April 28, 2008
I am pleased to announce that LACO’s Composer-in-Residence Uri Caine will be performing in the Los Angeles area in the near future. He will be playing solo piano at Amoeba Records, 6400 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood on Wednesday evening, May 7th, at 7:00 PM. As you may remember, Caine composed the remarkable “Concerto for Two Pianos and Chamber Orchestra,” commissioned by Sound Investment and premiered by LACO in May 2006, featuring duo pianists Caine and LACO’s Music Director Jeffrey Kahane.
Born in Philadelphia, Caine studied piano with Bernard Peiffer and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied composition with George Rochberg and George Crumb. At the same time, he was receiving a priceless jazz education, playing in the bands of such Philadelphia luminaries as drummers Philly Joe Jones and Mickey Roker, saxophonists Hank Mobley, Odean Pope, Robert “Bootsie” Barnes, and Grover Washington, Jr., trumpeter Johnny Coles, and bassist Jymie Merritt, among others. Since moving to New York City, Caine has recorded eighteen albums as a leader. His most recent, released on the Winter and Winter label in 2007, is The Classical Variations. He has recorded CDs featuring his jazz trio (such as Live at the Village Vanguard in 2004), his Bedrock Trio (Shelf-Life in 2005 and Bedrock in 2006), and his ensemble, performing arrangements of Mahler, Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Schumann, and Mozart.
Caine is much in demand throughout the country and in Europe, receiving commissions and grants, premiering works, and performing at jazz and classical festivals, for instance, in Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Israel.
I recently had the opportunity to speak at some length with Uri Caine, and I’m delighted to share that conversation with you:
Bob: I know you have recently returned from Europe, Uri; in fact, you appeared with LACO during their recent triumphal tour on the continent. I can’t imagine how busy your schedule must be, and I’m most grateful to you for spending this time with us here in The Stream.
But let’s “jump right in” (pun intended): I’m curious to know how you got interested in music. I know that your father, a professor at Temple Law School, was not a professional musician. Were there other musicians in your family? Where did your interest in music come from?
Uri: Well, my cousin actually was a pianist—I was younger than he—and he went to Juilliard. When I was young, he would come to our house in the summer to practice. He practiced Brahm’s 2nd Piano Concerto for eight hours a day. This made a strong impression on me and I admired him. But my parents played a lot of music in the house. They played classical music, and my mother was into the Beatles, the music from Hair, and Aretha Franklin—the pop music of the day. My parents were also trying to speak Hebrew to us, so a lot of the music we heard was Israeli music, music from Morocco, Sephardic music that also had that function of helping us to learn Hebrew.
Bob: When did you begin lessons?
Uri: I started taking piano lessons when I was about seven or eight years old with a woman who lived in our neighborhood. I would say I was mildly into it; I was not as interested as, say, playing sports with kids on our block. But then I started to hear records of jazz, as well as the classical music around our house, and also to hear musicians in jazz clubs which really started to pique my interest. I asked my mother if I could switch piano teachers, so that I could start studying with a man named Bernard Peiffer. He was a French musician living in Philadelphia, an incredible virtuoso; in fact, you can get some CDs of his which have recently come out. He grew up playing classical music but then went to Paris and was influenced by the music of the Hot Club of France. He had to leave Europe as World War II was closing in and ended up coming to the United States and then to Philadelphia.
Bob: How old were you when you started hearing musicians in clubs?
Uri: My parents would take us to coffee houses when I was real young. They were getting involved in politics; my father was a legal advocate, and he became head of the ACLU in Philadelphia. In fact, my parents went to Woodstock and left my sister and me home (when we were old enough to have gone ourselves!)
Earlier on, there was a place near Philadelphia called the “Main Point” where people like Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder would appear; that was in the ’60s. There were a lot of jazz clubs and places to hear music in Philadelphia then. It wasn’t until later when I got more into jazz that I realized that some of the musicians I was seeing were the same ones that were playing on the records I was listening to.
Meeting Bernard, and the coterie of others who were studying with him, was a powerful experience for me. I studied with him until he passed away when I was 17. Those four years were really important.
Also, I started playing with other people my age that I knew in school. We had a group of kids, 14 or 15 years old; we were really into rehearsing. I don’t know how we sounded, but there were places for us to play. There was a place called “Togetherness House,” that was a popular meeting place in 1969.
There were a lot of older musicians playing in Philadelphia; it was a very vibrant music scene. I remember hearing Philly Joe Jones play, and Mickey Roker, and Hank Mobley… And, there were a lot of musicians coming through Philadelphia, because it was so close to New York.
Bob: What about your teacher? Was he supportive of all your extra-curricular activity?
Uri: Yes, but Bernard Peiffer was a very demanding teacher. He wasn’t just talking about practicing; he said you really have to think about what it means to be a musician, to learn about music history, jazz history, to start reading books. You have to learn to play with older people, with younger people, and you have to think about making choices. He was an open, wonderful man.
Bob: So you studied with him through high school?
Uri: Peiffer suggested that I leave high school a year early so that I could just practice music. He emphasized practicing in a lot of different ways. I started studying also with a composer named George Rochberg, who was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, he was one of the very important American composers writing serial music. Then he had a change of heart, especially after his son died, and he started writing music that was tonal and that had quotations from tonal music. (In the ‘70s, it was considered heretical for an academic composer to be writing music that borrowed from a lot of different types of styles.)
Rochberg was a wonderful teacher. I told him when I first met him, “I really want to study how to write 12-tone music; I love Arnold Schoenberg, and I want to learn all the secrets of his music.” And he said, “I can teach you, but you have to submit to the discipline of writing music imitating older models.” We also studied Webern and Berg. He began by having me imitate Bach chorales, Mozart sonatas, Chopin preludes, and also songs in the style of Schumann. Initially I thought these exercises were academic, but once I started to work on them, I got excited. I realized that I can learn a lot from this music, and that this will help me with my jazz playing, which was my priority then.
Our interview with Uri Caine will continue in our next installment.