Dialogue of traditions

If Vincent Cotro was correct in his 2005 study that since the 1980s, the past has become more important than the present in jazz, then we might regard Uri Caine as one of the key figures of the genre. His oeuvre to date has truly been conceived under the enchantment of the past. He employs a wide scale of references in his performances. Conspicuous processes include collage and quotation, while he playfully deletes the conventional terms of hierarchy, genre and style. He has re-interpreted such representatives of the classical canon as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Verdi and Gershwin, but it would seem that Mahler has exerted the most profound influence on him: on several recordings and DVDs, he has turned to the author of Kindertotenlieder and in 1997 his first Mahler album, Urlicht won the Toblacher Komponierhäuschen prize awarded for the best Mahler interpretation of the year. And yet we primarily define Caine as a jazz performer whose earliest recordings featured him playing modern “straight ahead” jazz, before discovering for himself the joys of transcribing and rewriting the works of the classical music canon under the aegis of post-modernist eclecticism. The objective of his preoccupation with the past is not reconstruction, nor adaptation or revitalisation, but rather re-reading and the ensuing act of recreation, during the course of which he does not jazzify classical extracts but in a sharply unpredictable stylistic blend (jazz, latin, dub etc) creates something new from classical fragments.

To all intents and purposes, Caine discovered Mahler for jazz. Even in his first reading (Urlicht/Primal Light, 1997) we don't find the kitsch that is all too frequently present in crossover; rather, he undertakes a radical reinterpretation of extracts from the Viennese composer's works: despite coming from Philadelphia, Caine reconstructs a central European Jewish jazz tradition which is not a challenge to the Afro-American musical tradition but supplements it. The result is a pluralistic musical phenomenon in which the different cultural traditions unite with each other to form an open and equal dialogue. The roots of his strivings – particularly in relation to Mahler – can be found not in jazz history but with classical composers. He further develops the trend launched by Schoenberg in Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen and which Berio followed in the third movement of his Sinfonia. When we hear Caine's classical pieces, above all we must find an answer to the question – and this is not easy – whether we are hearing a transcription or his own (re)-composition. This ambiguity is deliberate. According to one possible explanation, Caine is selecting these two qualities and mixing them, always unpredictably. We can also say that for a jazz musician of Caine's stamp, the customary categorisation in classical music of performance, arrangement and re-composition have no validity. Because these recordings are placed in a zone between classical and jazz that is hard to define, the judgement of Uri Caine's music will not be satisfactory using conventional aesthetic categories for classical music or jazz. This is because the concept of authorship and originality can mean something different in classical and jazz discourse.

Uri Caine (Photo: Bill Douthart)

Mahler is particularly problematic material, since from several perspectives he, too, lies in border territory: romanticism and modernism, the urban Christian Western Europe and the rural Jewish Central Europe. Europeans (Bruno Walter) and Americans (Leonard Bernstein) have both claimed his artistic heritage as their own. It is also clear from Caine's selection of themes that he does not reject the tradition characteristic of all music but deliberately selects between traditions, placing some in the foreground, while ignoring others, and with Caine this latter gesture also has great importance. His articulation is at once situational. His music avoids the categorical borderlines, and what is important is not how he synthesises different traditions (which would not be a great novelty in our current era of using and proclaiming the juxtaposition of a diversity of styles) but rather how he treats the demands for identity of the individual elements. Jazz explores Bach and Wagner, but that does not mean that in this music, jazz is necessarily the determining stylistic element. We can say very many things about these types of music, but not that they are “jazzed up” versions of old composers.

On his first two records, Caine rethought works by important pianists in jazz history (Thelonius Monk, Herbie Hancock). Even then he did not approach the performers through conventional means: his attitude as a performer instead linked him to the downtown avant garde of the Manhattan Knitting Factory where John Zorn, Dave Douglas and co were the artists showing the way. As a pianist, Caine is perhaps best thought of as a disciple of Herbie Hancock but as a composer and band leader, he has no predecessors: he is a unique phenomenon. While on his record Village Vanguard (2004) he can be heard in a conventional trio, in the Toys album he “quotes” Mahler's First Symphony but it is almost indistinguishable from the funk musical background. The idea for an independent Mahler album primarily came from the Winter brothers' record company: they were just thinking in terms of film music. The Uri Caine Ensemble provided live music in the Knitting Factory for a silent Mahler film in 1995, the DVD accompanied with sound only appeared in 2005 under the title Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.

Caine has always approached the music he selects deconstructively and uses eclecticism to organise it into a work which in most cases is impossible to label as contemporary jazz music or as something else entirely. We can observe the strata principal of marked eclecticism on his records published by Winter & Winter which does not really go in for traditional generic classification: different musical layers pile up one on top of the other, from jazz motifs to laptop noise, but in the end, it is undecided which strata should be regarded as the “real” one.

György Máté J.