzer (b. 1951, Bad Kreuznach) started on piano, clarinet, and saxophone. He first studied economics in Mainz, then entered Cologne Musikhochschule for percussion studies with drums as his principal instrument. In 1977, Ketzer joined Passport for a transatlantic tour.

Bernd Adamkewitz joined the Chris Braun Band on guitar and saxophone for the revised lineup behind their 1974 Pan release Foreign Lady.

The Division played dates across West Germany and appeared at the Sommerfest des Bundeskanzlers. In 1977, the group recorded the ten-track Terra Contact for Hör Zu/EMI Electrola.