Raising Caine continued

Urlicht/Primal Light inaugurated the Winter & Winter label early in 1997, and caused an immediate stir. It won the International Mahler Society’s prestigious Toblacher Komponierh”uschen award—a decision that was perceived by various camps of the classical world as either admirably progressive or downright blasphemous, and sometimes both. A Mahler enthusiast in London began his post to an internet site called the “Mahler Shrine” with the words: “Uri Caine, madman or genius?”
    Certainly Urlicht is a bold statement. Caine and his ensemble—a changing cast of dynamic, multifaceted players—render the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. Their opening salvo, the “Funeral March” from Symphony No. 5, begins harmlessly enough with Mahler’s notated trumpet tattoo. But as the track progresses, a revisionist pattern emerges: Caine exploits not only the bombast of the piece, but also its gypsy melancholy. In the third movement of Symphony No.1, the ensemble’s exaggerated treatment of Mahler’s “FrÍre Jacques” quote, and their subsequent klezmer hoe-down, bring the piece’s ethnic influences into clear focus. Meanwhile, “I Often Think They Have Merely Gone Out!” (from Songs on the Death of Children) becomes a bossa nova; the melody grows even more haunting as sung, wordlessly, by Arto Lindsay. Other moments—an Afro-Cuban/gospel “Drunkard in Spring,” a cantor’s mesmerizing variations on “The Drummer Boy,” a DJ’s use of recorded music and spoken words on the “Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5—plants Mahler’s pieces in often-startling contextual soil.
    But an argument can easily be made in support of Caine’s approach. Mahler’s music, even in its time, was a mÈlange of styles. “That’s sort of a clichÈ about Mahler,” Caine says, “that he brought in a lot of the street music of his time, and waltzes, classical music, folk music, Jewish-sounding music, and all these different influences. He wasn’t afraid or ashamed to mix them up, even though he was terribly misunderstood when he was doing it.”
    The album also seems less jarring when weighed against Caine’s musical experience: his quick-flash listening sessions in Van Pelt, his prior tributes to Monk and Hancock, the way in which European classical music and jazz improvisation have always coexisted side-by-side. Equally significant is the influence of George Rochberg, to whom the album was dedicated. “After I’d heard the Urlicht for the first time,” Rochberg recalls, “I said: ‘I love it and I hate it,’ for a lot of different odd reasons. But I admired the incredible courage.”
    Rochberg, whose 1965 opus Music for the Magic Theatre quoted whole passages of Mahler and other composers, had always steered Caine toward extremely catholic tastes. “Uri has stepped into an area which will probably be central to the next big world of culture,” he says, adding, “The difference between Uri and his contemporaries is that as a composer, he’s thinking in terms of very broad swatches of time—maybe not in terms of their historical relationships as much as in terms of their linguistics.”
    Caine’s group toured Europe in mid-summer of 1998. At a festival in Toblach—Mahler’s summer retreat—a sizeable portion of the audience walked out in protest at the beginning of the concert (missing an incredible performance, later released as the double-CD Gustav Mahler in Toblach). For the most part, though, audiences were startled but receptive. In Cologne the crowd was so enthusiastic after a performance that the musicians practically had to be rescued.
    Caine quickly dove into other projects. His take on Wagner, performed live in Venice’s Piazza San Marco with both American and local musicians, was released as Wagner e Venezia late in 1997. Caine, wary of Wagner’s near-tyrannical influence as well as his anti-Semitism, approached this project with an agenda: “I thought: ‘Man, instead of inflating Wagner, deflate him.’” The resulting chamber performances are uneven, but invariably lovely. Even “Flight of the Valkyries” assumes a genteel disposition.
    Blue Wail, a trio album recorded and released in 1998, conveys the pianist’s daredevil instincts and rhythmic depth and brought Caine back to the terrain of straight ahead jazz. (“Because that’s my real shit, too,” he says.) The pianist is understandably wary of losing himself to his own successes—becoming the Classical-Crossover Guy. “It’s an interesting situation to watch him in,” remarks Ralph Peterson Jr., the drummer on Sphere Music, Toys, and Blue Wail. “Because if your association with Uri Caine is purely from the ‘Dead Composers’ aspect of his writing and playing, then you’ve missed the whole point of Uri Caine.”
    Caine’s prolific output seems to reflect an inner urge, something more basic than ambition: his head is simply full of music. How else to explain 1999—a year in which the pianist not only toured extensively as both a leader and sideman but also conceived and recorded two major projects and started work on a third?
    The Sidewalks of New York is a whimsical celebration of the heyday of Tin Pan Alley. Caine, aided by a cast of more than a dozen vocalists, juxtaposes cultural anthems (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag”), early jazz (Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag”), ephemera (“Too Much Mustard”), and ethnic novelties (Irving Berlin’s “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars”), in straightforward renditions that are at once boisterous and sincere. Meanwhile Love Fugue, an interpretation of a Schumann song-cycle, casts a more ruminative shadow. Here Caine’s collaborators include guitarist David Gilmore, the La Gaia Scienza string-and-forte piano ensemble, singer Mark Ledford and several poets (including his mother). The resulting chamber album oscillates between the intimate and the grandiose (and, thanks to the indescribable vocal contortions of David Moss, occasionally borders on the grotesque).
    Jim Black, a drummer-percussionist and veteran of numerous tours with Caine (including a leg of the first Mahler expedition), still marvels at the pianist’s capacities. “Uri’s got the kind of mind that can deal with that volume of music. I watched him write a dance piece for a Vienna premiere basically on an airplane and in hotel rooms; he was composing this thing with his laptop on the road.” And somehow, Black emphasizes, the material “always has his stamp on it. I mean, have you heard the Goldberg Variations? It’s a shameless good time! Downright offensive to many, I’m sure!”