"...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."

By Vic Schermer

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.

VIC: What's coming up for you musically in the next few months?

URI: Well, with the Bach Project, I'll be doing a tour in Italy and in England. I'll record a solo piano CD and finish another CD of Mahler songs that was begun last year. I'm writing two pieces. One is for a group called the Concerto Cologne, which is a baroque orchestra. They played on my Bach Goldberg Variations, and they want me to do a piece for piano and their ensemble. Then there's another group called Ensemble Moderne, which is a very much more contemporary music ensemble. They play Frank Zappa's music [!- eds.] And they want me to do a piece with their ensemble. That's what I'm working on now- getting it ready for a performance.

VIC: Any concerts coming up?

URI: I have concerts mostly in Europe, not so much in the United States. I'm playing at a lot of different festivals in the next five or six months, like the Israel Festival, the Holland Festival.

VIC: What kind of festivals are they?

URI: They're general music festivals. We'll probably be doing the Bach or this new Mahler song project. And then I'm also leading a trio, and we're going to do a tour in Europe next Spring.

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.

VIC: You told me you were going to perform at a top new jazz club in New York City, the Jazz Standard. What are you going to do there?

URI: It'll be part of the IAJE (International Association of Jazz Educators) Week. Jazz Standard was very nice to me. As part of the New York Jazz Festival in June, they gave me a week at the Jazz Standard as part of the Festival- to do all these projects. It was surprising how good the response was- the "Goldberg" was totally sold out. The club and I were both shocked! But, people in New York are quite interested. Road musicians expect that most of their gigs these days will be in Europe and Japan. There's a certain circuit there that doesn't exist in the U.S. any more. If you heard Philly Joe Jones talk, he'd say how he'd been around the U.S.- now it doesn't exist in the same way. There are clubs, and there's a small circuit you can make, but my experience is that you can't do it in the same way. But in Europe you can go to club after club.

VIC: How, then, did you get booked at the Jazz Standard?

URI: Seth Abramson, who is the booker of it, said, "I really want people to hear this." And it's very rare when you hear a club owner in New York tell you that.

VIC: When will you be in Philadelphia again?

URI: I'm playing at the Painted Bride on February 22, (2001) probably with the "Goldberg." We are doing a tour with the Mahler project in the Spring, probably with a touring grant. We'll play at art centers, colleges, museums.

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. Vic welcomes thoughts from readers and will respond. Contact Vic.