At home in the worlds of Mahler, Bach and jazz, Uri Caine defies categorisation, writes Ray Comiskey
Asked what he would like carved on his tombstone, comedian W. C. Fields once suggested - probably drink in hand - "On the whole I'd rather be in Philadelphia". He might have felt more kindly towards the city had he been interested in jazz. Over the years it has been host to some outstanding players; both tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley and drummer Philly Joe Jones, who achieved their widest fame playing for Miles Davis, came from there, as does Dizzy Gillespie's one-time drummer, Mickey Roker.
And, from a later generation, pianist Uri Caine. He grew up in what must have been a personal musical melting pot; at home there was Jewish music from Iraq and Yemen, mixed with Israeli folk songs; outside there was classical and jazz training - one of his home-town teachers was the late, great French jazz pianist, Bernard Peiffer - as well as studying composition.
There were jazz gigs from early on, too, with Mobley and Philly Joe, Mickey Roker, visitors such as trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, and singer Morgana King. This was not only big-time company; stylistically it was also all over the place. Caine must have been versatile as well as good to get the calls and handle the gigs.
"Growing up in a place like Philadelphia," he acknowledges in a soft, gentle voice that may have sounded even gentler because he had just arrived back on the East Coast from Italy a few hours before the interview, "discovering your own style, you start to think to yourself what is it that defines style, and why is it that if a singer calls you up you know you're not going to play like [uncompromising avant garde pianist] Cecil Taylor for that singer!
"I guess it's having a lot of experience playing with different people," he adds, "with people that were playing very inside bebop, and then a much freer type of music with people that were coming up."
He's now as celebrated in jazz as an innovative leader and composer, as he is for his contributions in supporting roles in other musicians' groups. How are the two aspects reconciled playing jazz?
"I've thought about that a lot, because I guess I came up with this idea that, because it's a group music, it's really important to try to play with that in mind - listening to how you're playing, really reacting to what's going on. And I think that a lot of people that play in rhythm sections, especially, grow up playing this music trying to be very adaptable, because they realise that there are a lot of different styles of music and different roles.
"As a sideman, maybe you don't get to pick the songs or play your own music, but your function is important, in the sense that you're shaping how the music is sounding.
"I'm not so hung up on that thing of who is doing what," he continues. "If you study the way a lot of piano players played as sidemen but influenced the group, like Herbie Hancock in Miles's group or McCoy Tyner in Coltrane's groups, then you're still dealing with a lot of the same aspects where you have a certain freedom to bring your style of playing."
His leader in Dublin will be the intellectual, passionate, wide-ranging, historically aware and visionary trumpeter and composer, Dave Douglas, a longtime colleague of Caine's.
"In Dave's case a lot of the pieces that we're playing are very specific; it becomes clear from his compositions how we play. But he allows the group to coalesce in its own way. He's a more active leader in the sense that sometimes he will say, very specifically, do this here or lay out there, when it comes to things with the arrangements in the compositions.
Among the many avenues Caine has explored in his own right as leader is his reworking of classical material, notably by Mahler and Bach. And it brings up something that exerts a continuing fascination for him - the tensions between structure and improvisation.
"I think what began to evolve was sort of a combination of having these arrangements, but how we got from one piece to another could be very free. And if certain people were to improvise a certain way one night, and then the next night something else happened, I thought it better to go for that feeling, even if we know that we're going to get to the second or third piece eventually.
"Oftentimes what was happening to get to that piece was developed out of the piece we just played, which was interesting. The point of it, in a way, is that it mirrors really closely what Mahler was doing, in the sense that his compositional procedure is often to keep coming back to certain ideas that are always restated in a different way."
Given the sheer breadth of variety in his own work, is there a core thing that underpins it all? "I would say the one thing that would be important is that I really love the play between structure and improvisation, and the idea that you have a certain underlying structure that frames the freedom of the improvisation. Also, taking the idea, from growing up, of, let's say, music based on something like standards and playing structures that existed somewhere else before.
"A lot of what I'm doing is borrowing these structures from different places, Cole Porter songs or, at this point, Charlie Parker songs. I love that and it also doesn't mean that you can't, as many people have been doing, take models from either classical music or folk music - the conception, or different sound worlds, electronics and so on - and still have this idea that you have the structure that's set up and then the improviser has to play with that structure.
"That's where the fun comes in - the whole idea of having that structure shape the improvisation. In other words, playing bebop Charlie Parker lines on top of Mahler's First, you might try to find another way to do it.
"The structure part comes from, let's say, trying to sit down and work out an idea so it's coherent, somehow makes sense. The feeling you want to get as an improviser is one of ecstatic, like just going for it, being in the moment. And when you try to combine both these things, that's where things become interesting. That's not to say also that I don't want to play totally improvised music - I do that, too - or to write totally structured pieces where there's no improvisation."
His work both before and after the tour with Dave Douglas bears this out. He will convert his working trio into a quartet with the addition of DJ Ted Rock for some concerts. There's a new version of Verdi's Othello scheduled for the Venice Biennale. Another CD of Mahler songs is due out, which includes a Chinese group, a poet and a German actor, and he's just made a CD with his trio at New York's famed jazz club, the Village Vanguard.
On the whole, would he rather be in Philadelphia? Probably not.
Uri Caine plays with the Dave Douglas Quintet at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Saturday, July 5th, as part of the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival