Meet Uri Caine
By Vic Schermer
Uri Caine is both a pre-eminent "straight ahead" jazz pianist and a "cutting edge" innovative pianist, musician, and composer who is not afraid to experiment with new forms. Utilizing instrumentalists, vocalists, dj's, assorted street sounds, digital recording effects, and, on one CD, his mother, Shulamith, reading one of her poems - in other words whatever helps get the sound and intention he is looking for!- Uri makes well-disciplined and well-thought-out music imbued with musical history, that cuts across all categories, encompassing jazz, classical, synthesizer, ethnic and religious music, etc. In essence, Uri uses a variety of classical and jazz forms to create sound experiences for his musicians and listeners which are alternately tender, moving, passionate, delicate, stimulating, challenging, and disturbing. Winning the International Mahler Competition for his groundbreaking recording, "Primal Light," based on the music of Gustav Mahler, surprised everyone in the music world and put Uri in the limelight as a key musical innovator at the turn of this century and the New Milennium.
Uri grew up in Philadelphia and started his musical career as a jazz pianist there. He had both classical and jazz training in Philadelphia, and studied classical composition with George Rochberg and George Crumb. In the late 1980's he moved to New York City, where he currently lives with his wife, Jan Galperin, who is a sculptor. He has been involved with the innovative developments at the Knitting Factory in the SoHo section of Manhattan, and performs in New York, Philadelphia, and around the world in a rapid-fire schedule of club dates, concerts, and recording dates.
It is my impression- and it is only one man's opinion- that Uri is trying, whether consciously or unconsciously, to recapitulate the history of music by going back to its roots and its essence. Consider that, at the dawn of human history, music most likely started with combinations of sounds, partly human and partly from nature. The rustle of trees might combine with a bird call and someone's shout to create a feeling of something mystical or magical, rhythmical and flowing, like a kind of synthesized hallucination or presence. Gradually instruments like drums and flutes evolved, then ensembles. Only in recent epochs have specific musical forms and styles developed: solos, orchestral pieces, dances, liturgical music, diatonic scale, serial composition, etc. Still, at it core, music remains the use of a variety of sounds (and the silence within and between the sounds) to convey an idea, an image, a feeling. Innovative musicians see the potential in the simplest sounds. Thus Beethoven created intensity by repetition. Miles Davis found that he could vastly expand the range of jazz expression with a straight mute and modal composition. Uri Caine brings in synthesizers, DJ's, classical themes, folk themes, the voice of a Jewish cantor, street sounds, etc. to create new musical experiences. In his pieces, street noises may comingle with an old song, a Bach motif may be interrupted by a synthesized voice, a Mahler theme may be played as "straight ahead" jazz.
In this way, Uri is reconstructing music from the ground up. Respectful to all genres, he nonetheless questions and challenges each one.
But then, you have to hear Uri's music to believe it! Buy his recordings or go to one of his gigs for an unforgettable musical experience.
I had the privilege of interviewing Uri at my office on Rittenhouse Square on a Saturday at the end of September, as he was on his way to Ortlieb's Jazzhaus to perform with a small group of his friends headed by tenor saxophonist, Larry McKenna. Uri introduced himself in a warm, friendly, and gentlemanly manner, and then seemed to relax completely as he shot out interesting recollections and stimulating ideas which at times, were almost mesmerizing.
If you've got some time, read the whole interview. You won't regret it.
Here, in virtually its entirety, transcribed from a recording, is the interview with Uri.
PERSONAL AND MUSICAL BACKGROUND
VIC: First, Uri, I'd like to ask about your background. I understand that your father is a lawyer and your mother is a poet?
URI: My father was a lawyer and now teaches at Temple Law School. My mother is a poet and teaches at Drexel. One of the distinctive things about my family was that we were all into speaking Hebrew: myself, all my brothers and sisters. For my father and mother, who were both Americans, for them to be teaching kids Hebrew in such an intense way- I really think they wanted us to move to Israel at some point. I remember even kids in my neighborhood who would come to visit us and weren't Jewish, they would be speaking Hebrew in our house, because my father was such a fanatic about it [laughter]. I grew up going through the cultural- not the religious- Jewish schools. I went to Solomon Schecter, which at that point basically taught Hebrew culture, and then I went to Akiba, a high school in that same vein. All of this influenced me musically, in that what I was hearing at home was a lot of Israeli music from Iraq, Bagdad, Yemen, that was Hebrew and reflected the fact that a lot of those Jews had immigrated to Israel in the fifties and were changing the other aspect of the European Israel. At the same time I also remember singing around the table on Friday night, and learning many Israeli folk songs. When I think back about that, and my earliest musical experiences, they have a lot to do with that type of community. I remember hearing the cantors sing in the synagogue on the high holy days, the very emotional prayers, and seeing how the older people were reacting to that. So, that was one aspect.
BERNARD PEIFFER
I started taking piano lessons because my mother played a little bit. I started lessons with a woman in the neighborhood. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I heard about Bernard Peiffer [pron. Pay-FAIR'- eds.], who was a French pianist living in Philadelphia. I was starting to listen to jazz, mostly through my uncle, who gave me Miles Davis' recording, "'Round Midnight" and John Coltrane's "Crescent." When I first heard those, I knew it was something heavy, I knew it was something I wanted to delve into, so I switched teachers and started with Bernard. He used to come to our house. That definitely started my path towards what I'm doing now.
VIC: Several of you Philadelphia jazz pianists were profoundly influenced by Bernard.
URI: Bernard was tremendously charismatic, but very demanding as a teacher. He drove a red Mustang, and dressed very cool, and had a very funny manner. But when it came to music, he was totally serious. If people weren't prepared for the lesson, he would just stop and tell them to go home! One thing that he told me that made a strong impression was that "If you think I'm not going to make you practice classical music, you're wrong- that's the way you're going to get your technique together."
VIC: What is it in particular that Bernard gave his jazz piano proteges?
URI: A lot of it has to do with attitude. You're looking for role models. For me, he was very sophisticated, very emotional, very open. Also, you could go hear him play. It was a pilgrimage. All the students would go and hang out at his gigs, for example at the [now defunct- eds.] Borgia Tea Room. It made what we were studying very real. That if you kept on working at it, you could reach that level.
VIC: Did he have a particular way of teaching jazz?
URI: He would encourage me, for instance, to write, and then I would bring in pieces, and he would really work on it! He would say, "add this note to that chord...OK, play it again..." Very careful chord by chord analysis. I think he was trying to tell me that you have to work at these things, see how it goes, and wait until you're sure you have it right.
VIC: The chord structure is crucial.
URI: He talked a lot about that, he talked about chord voicing and how you could inject different flavors to the chords by adding different notes. He talked a lot about the concepts, how he himself was influenced by Art Tatum, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, things in the sixties. He wasn't staying still, he was dealing with many different influences. In general, he was a tremendous virtuoso, and he also knew a lot about contemporary composers like Messaien and Stravinsky, and that made me start to check them out.
CLASSICAL INFLUENCES: GEORGE ROCHBERG, GEORGE CRUMB, VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF
VIC: In your own recent "Goldberg Variations," based on those of Bach, of course, do you perform some of the classsical "riffs" on the harpsichord?
URI: I played all of those parts.
VIC: You were very much into both classical and jazz even as a teen-ager?
URI: When I was a teenager, I started studying with a composer in Philadelphia named George Rochberg. His thing was to study harmony, counterpoint.
VIC: You were interested in composition even then?
URI: I was. I didn't realize what I was getting myself into. Rochberg was a family acquaintance of my father's, so I went out to see him. He said, "I'm a college professor and usually don't take students this young, but if you submit to what I ask you to do-" I think what he was meaning by that was that many young composers came saying- especially because he was writing a very twelve tone serial modernistic style, very strictly- people came to him to learn to write that type of music, but he said to me "I don't want you to go to that yet, I want you to study music history, Bach chorales: write them." He'd say, "Write four for next week-" Mozart sonatas, Beethoven sonatas, Chopin piano pieces, songs, short orchestra pieces- all these things done as exercises.
VIC: Ernst Levy, a modern composer of European origin who taught at MIT and Brooklyn College, and was a musical genius with an incredible ear, used to emphasize the very basic works like chorales in his teaching.
URI: I did that for Rochberg for about three years. I went to the University of Pennsylcania Music Department to study with him. It was at that time a very academic department- you couldn't get a single credit for playing music!- you were either a musicologist or a composer. For me, it was a good experience in that I was thrust into these two paths. I was playing jazz more and more in Philadelphia and meeting musicians like Philly Joe Jones, Hank Mobley, Mickey Roker, Bootsie Barnes. Playing night after night in many different situations, for example, with singers, bands, quartets, the house trio with celebrities from New York. At the same time, I was at Penn. My job there was to be the pianist for the choir. That was another really good experience. So I was dealing in both the classical and jazz worlds. I wouldn't say that Penn was the most open-minded school about jazz. I think they really wanted the students there to become professors of music.
VIC: Very few musicians are at home in both classical and jazz.
URI: Well, my attitude at Penn was...I heard professors say the most ignorant things about jazz, as if it were a waste of time, and my thing was, "As long as I'm doing your thing, don't ever tell me not to do the other! And by the way, I never see you guys come up to 46th and Walnut to the jazz places. They're three blocks from your school, and you won't set foot in these places where the most amazing music is being played! So don't tell me that!" And I guess they said, "OK! OK!" I had my problems at Penn, and felt very alienated by the time I completed the program. But the van Pelt Libarary at Penn is a tremendous library: they had so much music. One of the tests the department gave at the end of the year was a brutal one in which you had to identify any piece of music from 1500 to the present. Most students spent half a semester just to study all this music. I would just take out hundreds of recordings, and 8-10 hours per day, put on 30 seconds of each piece so I could recognize it. I did this for about five months, and something happened musically for me.
VIC: It's almost as if you can see the influence of that inundating exposure to classical music in your recent work.
URI: At that point, I wasn't visualizing things the way they are now. My dream was to move to New York, to get a gig with Freddie Hubbard's or Art Blakey's group, and just play jazz.
VIC: You studied at Curtis Institute as well as at Penn. Where did Crumb teach?
URI: George Crumb taught composition at Penn. I studied piano with Vladimir Sokoloff at Curtis. Bernard Peiffer died when I was about 18, so I went to study with Sokoloff. He was great, and he was a musician's musician. He was the pianist for the Philadelphia Orchestra. He accompanied the Curtis students at the chamber music concerts. He had an incredible repertoire. When you walked through his house, it was blanketed with music. And he was a kindly, sweet man, just totally drowned in music. All these guys were role models-- they've had to get by professionally, but they all created a world of music that surrounded them.
THE CLASSICAL AND JAZZ "CROSSOVER"
VIC: This classical background must be relevant to the pieces you're putting together these days. In the past, were jazz and classical two different worlds entirely to you, or were you beginning to see a crossover between the two even then?
URI: I would say that, even from that age, I was trying to construct relationships between the two, but also trying not to take anything away from the music. The crossover projects, so to speak, seemed to dilute the music. I was into the most intense expressions of music, so when people would say, "I like Stravinsky," I would reply, "I like late Stravinsky." Most listeners like the "Firebird." It's great, but I'm really into Stravinsky- I went through every piece of his. Recently, I've changed and become much less of a hothead about it. But it's still true that the pieces I love range from "Pulcinella" to "Oedipus Rex" to "Movements for Piano and Orchestra." I like all his periods, because I've learned a lot from how he worked, taking the given material and somehow transforming it through different processes. So I didn't necessarily go out on a Philly Joe Jones gig and say, "I'm going to give them my late Stravinsky stuff here." I was also learning that there are boundaries of style, but as I got older, I grew more confident in my ability to just do as I do. See, like I wasn't trying to play, say, Cecil Taylor style behind Morgana King, if she came to Jewels [then a popular Philadelphia jazz club- eds.], because I knew that wasn't cool...
VIC: You backed up Morgana King?
URI: Sure. I had the opportunity to play with so many in Philly. When Freddie Hubbard or Joe Henderson came, I wanted to be prepared and tried to learn as many of their tunes as I could in case they called them on the gig.
VIC: Briefly, what impact did George Crumb have on you?
URI: I studied with him for about a year. My best memories of him was that he was a very gentle person. He loved to sight read four hand piano, and I could do that. We weren't supposed to do it in a 45 minute lesson, but he would whip out the music, and say, do you feel like sight reading? And I'd say, "Come on, let's go!" So, he would look at my composition for about 5 minutes, and say, "It's good; now let's play."
GUSTAV MAHLER
I also remember a seminar I took with Crumb on Mahler. I had gotten my first Mahler score when I was 15 with Rochberg, who was trying to show me about orchestration, and he picked a Mahler symphony and told me to reduce and transcribe it, etc. A lot of the music that you hear, then don't for a while, then return to it. It's curious how with the music you return to periodically, it's a very psychological thing, how some of what you thought were tremendously far out, doesn't sound that way any more; and other things that you took for granted suddenly have a tremendous meaning and poignancy.
VIC: So Mahler is a composer who has interested you for a long time?
URI: I would say, yes.
VIC: When you listen to Mahler, does he affect you emotionally?
URI: Sure.
PHILLY JAZZ
VIC: In addition to those you've already mentioned, when you look back, who were some of your important musical mentors in Philadelphia?
URI: Beyond the teachers with whom I had a formal relationship, there were so many other musicians whom I admired. Just being around people like Philly Joe (Jones) and Mickey Roker. I love drummers. I'm not sure I can totally agree with those who say that the heart of the music is the drums, but so many of the things I like the best occur when the feeling from the drums and the soloing, and the group thing against the drums is so propulsive yet "locked in." There were others, like Bobby Durham-- I used to play in his trio.
There were different periods, but when I started playing with Bootsie (Barnes) and started playing gigs at a really regular level, 4 or 5 nights a week, my playing really developed. And we played not so much in downtown places but clubs in North Philly where people really reacted to the music. There was a certain musical intensity that I was trying to get to at that period. I started to meet musicians who were older than me, like Charles Fambrough, but more so, the impact of the music that was going on at that time. My role models were Herbie Hancock, the early Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett. Of course I was also obsessed with the ghost of Coltrane as he existed in Philadelphia, and all the people who would tell me about what a fanatic practicer and dedicated musician he was, and the bravery of both him and Miles (Davis) of getting the audience approval, but then saying, "I'm going in this new direction," and the audience saying, "We don't like that..." Both Trane and Miles were seeking this thing. And it was very dangerous in the way they were playing. That was something that was making a strong impression on me.
TAKING RISKS MUSICALLY
VIC: This is an interesting point about going to the edge creatively. It brings to mind your re-doing of the "Goldberg Variations," in the way that you suddenly disrupt a beautiful sounding replication of Bach himself with synthesizer sounds that are very dissonant and disturbing. To me it feels dangerous, risky when you go there. Do you feel that you are taking a risk when you radically contradict Bach, the master, himself?
GOLDBERG VARIATIONS
URI: I know it can be construed as that, but I'm not thinking of that so much at this point in my life in terms that I'm doing that, although I know that in a way- only because I've been told by people that they don't like it, that it touches a nerve. Many people can't deal with it and are against it. But, my thinking about that, especially in terms of the Goldberg Variations has to do with the fact that, if you're talking about variation form, it's also reminiscent of the way jazz players take a theme and then improvise on the same harmonic structure. So there are similarities there, but the point is that the form develops in a different way than sonata form evolves. Instead, it's a theme that's a given, and all the variations of that. So in a sense the game is to make each piece wildly different from the others and to still emphasize that they're all unified by a central adherence to the harmony. Bach himself does that in the "Goldberg Variations." He has pieces that are chromatic right next to really diatonic pieces. He has incredible virtuosic pieces that sound like Scarlatti next to pieces that are very simple to play. He has pieces that refer to national dances like the gigue, and pieces that refer in a comedic way to drinking songs, at the end, which would have been a joke that his listeners would have gotten (at the end of the party, they sing this song, the party breaks up, the piece is over.) He puts a French overture in the middle of it, as if to say, OK, this is the most formal, half-way point of the piece, and he uses dotted rhythms to show that. These are all styles he had been playing with all his life. So in a sense, I thought, why not play the Bach, emphasize certain aspects of the Bach, but then create variations to in a way mirror his technique. So, if he's dealing with a gigue, I can write a mambo!
As long as everything is on the chords, as it is in Bach, then it's fine. If he wants to do this very formal French overture feeling, and I'm thinking formal because I'm watching Kurosawa movies like "Seven Samurai," where the actors [Uri makes an indescribably deep grunt!] are hitting these huge drums, why not put that in with that formality? Why not have a real drunk choir singing drinking songs? The thirtieth variation. But then, there are many other aspects of that piece where I'm taking the harmonic form and giving jazz improvisors a chance to solo on it. And so, in a sense, there's a history of jazz that's embedded in the piece, too. Starting with the Hot Six going to a much freer, open type of playing. There are references to all the other elements of Bach, like PDQ Bach, Switched On Bach, The Swingle Singers, Jacques Loussier, all these types of things that were part of Bach when we grew up. So, I'm just taking the cue "variation" to make it the widest stylistic difference that I can find in two minute pieces, and see how long I can do that- that's the challenge in that piece.
VIC: So, you're thinking more in terms of composition than you are in terms of shock value.
URI: Exactly right. But having said that, I realize that when you say that it's the Goldberg Variations- and this doesn't necessarily apply so much to jazz audiences as to a classical audience- it is of course a shock when a singer stands up and starts to have what they think is an epileptic attack, but that's OK!
VIC: It certainly gets people thinking! But then art and music aren't always supposed to make people comfortable.
URI: I would agree with that. I don't think that musicians necessarily sit down and think, "What is going to make my audience the most uncomfortable- but obviously, there is an element of that in everything that's happening. In every interaction, there's a certain element of that. This is psychological- the audience is expecting a certain thing and doesn't get it, and they feel angry about that. Then they project that onto the composer, as if to say, "HE's upsetting us!" When, forty years later, the same thing might be just "ho hum...." These things change. Anyone who studies music history will see that what seems disturbing to one group, seems normal to the next group.
VIC: Absolutely. Some of Beethoven's contemporary audiences were terrified by his music.
URI: There are so many examples of that.
VIC: It does seem that there's an aspect of your personality where you really do try to push the limits and try new forms and ideas. Have you always been that way?
URI: I think I've had both aspects. There's a part of me that has always tried to fit in, in order to experience that group thing in music, and so much of music is about the group, that in a way you can be an "actor." You know, here I am accompanying the singer. I have my little role to play there. Here I am playing in a quartet. There are all these roles, but the way I'm looking at it is that there are groups of musicians I know who have the same experience that I do, that we can do this. So, it's not a question of trying to find someone to play, let's say, Mahler, like it's Klezmer music, then like a free jazz musican, then like a classical musician, if you happen to know a musician who can do all that! So it's really based on the people that I play with. And imagining in my mind what it would be like to get these people to play this, or get this person to sing on this thing. It's much more a tactile hands-on approach. Earlier, I gave you five of my CD's: one of them is a tribute to New York City's history: "Tin Pan Alley". It's a version of what it would be like to be walking around New York in 1908 and just hearing all these different mixtures of sounds. I'm really interested in the history of New York. I love subjects like the history of cities, of how music works throughout different environments. Then there's the first Mahler CD ("Primal Light"). And "Blue Wail" is the straight ahead jazz trio that I play with.
OTHER WORKS WITH WINTER AND WINTER, LIKE "BLUE WAIL", RICHARD WAGNER IN VENICE, &C.
VIC: The compositions on "Blue Wail" are mostly yours?
URI: They're all mine, except for the first and last.
VIC: "Blue Wail" features the Uri Caine Trio, with James Genus and Ralph Peterson.
URI: I still play a lot of trio gigs, especially in Europe, and what I'm thinking in that group, I'm very wide open, but of course it's coming out of swing. After the Mahler recording, I had an idea. At St. Mark's Square in Venice, they have these groups- a string quartet, a piano, and accordion- and they play everything from light classics to Beatles songs, and the tourists are there, in this very kitschy but beautiful environment, it can be eerie in a way too. But I knew that Wagner loved Venice, and wrote in his diary of sitting at this very cafe that I was sitting in, listening to these same groups. Sometimes, he writes that "They're massacring my music [laughter] and I tell the guy to play faster;" other times, he's eating, and he says the music is very transcendent. Of course back then, he was listening to Austrian martial music. Wagner loved Venice. He lived there and died there, actually. So my idea was, let's update that concept and arrange Wagner for these groups, which is what I did. Of course, these are real tough Italian musicians! They said, "Man, we don't turn pages on our arrangements- you have to have it on two pages, and that's it. [Laughter.] So Stephan Winter brought some friends of mine from New York, like Mark Feldman, over there to play. It's not really an improvisation recording, it's just a performance out in the middle of St. Mark's Square. It's really noisy, you hear the bells. Of course, the engineers did their real sorcery on it too. The recording conditions were very difficult- it was very windy, and so on.
Before I went with Winter and Winter, Stephan Winter had a record company called JMT, Jazz Music Today, and I made two CD's for that label, the first was called "Sphere Music," the second was "Toys." These are more jazz oriented. "Toys" has some Latin stuff with Don Alias as well. It was recorded in 1996.
THE KNITTING FACTORY
VIC: Some of the musicians on your recordings are associated with the Knitting Factory, a very creative venue for jazz and other forms, located, as you know, in New York City's SoHo section. Has the Knitting Factory had a major influence on you?
URI: The place has a history- when I moved to New York in the late '80's, the Knitting Factory was certainly a place where certain projects could be put together that you couldn't do, for example, at the Village Vanguard or Sweet Basil, either because they were perceived as being too far out, or just obscure. The Knitting Factory was very organized about how they grew. I remember them when they were just a performance space on Houston Street. Now they have four theaters, a record company, a branch in L.A., a worldwide touring program. I've always been a part of what's going on there. I made one CD for their record label with a group called Zohar, which is based on Sephardic Jewish music. It's called "Zohar Keter." Keter means "crown" in Hebrew. Zohar is the Jewish mystic book which postulates ten rungs of ascendence to the divinity.
VIC: Kabbalah? [Kabbalah is a source of Jewish mysticism, dating back at least to the Renaissance, currently undergoing a renaissance in America, and very popular in New Age spirituality.- eds.]
URI: It's the origin of the Kabbalah. The highest rung is the crown, Keter. In a sense, that recording is another aspect of some of the stuff in New York that I'm involved in. I've always had a good relationship in New York with the Knitting Factory. I'm not necessarily one of their main exports, because I maintain independence more than some of their other people.
URI'S CREATIVE PROCESS WITH HIS MUSICIANS
VIC: Can you tell us a bit about how you set up a piece? You may mix in a string quartet, a synthesizer, a singer, a poet, your mother was on one cut, DJ's, a piano. Your musicians come from vastly diverse backgrounds. How do you go about organizing this mix? Do you write an entire composition? Do you have sketches?
URI: It depends upon the piece. In general, I would say that there is an organizing principle, whether a particular piece of music, or a set of procedures, or a harmonic sequence, or whatever. And then there's often room for improvisation. Often it's set up so parts that are written go against improvised things. Certain people sometimes are designated as improvisers. In the Bach "Goldberg Variations," two people may play the Bach, and the third person improvises, but then when they hear that the second person is veering off into his improvisation, the others have to jump down and start playing the Bach, so there's always movement between things that are strictly notated and the element of improvisation.
VIC: Presumably, some of the musicians are not accustomed to this process?
URI: I think they are accustomed to it. When I first started expanding beyond the so-called normal jazz aspect, that when you play with DJ's [Uri utilizes DJ's for various effects and musical inputs- eds.], at the Knitting Factory they would have these sort of jam sessions. I was always interested in electronic music and in seeing groups use that in live performance, for example people like Richard Teitelbaum in New York, you realize their ensembles are doing pieces that are moving through a certain form, but that in and around it there is a lot of improvisation. That's the way I wanted to structure the Mahler piece- you have these very long pieces that in a sense provide their own structure or standard, but interwoven through that there should always be a type of "loose element" moving against it that could be in accordance with it, dissonant to it, mirror the emotional contour, be something totally different. Also, when you take groups to perform live- records can be made in different ways and be tinkered with endlessly- you can add, subtract, shorten, expand- but live on a tour, I want to put in opportunities for everybody to get a chance to play. Even if we're playing these "classical" pieces, what makes it different is what we're adding. I like that: it's that element of jazz where people go up there to tell their story, and if someone is having a bad day on the road, you know they're going to play well that night because they have a lot of feeling to express. I was just reading how Duke Ellington would actually start friction between two musicians, and then say, "OK, now you two play a duet," just to see what might happen. Now, I don't want to put anybody against each other like that, but I'm just saying that, as a leader, I'm sensitive to personality and to the individual's wish to perform, and so I don't want to have a group where I'm suppressing that.
VIC: Why do you have reservations about getting musicians to compete?
URI: Because I'm not manipulative, I'm more reactive. I wouldn't take someone and call them out on the road, with all the problems we encounter on the road to begin with- hotels, food, missing family, etc.- to deliberately provoke my musicians.
VIC: The article you read implied that Ellington actually provoked conflicts among his musicians?
URI: It was a review by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times about a concert where Luther Henderson, who was a Broadway arranger, took Duke Ellington and supposedly made a "crossover" project where Simon Rattle conducted the London Symphony Orchestra while jazz soloists played. The reviewer was trying to say that you don't have to do a crossover between jazz and classical for Duke Ellington- he already did that; he's a hybrid between the two. He used this "conflict" example to say that Duke's thing was much more subtle than that. In other words, Duke used psychology in his group, and I think anyone who has been a leader, sees that there is a psychology in the group, especially as you're moving through- sometimes the group becomes very tight knit and starts talking in this code that no one else can understand; this dark road humor; sometimes there's a feeling that "Whoa, man, we're really moving along," it's exciting, people really want to play. Then there are times on the road that you're feeling dejected and lonely, but when it comes time to play, something elevates it. You want to capture that feeling and you can't always do it, so in a way you have to learn this- for me- Zen vibe of just let it happen, but when it starts to move in a certain way, then push that a little. Many people have criticized the live performances in these recordings. They get the records and get into them, then they see it live, and it seems a lot more disorderly in a way, It's not the same thing. And my attitude is, of course it's not the same thing- different people are playing it and the piece itself demands that there be differences. It isn't like classical music, where you get to a certain interpretation and that's it. A jazz musician doesn't see it that way.
VIC: Some of what you're talking about sounds like a parallel to Stanislawski's school of acting.
URI: It is. I like that comparison.
VIC: Just as he encouraged actors to access their own inner feelings and mental states, you do the same, which in a way is part of the history of jazz as well.
URI: Again, I don't want it to sound like I'm being manipulative. I want to say more that we've had experiences that have shocked us. Many musicians have had that.
VIC: The experiences arise spontaneously and aren't deliberately evoked.
URI: It's a mystery. To me, it really started when I was playing the Mahler project, in places that were hallowed Mahler locations, like the festival at the place where he composed, or when we showed up to play at Salzburg, which for us is just a gig, but of course it's one of the most supported music festivals. But they were having this tremendous political battle in Austria, whose president told the head of the Salzburg Festival, who is Belgian, "You are not dealing with the true music!" And everyone said, "What does he mean by that. What do they want to bring back- yodeling, Herbert von Karajan?" But some did think the Festival was going too far out. And so we showed up. And the people were saying, "You have to go out there and play this concert, because you are the reason- there was such an eruption at this concert! We knew that everybody was looking at each other, the people were primed, and of course, at the end, they just wouldn't let us go!
It was intense! And I've had many more experiences like that. Sometimes when we're playing really emotional music, the audience is on the verge of tears. Once when we were asked to play the Mahler Project for the opening of a synagogue in Poland, when it came to the part where the Cantor sings, you could tell that the whole place was just dissolving. It's just to make the point that somehow the situations that we find ourselves in are very intense. This summer, and throughout the year, I've been playing the Bach project. At jazz festivals, we get one reaction. At "new music" festivals, other times in straight Bach festivals, very conservative, and you get the whole gamut of reaction, and in a way it takes you full circle, because you try to "psych out" the reactions of these audiences- and then you realize you can't do that, because it means so much, especially when in pieces like this where you tamper with things that aren't supposed to be tampered with.
VIC: There's a very intense interaction with the audience in these concerts, including the impact of the political climate, both within music and in the whole society.
URI: Very much so. Sometimes it's a good thing, and sometimes it's shallow. For instance, people might give us "license" to "desecrate" "their" music, because somehow we're these New York downtown non-European jazz musicians. They see the visual effect- with the DJ, etc.- it's almost as if you're throwing their thing back in their face but in a totally different manner. It's jarring and sometimes very emotional for them.
MAHLER AND LEONARD BERNSTEIN
VIC: On another level, something similar happened when Bernstein introduced the Vienna Philharmonic to Mahler's symphonies. The musicians had forgotten about his music, and at first panned it, and Bernstein was deeply hurt.
URI: It was even stronger than that! There's a video of this where Bernstein is rehearsing them, and it's not going well, because they're holding back, and he keeps on saying, "More! More emotion!" And then he hears somebody saying, "This is scheisse (shit) music!" And he puts the baton down and cried, "This was your music! You killed this music!" And there's silence because he's implicitly addressing that there's a Jewish feeling in the music, and you've killed it, and now you're calling it "shit music" and you know that there's this tremendous love-hate that's so deep seated in European culture, in how they were dealing with the Holocaust. In many ways, it paralleled the racial situation in the United States. There's tremendous guilt, fascination, and denial at the same of a minority culture that somehow gives meaning to the majority culture- I don't know how else to put it.
VIC: Mahler's music had a Jewish influence?
URI: I wouldn't say and never said that Mahler was a repressed Jewish composer. I think, however, that there is a certain very Jewish aspect to him, especially-- I'm really interested in the culture of Vienna, and how it changed. There's a very nice book called Fin de Siecle Vienna...
VIC: By Carl Schorske.
URI: Yes, he's arguing that people like Mahler and Schoenberg in music, Freud, etc., were all outsiders, Jews, commenting on the majority culture. And only someone like Freud could say to the Viennese, "You're too obtuse or too repressed to see what I'm seeing." In a way, that's simplistic, but there is an element of truth to it, so that there's a lot of nostalgia for the intellectual life in Vienna prior to WWII that is associated with certain aspects of Judaism. But I think Mahler himself was, however, not a Jewish "victim" in his own mind. Mahler was more typical in that he saw himself as coming from a disadvantaged background, but was happy to discard it [Mahler was born a Jew, and converted to Christianity- eds.], especially for the cause of social climbing and achieving his true goal in life, which was to become the head of the Vienna Opera. He didn't really see it as a betrayal of his own people. He might have felt that there was something unfair about what was happening, but I don't get a sense that he was really obsessing about it. But even as a Jew who tried to assimilate- he was still ironically called a "disrupter of German music." That's how the critics judged him. On the one hand, you can say, "I officially assimilate," On the other hand, you can say, that as a composer, one can take on any identity he wishes. And Mahler is one of the first musicians to exploit that idea of Freud that we have all these changing viewpoints- that it's not neurotic to say "I'm happy; now I'm cynical; now I'm this; now I'm that" that's just following the course of things [Freud used terms such as "free association," "self representations," and "identifications" to describe the co-existence of multiple meanings and identities in the flow of thought and language- eds.] Mahler put whatever he wanted to in his music. People said to him, "You can't put a little quotation from a klezmer band right after this intense passage!"
You know that he was analyzed by Freud because he was very upset that his young, beautiful, social wife, Alma, was already cheating on him while he he was in the cottage writing his music, she was with Kokoschka [a noted Viennese painter- eds.] or whomever she was flirting with. Freud said to him, "What do you want me to tell you, man? You married a woman twenty years younger than you, you knew what you were getting yourself into. You have to deal with it."
VIC: My psychiatrist friend, Dr. Emmanuel Garcia, wrote an article for the Conductors' Journal about that session that Mahler had with Freud. It was conducted while they strolled around Vienna! Mahler wasn't truly satisfied with the consultation, but did feel that Freud was "right on" in connecting his feelings about Alma to those of his mother.
URI: Mahler told Freud that his parents were constantly fighting, and he would always go running outside, and would hear the "hurdy gurdy" [a portable street type of organ-eds.] player. So he associated this "silly" music with the greatest tragedy, and often juxtaposed simple tunes with deep, intense passages. So many of his pieces have funeral marches. Also, he grew up near army barracks, and he heard the guys practicing their cadences on the trumpet and drums- very sombre.
VIC: I'm hearing you hinting at strong parallels between you and Mahler.
URI: Well, I would say that when I was working on the Mahler project, I did identify. Mahler lived in the Empire Hotel when he came to New York, around 1908. Well, I live on 72nd Street in Manhattan, and right down the street is the old Empire Hotel, what's now known as the Empire Apartments! I got a book on the history of the Upper West Side, and sure enough, it said Gustav Mahler lived there in 1908-1909, right across from the Dakota, where Leonard Bernstein lived, and also where John Lennon was shot. My whole street has very strong associations for me. On the other side of the street is where Irving Berlin lived- one of my friends actually lives there. When I was working on the "Tin Pan Alley" recording, there is a big statue of Giuseppe Verdi at 72nd and Broadway- I really want to do a Verdi project. And I love walking by Miles Davis' house on 76th Street. It's not that I'm not trying to have it rub off on me, but there's something so beautiful about the thought of Mahler taking the subway at the same time that Eubie Blake was playing- all of it happening at the same time. I don't know why I'm interested in that, though: it's a mystery to me. My favorite books are biographies, and I love the intense detail accumulated by a really good biographer. It gives you a sense of how in a way the social history affects individuals- somehow something starts to happen, because people influence each other in a certain way.
VIC: I'm hearing from you that Mahler took melodies and motifs that were only remotely connected, and wove them into a single fabric. And that's what you do, as well. You utilize diverse types of ideas, sounds, and bring them together. All this has the feel of what is called "post-modernism," which, whether in art, architecture, philosophy, whatever, "deconstructs" previously hallowed forms, and allows for diverse elements to appear, almost without rationale, in one work.
URI: This is the way I look at that: I'm familiar with what people call post-modernism, although it's one of those vague terms that mean different things to different people. I think if you look at music history, though, a technique of many composers is to combine things that didn't necessarily seem connected before. But then that becomes the new vocabulary that's normal. And it's been happening all the time, you just don't recognize it any more. For instance, you see classical composers suddenly trying to write Spanish type of music or their version of an exotic music. Debussy listening to a gamelon orchestra and saying, OK, that changed his life. There's always the desire to reach out, and to use things that might not seem like they belong, and then it becomes normal. And I guess that if you catalogue the music I've been listening to- and I'm not that different from the other people I know who are thinking along these same lines. There are musicians who really have to put the limits on, and say "this is all I'll deal with"- and that's fine. But it really doesn't have to be that way, and there's a really long tradition of musicians combining many different elements from both past and present.
A SIDE BAR ABOUT JOHN COLTRANE
VIC: I'm thinking of Coltrane's "Meditations." What do you think of that piece?
URI: It's profound. For Coltrane to get to the point of "Meditations" after he had mastered "Giant Steps"- I guess it's a cliche, but if he got to this point of transcendence, where let's say the harmony is out here- after showing that he could deal with all these very intense harmonic structures up to that point, shows that in a way he was really moving that way. "Meditations" was a natural part of his evolution- which his audience to this day cannot accept. And I guess that I was taught this- that if someone as great as he decides to go there, there's a reason. Check it out. Don't dismiss it. Especially when I was growing up, listening to Coltrane's total development- because I was really into it from his early recordings with Miles, when people were saying "he's fumbling around," but there was such a great feel to his playing. And then, in 1957, with Monk, 1959, Giant Steps, 1960, the quartet, then how he's playing things like "But Not for Me" in 1962- it's moving. And it explodes. And nobody knows what would have happened had he lived, where he would have gone from there. But this tremendous emotional energy in his music.
VIC: To get back to what we were talking about regarding Mahler, it's my sense that his physical vulnerability played a very important role in his music. Has that been a part of your own life in some way? Is that part of your identification with Mahler?
URI: There's an aspect of Mahler that was in love with the peace that would come from death. A renunciation- that when it's over it's over. To listen to the end of his Ninth Symphony, or Das Lied van der Erde, gave me the same type of chills along that line as when I heard Miles Davis play "My Funny Valentine" with Herbie Hancock. That 4:00AM heartbreak- you almost want to luxuriate in that type of agony- but it's real, and it touches listeners too, it's not just the musicians that are having that feeling of suspension. But there are certain pieces of classical music that definitely have that aspect. I also don't want to go to far on the side of romanticizing that aspect of Mahler's life, because that's part of the mystique- that in 1907 his daughter died, after he wrote a piece called "Songs of the Death of His Children" (Kindertotenlieder), he felt that he had jinxed his daughter, who became sick and died right after he wrote it. He was shattered, and then, almost as a joke, he tells his doctor, "OK, you gotta check me out," and his doctor says, "You're gonna die soon, too, man, you're really sick." And he realizes he has three years to live. Then he becomes a maniac workaholic, he's trying to finish all this music. And there's something of course very moving about that. So, many artists feel they're giving their life to their work, and then they realize, it's soon going to be over, man, and it's not stretching out in front of you. There's a poignancy to that, which of course is affecting. But it makes him appear too much the way he's portrayed in the Ken Russell movie about him. Too Hollywood-y. Because in the core of Mahler, in the core of all these people, there's a tremendous strength and defiance. And that's the only thing that keeps somebody working their ass off- is that anger and joy. So it's not that he's sensitive and all that, but to go into your room and lock yourself up and say you're writing music, that's his response. It can be seen as very brave or very pointless, but in its very pointlessness, it's beautiful. Because that's the way he's expressing himself.
URI'S CURRENT LIFE AND MUSICAL VENUES
VIC: Let's talk about your life currently. Your wife, Jan, is an artist?
URI: My wife is a sculptor. I've known Jan for a long time since the West Philly days when I was a student at Penn. She's originally from Delaware. We've been living together for twelve years, although we've only been married for a year and a half. It's interesting, because she really knows a lot about my life back in that period, and I don't have as much contact with other people from that time, so it's nice.
VIC: Do you get into her art work, and does she get into your music?
URI: In the sense that, sure, we discuss what's going on, and on the other level- this happened, this guy is doing this or trying to do this to me and blah blah blah. It's unavoidable, but on a certain level, it really changes. At this point, it's good because we're both working on stuff that we really like, and also because I'm on tour a lot, we get a chance to travel together, which is very nice.
VIC: How does being on the road affect you? Does it energize you? Is it difficult?
URI: Both. In a way, it's a fulfillment of the dreams I had when I was thinking, "What would it be like to be a successful musician?" On other levels, it's a tough job, because- it's a cliche- you shouldn't complain, because you're very lucky- and I feel that way- I feel very lucky, but it's exhausting, and you have to deal with many things beyond the music. But I think there's nothing better than having this feeling of community with a group of musicians that are really getting along well and playing their ass off. And it really doesn't matter what the day by day critical response is, I try to filter it out, because if it's bad, I don't want to know about it. If it's good, great! But I don't want to start tripping on that either. It's more that the internal feeling of the group is a great feeling. And so I feel lucky.
SPIRITUALITY
VIC: I asked the following question of saxophonist Dave Liebman, who also tends to go out to the farther reaches of musical expression. There's a spiritual quality to your music. Would you describe yourself as a self-consciously spiritual person?
URI: I would say it influences my music, but I don't want to wear it on my sleeve. I don't want to proclaim myself somehow, because I think it gets too much when musicians get to think they're something special. I mean, there's spirituality in practically everything you do, I mean, the love between people, or somebody doing a job, no matter how unimportant society considers it, doing it very conscientiously and well. Again, I think that musicians are very lucky to get that applause, that interest, and I think everybody's looking for that transcendence through music, and that's why people are so into it. But beyond that, I just like to do music, and if people get something out of it that's what I want, but- I think it should work beyond words. My own personal feeling about it is that I don't consider myself to be religious in the sense of adhering to a certain set of beliefs, but of course I'm always thinking like everyone else about the mystery of what it's all about, and I don't know the answer. I'm very suspicious of people who tell me they do know the answer. For some reason, I've always doubted that, even when I was eight years old, looking at my teachers and thinking, "How do you know this, man? You're born and you're gonna die. You're here for seventy years or whatever, and it's so presumptuous for you to say that you know that. But now, coming back to psychology, I know why people convince themselves of certain things. And people need it so badly. I've changed the way I look at it- I'm not cynical about it. But for me, I try to understand others' beliefs, as long as they don't seem too intolerant to me. Again, from reading history, it just seems that it's always been true that there are certain people who are doctrinaire and want to impose their thinking on everyone else. And that there are other people who are more tolerant and see more sides of the coin- that's more like me.
VIC: It reminds me that while John Coltrane was a seeker, never feeling he had arrived at the Truth, but always searching and with a strong spiritual sensibility, his wife Alice chose a particular spiritual path, namely to become a disciple of Swami Satchidananda.
URI: Many friends of mine are disciples of various teachers, and they will patiently explain their beliefs to me, but I just I feel that spirituality is in my life, and I don't necessarily want to subscribe or join a group. When I was fifteen, George Rochberg told me, "Music is the religion." That was so liberating for me. Music is fun, and music is communal. Of course it's profound, but it's almost better to do it from a very emotional, intuitive level also, let it be what it is. That's what I like.
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WINTER AND WINTER RECORD LABEL
VIC: Tell us about the Winter and Winter record label.
URI: Stephan Winter called it Winter and Winter because he wanted to involve his brother, who is a theater producer in Vienna, but that didn't work out. Stephan had a label called JMT, which he started in 1985. He recorded folks like Steve Coleman, Cassandra Wilson, a lot of the so-called M-based, Brooklyn based musicians in the 1980's--- he did a lot of stuff with Paul Motian. When the company was bought out and became part of Polygram in 1995, he started a new label on his own, which is somewhat more independent and became Winter and Winter. And I sense that it's somewhat different from JMT in that perhaps it's less jazz oriented, although there are still many of the same artists as on JMT, such as Motian as well as Jim Black, who played drums on the Mahler record, but it also has a lot of classical and contemporary music, so what I'm doing with these projects fits in totally. They're located in Munich.
VIC: How does Tim James fit in?
URI: Tim works for the Winter and Winter distributors in America, called Allegro. Allegro takes smaller European record labels and is a clearing house for them. Tim is in charge of the press aspect. I think that early on, Allegro may have been very perplexed about how to market my recordings like the Mahler, which is not jazz as such. But I think they've supported me more as they sense that people are interested in the records.
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THE SATURATED SELF, JAMES JOYCE, EXILE, AND A NEW HOME
VIC: I have many more questions, but we're running out of time, so we'll close with just this one: ultimately, how would you like to be remembered as a musician?
URI: One level is not to say whether you're remembered or not, but to say that, at least during your time, you were given your chance, you did your thing your way. That doesn't mean that someone twenty or thirty years later is going to be saying, "Wow! I wish I was there!" the way I might do- like "I wish I was at Pep's in 1962 and I was sitting in the peanut gallery! Man, that was really the music!" Of course, when you're young, you'll say, "Shit, man, you didn't see Coltrane, you'll never know what that's like!" "Well, sorry I was born too late." "Well, too bad, man, you missed it. And nothing in your life will ever be as deep as that." And I used to believe that at a certain level. So some musicians create a mystique. But I just want to be thought of as someone who tried his best and had a lot of fun working with many musicians during the time that I had.
On the larger level, if people still find some value in it in the sense that somehow mixing these things-- others have taken classical music as a standard and improvised on it, I don't know if it's the same way I've done it. I don't know where it's leading for me, and I don't know whether or not, being honest with myself, how to proceed, because I'm seeing that what's happening for me is that I'm getting other opportunities to do what I've done- because people say, you can take this guy, or we can give you money to do a project about this composer because he's dear to us- or be somebody who is doing a whole different thing, because I think that's where I'm really headed. I don't want to stop playing jazz, although, my last three or four CD's wouldn't be called "jazz" records, although I do consider them to be coming from that spirit. In a way, I'm trying to experiment and also learn something. The other joke is that somehow as you get older, you think that you know these things, but I always heard other people say this, and never believed it, but while you do know more, you're not sure if that propels you to the next thing, or is a prison that you sort of have to break out of. You don't know how to do that necessarily, so I just do it sort of by instinct. And I can see that you can get certain things done, and only later have an overview of what you've done.
VIC: You're living the music rather than having a well defined agenda.
URI: I would say that that's true, and that goes back to the other question about being on the road. There's a certain disconnectedness that's liberating, when you're walking down the street in Buenos Aires one week, then the next week you're in China... things are so dislocated, and in a way, anything is possible.
VIC: I'm am reminded of Ken Jergens' book, The Saturated Self, about postmodern psychology. He talks about informational overload as an everyday thing, and that time and space and location have all changed, and so our sense of self has been challenged- it's harder to define who and what we are.
URI: In a way that affects a lot of people. Early on, I felt like a tourist, and had to get maps of Paris even before I went to Paris, and I had memorized the streets, and they were so resonant to me. And now, I'm in a more jangled way of looking at it. I don't feel like I need to do that. I need to sit in my hotel room with my computer and keep on working on my music. Yes, living it, just letting it happen. Every day is a different thing. And in a way you can say that that's living on the surface, it's not really going deep, but in another way it's sort of eliminating the things that even back in my home town, you're feeling that even that is another dislocation, yet we know it totally. I've been reading this really great book about James Joyce's wife, Nora, by Brenda Maddox, the point being that Joyce spent his whole life in exile from his home, and yet this woman was his Ireland. The way she wrote, the way she cursed, the fact that she had no idea what he was writing about, and yet he loved her so intensely. In effect, his whole literature is about her.
VIC: An artist is almost by definition an exile, because he or she is somewhat outside the culture, rewriting, reconceiving the culture. Joyce capitalized on that.
URI: It's a paradox. They're also deeply rooted in the area they're writing about. Faulkner can make his little county seem to be the whole thing. Joyce was obsessed with details about Dublin- was that store next to this one, was it on the corner? I understand that so well.
VIC: You're close to your origins.
URI: And yet also distancing yourself. Joyce hated Ireland. He felt judged by the people there. He felt diminished. And he was. I wouldn't apply that directly to Philadelphia in my case, but there's a certain element of leaving Philadelphia which is eye opening. The cliche is moving from Philadelphia to New York, because in a way, for me, the feel of New York is so different. Philadelphia felt so warm, especially as a younger person being enveloped by older people. And then in New York, it's not so much that. It's much more a feeling of desperation. I always had thought of New York as a city of opportunity. Today, for musicians, it's desperation. We cannot get a gig, so let's get together and start playing our music and find a place. And then out of that hotbed, something strong comes out. And then people from all over the world say, "What's going on in New York?" Some guy in Italy will say, let's bring them over here, while the New Yorkers are sleeping on it. And yet I love both Philly and New York very much.
VIC: Thanks, Uri, for taking time out of your undoubtedly crushing schedule to meet with us. It was a pleasure to talk with you.
Vic Schermer is creative editor, critic-at-large and regular contributor to All About Jazz. He is a psychologist and jazz aficianado in Philadelphia, PA. He is a published author in psychology and a regular contributor to jazz and literary venues on the Worldwide Web.
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