ROCKPORT — Reading David Amram’s resume — performer, composer of operas, symphonies and film scores, conductor, teacher, self-described ethnofunkologist — you see why he’s rightly called the Renaissance Man of American Music.

Catch him in concert or working with school kids, surrounded by the dozens of instruments he plays, leaping from piano to French horn to congas without missing a beat, soloing on three flutes at once (two Turkish, one Irish), improvising jazz poetry about lobster rolls and the Machias Blueberry Festival, and you realize he’s more than merely da Vincian.

He’s a musical Marco Polo, soaking up tunes from his world travels, a multi-instrumentalist with a closet more jammed than Fibber McGee’s, a music man who could teach Professor Harold Hill a thing or two about conveying a love of his art.

Amram brought his trio — bassist Victor Venegas and guitarist Vic Juras — to the Rockport Opera House Thursday night for the last event of the Bay Chamber Concerts spring season, a cozy evening of classic jazz by the likes of Ellington, Basie, Monk and Rollins.

Amram gave a quick overview of what he’s about on the first number, Billy Strayhorn’s signature tune for Ellington’s band, “Take the A Train.” Kicking off what he called “the best song ever written about mass transit” with some finger popping, Amram got things up to speed on congas, moved through several continents’ worth of small percussion instruments and flutes, took a few choruses on French horn and legged it over to the piano just in time to wrap things up.

Every good concert has one moment that alone is worth the price of 10 admissions. This night it was an astonishing solo on “Summertime” by Juras, his guitar sobbing like a heartbroken lover, leaving the audience breathless. It had to be the best rendition since Gershwin sang the tune to himself in the shower.

The rock-steady Venegas, who gave the band a solid foundation all night long, stepped out front for a blistering mambo-style solo on Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” showing what he’s learned in a career playing in everything from the Tito Puente Big Band to the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Amram and friends closed the show with the leader’s own “Pull My Daisy,” a goofy, up-tempo tune he wrote with Jack Kerouac when the two virtually invented jazz poetry back in ’57. Using Kerouac’s lyrics as a point of departure, Amram scatted his way from beat-era Greenwich Village up Route 1 to the present day and his family’s favorite Down East campground, with a stop at Perry’s Nut House along the way.

Amram was back at work Friday morning, talking music with several busloads of local elementary pupils, part of Bay Chamber Concerts’ educational outreach program.

Starting with his arsenal of flutes and whistles, Amram took the kids on his “Around the Musical World in 80 Minutes” tour, demonstrating music he’s learned firsthand from the Chilean Andes to the Khyber Pass. Moving on to percussion, Amram wowed the kids with an Afghani dhubek, a talking drum he once played on a “County & Eastern” gig with Willie Nelson.

The 65-year-old musician has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber pieces, two operas and numerous film scores, including “Splendor in the Grass” and “The Manchurian Candidate,” often using jazz, folk and ethnic music as inspiration and basic material for his compositions. He has conducted and performed with orchestras around the world, and was the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence.

During a break between school groups Friday, Amram said he was multicultural before multicultural was cool “simply because I was never taught we were supposed to draw lines between different musics. When I was growing up, in my house, classical music and jazz were all part of the same stew, with traditional Jewish music thrown in for good measure. As a young man in the ’50s, I was playing jazz in clubs in Washington, D.C., and we’d get musicians from all the embassies, clerks, office staff, coming to sit in with the instruments and music they’d brought from home.”

Two of his most recent projects are “A Little Rebellion: Thomas Jefferson,” a piece for narrator and string orchestra commissioned by the Library of Congress, and the release, 37 years after it was recorded, of the complete “Pull My Daisy” sessions, with Kerouac improvising poetry and Amram improvising music.

As a composer, Amram says he is very fortunate to have grown up surrounded by improvised music. “The jazz and Jewish music I heard and played as a kid was heavily improvised. To me, it’s always been a part of what music is and what leads to new ideas for compositions. Improvisation is a natural way to express yourself, the way all children make up stories, songs, plays. As we get older, we get more formalized, disciplined and organized, we can easily lose that spark of spontaneity. Improvising keeps that spark alive.”

During his career, Amram has collaborated with everyone from Leonard Bernstein and Dizzy Gillespie to unknown villagers in remote spots around the world. “Great musicians are great musicians, whether they’re standing in front of a major symphony orchestra or living in a village in Guatemala, the Lakota Reservation in South Dakota, or in the mountains in Pakistan,” he said. “I incorporate the music I hear in my own work because music is knowledge. Anytime others give you the blessing of their knowledge, you thank and honor them by sharing that knowledge with others.”