A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH URI CAINE


Downtown isn't just a zip code and Uri Caine isn't just a piano player. Caine is a brilliant improviser that combines his subtle, but evident knowledge of classical music with his tremendous improvisational creativity. His work with Mahler is the stuff that makes legends. I consider it an honor to speak with any musician, but I particularly enjoyed my time with Caine, whom is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. It is Caine, unedited and in his own words, enjoy.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

URI CAINE: I grew up in Philadelphia and there was a pretty lively jazz scene going on there with people like Philly Joe and Mickey Roker and Hank Mobley, so you could actually sit in and play with those guys. That's what I was always aspiring to as I was growing up there. I was studying with this French pianist named Bernard Peiffer, who was a really big influence on me. At the same time, I was getting into studying classical music, taking piano lessons, and studying composition. I went to the University of Pennsylvania to study that and then moved to New York. So a lot of the stuff that I am doing is grounded in the different types of music I heard growing up in Philadelphia.


FJ: Did you separate the music into two genres, classical and jazz?

URI CAINE: I didn't necessarily see them that way. Obviously, there is a difference between sitting in a concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra and then playing on Saturday night at a jazz club. There is a definite different atmosphere in the way that people are relating to what's going on. If anything, I was determined not to be discouraged from dealing with music that even people within the groups that I was playing with were saying wasn't worth it, like if I was playing with a bebop cats, they would say that out music wasn't happening. I would think to myself that I was into out music or when classical musicians would say that they don't really give it up to jazz musicians and that it was not serious, then I would just laugh and think that it is totally serious and the fact that different people did not endorse other types of music. Even though they were musicians, it didn't discourage me from checking out what I wanted to check out and hang with who I wanted to hang with and sort of absorbing what I wanted to absorb.


FJ: Sounds like you were a rebel.

URI CAINE: I guess if that is, although I think that a lot of musicians are in that same boat. I think even musicians who, if I go on the road, I'm sort of shocked or not shocked, but pleasantly surprised by what people are bringing out to listen to and it really covers a wide gamut. I think this whole idea of putting things into categories, it works for certain things, but in terms of just the general passion for music that a lot of musicians have as fans as well as players, that they can absorb a lot of different things and want those different things. I mean, it is not eclecticism for sake of eclecticism. You hear some stuff that knocks you out and you start checking it our and then you realize that there is music behind that music and then there is music that came before that music or was influenced by that music and so it becomes this really wide pot that you are dealing with. I prefer to look at it that way. I was also made aware when I was younger that there was a lot of different styles and in a sense, if you are playing with Philly Joe, that is a different aspect of playing and you have to bring a different set of skills sometimes to different aspects of music making, but that is a different story than what you are actually absorbing or rejecting.


FJ: What were some of the interesting things you heard?

URI CAINE: I went through a lot of different phases, but I know that I was really obsessed with Miles Davis and John Coltrane, especially Coltrane, having lived so much in Philadelphia and hearing first hand stories about what type of musician he was. I went through a heavy phase of that. I went through a really heavy phase of a lot of contemporary music like Stravinsky, Boulez, Bartok, because when I heard it, it sounded so fresh. I guess coming from different, when I grew up, I grew up in a house where my parents spoke Hebrew to us. They were playing a lot of Yeminite music, so that sort of had an effect. I guess another thing was when I was starting to study composition, my teacher was saying to me that I really had to go through a lot of the older styles and try to write pieces in those styles and to sort of understand choral works or how a Mozart sonata works, and so it forced me to investigate that music. Even though initially, I just took it for granted, the more I got into it, the more I became into it. I was really into gospel music, just any type of music that had either a strong emotional in it, but also had interesting structure, interesting architecture.


FJ: I am curious as to how a classically trained pianist gets into Trane.

URI CAINE: Well, I think it he was risking alienation and still he was going further and further in his explorations and you get a really strong feeling of somebody with a spiritual path and trying to find release through music. I liked that idea. I think he exemplified that. Also, his music, in terms of where he took what he started from and where he took it. It always seemed like this really towering achievement. It was so passionate, the way he played, and I was really attracted to that.


FJ: Do you find yourself on a spiritual path, much like Coltrane was?

URI CAINE: I do, but I would not compare myself to him. But in the sense that, yeah, there is a certain obsession for music that is really just a metaphor of drowning yourself in something in order to see what happens. Also, music is a lot of fun to play and to talk about and to think about and that is why so many people are drawn into the whole vortex of it. But in terms of something that I think about a lot and care about, yeah, I'm definitely into that.


FJ: When did you venture into New York?

URI CAINE: The late Eighties.


FJ: What was the climate for creative improvised music at the time and how have you seen it ebb and flow over the past decade?

URI CAINE: There is always this idea that there are somehow these separate scenes. There is a downtown scene. There's an uptown scene. There is sort of this young lions scene, which I guess was sort of pretty important in a lot of people's minds then. For me, it was again, it was never a question of these ideologies. It was more a question of, first of all, the practical aspect of how do you get started. How do you gain a foothold? It was really, for me, a lot of scuffling. I started playing with Don Byron in 1990, which is an association I still have and in a way, took me into a lot of different types of music that he was playing as well as starting to play with a lot of different schools in New York. At the same time, I was playing with people like Buddy DeFranco and Terry Gibbs. I was also playing with Sam Rivers and Barry Altschul. So, again, it was like one of those things where somebody could say, "How can you deal with both?" And the thing was, since I knew where that music was coming from, it was no problem for me because I had played all that type of music before and wanted that type of variety. It was very gradual. I was playing a lot at a place where they would have this really late night jam sessions and I was meeting a lot of horn players that way. I started also playing with other guys like Dave Douglas and a lot of the people that people now think of as the downtown scene around the Knitting Factory because in a way, that was the only place that we could play if we were playing improvised music that wasn't totally straight ahead. There weren't that many clubs in New York. There still aren't that many clubs in New York that really have that type of music. In retrospect, I can say that I was part of that as well. I made my first record for JMT, I recorded it in '92 with a lot of the people in Don's group, Ralph Peterson and Kenny Davis. I was playing with Gary Thomas on there and Graham Haynes. I guess I was playing with some of the guys that were supposedly part of that M-Base thing. In reality, I think that it is a lot more fluid than that. I think that a lot of musicians have a lot of different types of associations and it is not to say that there aren't these different styles, but I think it's a lot more complicated than that and for me, I find that I end up playing with people from a lot of these different schools just because we want to play together. It's not so rigid.


FJ: It isn't cookie cutter jazz.

URI CAINE: Yeah, I think that like most things, it is more complicated than it seems.


FJ: Let's touch on your association with Don Byron.

URI CAINE: He's a great musician. I think that he has an openness and a curiosity about a lot of stuff. For me, it is always funny that I started playing klezmer music with him. I'm Jewish and supposedly it is part of my background and I never really played it. I heard it, but I wasn't really into it. I started playing it with his group. I know he's into a lot of types of music like early Duke Ellington and a lot of the swing music, as well as a lot of other types of stuff, Stravinsky, so we sort of have that in common that we are really sort of interested in a lot of these different types of things. I think that type of openness and desire to pursue stuff that wouldn't be expected makes working with him fun. It leads to a lot of variety. Some of his groups might be more in like the Bug Music, Duke Ellington vibe, so I play a certain way that way. If we are playing in a group like Existential Dred, which is much more like a funk-rock driven type of thing with poets. That is a different feeling. I've also played in groups playing straight ahead, twentieth century contemporary music, so that is a different thing. Throughout all those different projects, there is this feeling that we are going for something and to me, it is interesting.


FJ: Your association with JMT, led to your continued involvement with Winter & Winter, where you recorded the Mahler project, Primal Light.

URI CAINE: That was recorded in '96. It came about because I had gotten on JMT during the last couple of years of its existence, already when it was being subsumed by Polygram. So I guess when it became clear that that was going to end, mostly because they shut it down and Stefan (Stefan Winter) started a new label. Projects like what I have been doing on Winter & Winter sort of became more possible because there wasn't this overhang of the corporate, you have to make a record that somehow can be sold and dealing with that whole issue of what it means to make something that a record company executive thinks will sell. It came about really when I was mixing the second record I made for him called Toys, which had this Latin piece on it, where one of the bass lines was a quote from Mahler's first symphony. When I mentioned that to Stefan Winter, he told me he had just made a television film about Mahler, which was with no words, just images from Mahler's life and places that he had worked and there was a Knitting Factory celebration of JMT, which had many of the artists on JMT performing with their groups and this was going to be one of the projects. He asked me to put together a live group, playing together to that movie. So after that happened, I decided to sort of expand it. That was how that first record was made. It was basically an expansion of that initial concert, where I took Mahler's music and sort of rearranged it or re-imagined it and using a lot of musicians who I was already playing with in New York as sort of a way to reinterpret his music. So that was the genesis of that. It was sort of a different direction for me, but again, it was something that I had always, I had been listening to Mahler since I was fifteen and then studied his scores. I was sort of interested in seeing how a group of improvisers could reinterpret music that was being perceived as being one genre.


FJ: You used the services of DJ Olive, do you see the turntables as an instrument?

URI CAINE: Of course, I think it's a, whether or not, when you say that word, instrument, it's of the same type of instrument as a violin or whatever, it maybe it maybe not, but the point is, the effect that I liked that it produces is dislocation. For instance, in that project, if we are playing Mahler and then the DJ brings in his own version of Mahler, that counterpoint can be really beautiful. I'm just really into that music. I think that I'm not so hung up on how it's produced or whether or not this instrument or that instrument is producing it. I guess for my point of view, all these things are machines on some level and so they're used to express music, it's fine.


FJ: You have taken the Mahler ensemble on the road and the Mahler in Toblach reflects that.

URI CAINE: Initially, again, I think there were certain promoters that were saying that it was too many people and it's too weird, but we have been playing it a lot, especially in Europe for the past two years.


FJ: And the audience response?

URI CAINE: It has been very good. Of course, there are people that don't like it and people that are offended, but when we played in Salzburg last summer, I think it was an emotional response. I just think that there are certain concerts that really standout in my mind with people who are ready for it. In a sense, it just intensified that music for them, but it's not universally accepted. I'm sure a lot of people have problems with it for many reasons.


FJ: What are some of those reasons?

URI CAINE: I think it's either that Mahler already did what he did. There is no need or reason and it's almost like an arrogance to do that to his music, which is sort of ironic because Mahler throughout his life was accused of doing the same thing. He was adding trombones to Beethoven symphonies and justifying it by saying that if he was alive today with these new instruments, he would have used them and I'm just rewriting it because I want it to sound more powerful. I think a lot of people have problems with improvisation, with jazz improvisation, specifically, if they are based in classical music. I think a lot of jazz people have problems with playing classical music and all this business of diluting music by trying to match them or mismatch them that you end up doing neither. With all those risks inherent in it, I still, I think it can work. I'm coming from it from the point of view of a jazz musician, in the sense that we are taking a text, just like we would take an Irving Berlin song or a George Gershwin song or even now a Herbie Hancock song or a Wayne Shorter song and improvising with it. What that means is that you are transforming it. I mean, Irving Berlin did not like Billie Holiday was singing his songs, but in a sense, those interpretations of those songs immortalized those songs. I know a lot of the times there is a lot of ambiguity on how all these things work and for me, I'm looking at it from a selfish point of view as a musician playing in groups a lot. I want to play this great music, but also use it as a springboard for improvisation and get to set up a group process where we are playing these pieces almost like a Mahler symphony because that is how we play it. We play like a ninety minute, sometimes even longer, just a continuous version to give this feeling of this grand piece, which is going through all these different moods.


FJ: And the future?

URI CAINE: I have a lot of stuff coming up with this CD I made based on Bach's Goldberg Variations. It is taking the idea of the variations and have the greatest amount of contrasts between short pieces, but have it all be unified by a centralized theme, which is what all the great variations did. So I chose the Goldberg Variations because I was always deeply influenced by Glenn Gould when I first heard him playing that piece. The Goldberg Variations themselves are sort of this compendium of Bach. He wrote it at the end of his life and he's dealing with a lot of different national styles with dances and he even has drinking songs at the end, which he combines and he has canons at all the intervals. In a way, I just took all those things and played the variations in many different arrangements from a baroque group to a choir to solo piano to even electronics to having sort of a drum and bass feel to it, to also writing thirty or forty variations, but instead of Bach writing, I might put in a mambo or a tango and also have a lot of pieces that refer to Bach's music, chorals and solo cello pieces and also tributes to other composers and their styles. All these pieces are based on the harmony of the original theme.


FJ: And the release date?

URI CAINE: That is due out in Europe probably in a month and in the United States at the end of the summer.


FJ: Do you think there will be a time where you will have reached a pinnacle as an artist?

URI CAINE: No, because I don't know if you can ever say that. It sounds like a cliché, but as soon as you do something, again, it is that Coltrane thing. You are never satisfied with whatever you do. It's hard.


FJ: It seems like a lot of perpetual angst.

URI CAINE: But it isn't. I'm not like a writer that has to sit in his room for two years to write a book. We get a chance to play and to travel and the art form itself is a very interactive one. At its best, if the groups are really interesting, it is not necessarily lonely, but you are right, you are never really satisfied because things could always be better. At some point you have to say that the record is done or the piece is finished, but then you hear it and then you say that you should have done this. I definitely feel that about a lot of the stuff that I have done, but I know that that is the nature of it and even my own reaction to it changes and so I tend to accept that and tend to not worry about it so much. Learn from your mistakes and keep on going.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and never made it past the fastest fingered question. Comments? Email Him.