May 01, 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: I don’t think you could buy a better education than you had.
Uri: Rochberg and Peiffer were wonderful teachers with strong personalities and opinions. I am not sure that I totally agree with the method of teaching by imitating classical models, but when I was a teenager, it liberated me in a certain way. I remember the first time I went to Interlochen, at a composer’s conference, someone laughed and said, “Oh, you actually write TONAL music? You’re playing TONAL music?” For a lot of people then, atonal music represented the be-all and end-all of contemporary music, and I was also a passionate devotee of this music. But I also loved jazz, Frank Zappa, salsa, and a lot of other music with groove and tonality. It wasn’t like this present era; there are so many strands and strains of music that coexist today.
The teachers at Penn had their own opinions, and certainly, composers who taught there, like George Crumb and Richard Wernick, were very open-minded. I am not sure they approved of the jazz I was playing, but it wasn’t an issue, because Penn didn’t have a jazz department then.
Bob: So, what came next?
Uri: After I graduated from college, I stayed in Philadelphia, probably longer than I intended to originally, because I was playing so much; I was happy there. But I thought perhaps I should try going to New York to live. I had tried living in several different places. And then at one point, I thought, “Go to New York.” This was in the early ‘80s.
I scuffled around in New York—it was hard to find a place to live, in 1985, I guess it was…
Bob: You were how old at that time?
Uri: I was 28.
Bob: OK. So, you were in Philadelphia after college, let’s see, five or six years…
Uri: Right, but not the whole time. I went to Israel and was surprised that I could support myself as a musician there, and was surprised at the life I found there, but that was for less than a year. I played on some Caribbean islands for a half a year or so—this initially was interesting.
Bob: So then you said, “No, I’ve got to find out whether I can do it in New York.” So it’s 1985, and you’re in New York, and you’re 28, and you’re scuffling…
Uri: I really had to begin again. I knew people in New York, and I was familiar with the city. Still, in the beginning, it was hard. So I played in places for the door and went to people’s houses to rehearse, even without a gig. We were just trying to get things together. That was my life in New York. Of course, I met many people who are still important in my life, musicians, people that I play with, and I heard a lot of music.
It was a time when there was contrast between the more “straight-ahead,” young-lion school, as exemplified by people like Wynton Marsalis, who were really coming into their own, with the more “down-town” type of sensibility, where it was improvised music, but it wasn’t necessarily straight-ahead jazz. It was based more at places like the Knitting Factory, art galleries, places that didn’t function as music clubs, but places where people would come to hear music and play music. I found myself in that scene, too. I was also playing at the Village Gate until 4 in the morning, or at a club called Augies, with a rhythm section. I met many other musicians…
I guess around the late-‘80s – early -‘90s, I had been playing with musicians like Don Byron, Dave Douglas, and they were getting better known.
Bob: Sure; I know of them both, Byron on reeds and Douglas on trumpet.
Uri: Playing with them in Europe broadened my perspective.
Bob: In what way?
Uri: Well, it became obvious that music was happening in places that had nothing to do with Philadelphia or New York. One could stay in Italy and play, because people are so into the music; or in Germany, where there are so many jazz clubs.
Making my first recordings was a definite turning point. In 1992 Sphere Music, my first CD, was picked up by Stefan Winter, who had a company named Jazz Music Today (JMT). He was based in Munich, but he recorded a lot of “down-town musicians” of the time, as well as people who would be affiliated with M-Base*: Steve Coleman, Greg Osby and Gary Thomas. Stefan was a very forward-looking guy; I made two CDs with that record company. JMT was being distributed through Polygram and Verve, and they decided the music was too avant garde, so they basically took the record company he started away from him and closed him down.
Bob: Wow…!
Uri: So Stefan started a new company called ¬Winter and Winter. He asked some of the people who were on his former label to stay with him, since things were in turmoil. The one thing he said is that he would not try to function within these corporate record company rules.
The first recording I did with his new label was the Mahler project, Urlicht – Primal Light. And that was another turning point for me, because it took my music out of just the jazz world and opened it up to a much wider audience. People tend to associate us with the “jazz world,” despite the fact that many different styles of jazz coexist at any given time, and many of us play music that involves many elements of contemporary music that are not exclusively jazz. But, in my case, this record actually led to gigs at Mahler festivals, the Salzburg festival, and other festivals. Even though we might still have been perceived as improvising musicians from New York, or jazz musicians, this broader acceptance put the music in a different context. Although that was not something I was seeking; it just happened.
I continued making recordings that would be considered more straight-ahead jazz, but I alternated them with improvisations based on classical works. I recorded a version of the Goldberg Variations next, and I started to tour with the groups with whom I had recorded. Paradoxically, it also enhanced what was happening for me in New York. People in New York would say, “I heard that you played at this festival in Germany.” And I was thinking, “Hey, I’ve lived here for ten years, looking up at your window, asking, ‘Can I get a gig here?’ and all of a sudden, you tell me you heard about me from someone else!” But I see that that’s the way life works…
Our interview with Uri Caine will continue in our fourth installment.
*M-Base (short for “macro-basic array of structured extemporization”) is a construct for creating modern music which reached its peak in the mid-to-late-‘80s and early ‘90s. It is sometimes called a type of jazz, but this is not strictly accurate; participants do not view M-Base in this manner. The word is also used to refer to a collective of musicians, poets and dancers who were associated with the movement. Some of its main proponents were saxophonists Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, and Gary Thomas, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and trombonist Robin Eubanks, all of whom are all still actively performing and recording.