Caine doesn’t let music genres become barriers
Uri Caine is the kind of talent that isn’t concerned with the boundaries genre classification puts on art.
For decades, the New York Citybased musician has lent his chops to everything from classical music to some of the most outside jazz sounds around. Over his 30 albums as a leader, he’s even managed to mash up genres to produce such recordings as his 1997 jazz tribute to German composer Gustav Mahler.
The album, which won an award from the German Mahler Society, left some on the jury aghast as it didn’t stick to convention.
This very open- mindedness is what brings Caine to town to kick off Vancouver New Music’s Parallels concert series in a program that includes the composer performing his original works and improvising with a string quartet as well as working with the eight- member Vancouver Electronic Ensemble in a piece featuring acoustic piano, string quartet and the group’s exploratory electronics.
It’s a far cry from his Philadelphia roots where he worked in traditional jazz and rhythm and blues bands. His release titled The Philadelphia Experiment with Roots drummer Ahmir ( Questlove) Thompson and bassist Christian McBride captures this era in a melange of funk, jazz and hip- hop tracks.
“When I was growing up I was working a lot, playing mostly straight- ahead jazz, but also with other musicians in other scenes around the city, which was really active at the time,” said Caine. “That meant I learned about how to play many different types of music and that had a permanent effect on my own work from high school onward.”
Caine began playing piano at age seven and, at age 12, studied with French jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer. At the University of Pennsylvania, he was exposed to the avant- garde classical compositions of professor George Crumb ( Black Angels, Makrokosmos), which clearly influenced his future pursuits in classical music. He says his interest in the work of Mozart, Mahler and others originated with exposure to their brilliance at a young age in classical piano studies. That appreciation veered into the improvisations of the masterworks that he is so well known for performing.
“It wasn’t my intention to necessarily do jazz interpretations of their work, but the material was there,” he said.
“When we toured the Mahler as a group, the music started going in a lot of different places and I began to see it as another vehicle for improvisation taking those rich harmonies and initial structures somewhere else. ”
He expands on the challenge of taking something as dynamic, rich and structured as Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or Bach’s Goldberg Variations and shifting it toward something entirely different.
“Improvising while that music is happening isn’t as free a thing as it would be if you just sat down and played for 20 minutes and saw where it went,” he said. “When you have all that Beethoven coming at you, you have to figure out where and when to go in or go out and it is certainly more structured. It can go both ways as sometimes there can be too much freedom and other times there isn’t enough.”
And other times, the purpose of the music may be to tell a story as in the fantastic Caine project The Sidewalks of New York: Tin Pan Alley. The 1999 album on Winter & Winter Records is billed as an AudioFilm. The label has released a number of these records, ranging from Vienna salons to pre- Second World War Shanghai. All of them showcase diligent research.
“I knew a little bit about the history of the era’s music because we play some of it, but as I went through the archives at the Museum of New York City and read books about how the music business was structured and how a lot of the things we take for granted were formed, I came to new understandings,” he said. “The way the music of African- American, Jewish, Irish and other immigrants all came together in this musical expression of something that was American pop proved really interesting to me to put together.”
For his Vancouver concert, some of the music is selected from the string quartets he recorded on his Twelve Caprices album.
“With the Electronic Ensemble, I’m thinking of bringing in something that could possibly be a template for us to work from for at least one of the pieces,” he said. “When we sit down before the show to get to know each other musically, we may find ourselves creating something that we can write down and try to compose or tighten up and organize into a format where it starts with those two musicians and then so and so comes in. Sometimes, coming into a situation like this can be best if you just let it happen and, frankly, other times you need to have the composer take the lead for it to work.”
Unlike some outside improvisers, the pianist’s recordings often reflect that “composer in control” quality, where the tunes can be shorter and more succinct. On his latest trio release, titled Calibrated Thickness, the group with Caine, bassist Mark Helias and drummer Clarence Penn swings hard and rarely jumps off script. But you can tell how a tune clocking in under three minutes such as Submission could be a far longer listen in a live setting.
For those interested in seeing how the Uri Caine + Ensemble project comes together, Vancouver New Music is allowing people to attend two days of rehearsals on Nov. 23 and 24 from 6 to 10 p. m. Attendees are asked to register in advance at newmusic. org.