April 30, 2008
We’re continuing our interview with LACO’s Composer-in-Residence Uri Caine, who will be performing on solo piano at Amoeba Records, 6400 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood on Wednesday evening, May 7th, at 7:00 PM.
Bob: So, as a teenager, you were studying piano with Bernard Peiffer, and composition with George Rochberg, but you were focused on how your studies could help you be a better jazz musician.
Uri: Yes, I was. Rochberg was a musical mentor to me. He took me to his studio recording sessions, to turn pages as he played the piano, for instance. He was writing a lot of string quartets for a group called the Concord String Quartet (a group that doesn’t exist now). They were not from Philadelphia, but George and Gene, his wife, opened their home when they were working on his music, and I saw the intensity they brought to bear when they played and rehearsed. So, as a young person, I was checking out a lot of great role models.
Bob: What a great opportunity for you to have had…
Uri: This is the point at which I began studying piano with some of the teachers that Rochberg recommended. He had been a student at Curtis, so I started studying with a really great, kindly teacher there, Vladimir Sokoloff.
And I had other important musical experiences: I went to Interlochen Music Camp, and as a 15-year-old kid from the East Coast, this was my first contact with Midwestern music culture. It was very different from the way I was dealing with my music in Philadelphia, but I just tried to drink in all the music that I heard that summer, and the people that I met. While I was at Interlochen I met [LACO concertmaster] Margaret Batjer for the first time. I was very happy to see Margaret again and to meet her husband, Joel McNeely, who conducted the Double Piano Concerto that I wrote for Jeff Kahane and LACO in 2006, and the Three Mosaics in 2007.
I ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania in order to keep on studying with George Rochberg. I also got to study with another composer there, George Crumb, who was really a great teacher. That’s when I really jumped into the music world that was happening in Philadelphia. I played with some of the jazz musicians that had been my idols when I was growing up, people like Philly Joe [Jones], Mickey Roker, and these other groups that were happening. There was a saxophone player named “Bootsie” Barnes with whom I played a lot. We just played everywhere. I met many musicians that were coming from New York, older musicians that told me about Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and what it was like to be in Philadelphia in those days—days that I missed, basically.
But I had a lot of good experiences at the University of Pennsylvania besides just studying. My job at the university was to be the pianist for the choir. So three days a week, I would play Bach and other composers, with the choir singing away…
Bob: That exposed you to a wonderful repertoire of music!
Uri: Yeah; I was so happy just to be immersed in that world. I couldn’t get enough of it.
Bob: Your lessons were primarily classical during this time, I presume, although your teachers were expansive enough to be supportive of what you were doing in jazz?
Uri: I would say that Peiffer was the type of teacher that, when a student said, “I want to learn to improvise, I want to learn how to play,” he would say, “OK, I can show you that, but you have to practice Bach for this much time a day; you have to play scales in every key, symmetrical scales..” And then, also, he was the one who said, “Start checking out contemporary music; you haven’t heard Stravinsky? Come on! You have to hear this, start buying scores, etc.” But a lot of times, when I would bring in a composition I was writing, he would spend forty minutes going over four measures, showing me different chords; “You can do this, you can do that…”
We talked about jazz improvisation, but the way people taught improvisation back then was not as structured as the approach to jazz in schools today. Although one thing that Peiffer did emphasize: he told us to get these tape recorders that we could turn down so they would slow down an octave, so that we could transcribe jazz solos. So we spent a lot of our youth listening to jazz that was going “Rowr, rowr, rowr…” [laughter] Now there’s a thing you can buy—I have it on my computer—where you can slow down the speed without changing the pitch.
Out of school, I would get together with people my own age, and I was always learning something new. I could see that some musicians were playing certain repertoire, some were into different genres, some were playing electronic instruments, some were dealing with funk music that’s not really coming out of the straight-ahead jazz tradition… There was a whole lot of variety out there. Rather than, “What is the proper way?” my thing was, “I’m going to try to absorb as much as I can and see what works for me.” It’s always that way: you’re sort of absorbing from the past, but you’re picking things up from the present.
Again, our conversation with Uri Caine will continue in the next installment.