"...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!"

By Vic Schermer

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.

On to part 3 of the Uri Caine interview