Uri Caine’s imaginative, genre-crossing musical projects—mixing influences from Bach to bebop and beyond—are sparking controversy and garnering international acclaim.
By Nate Chinen | Photograph by Candace diCarlo
On almost any night of the year, a quiet figure leans over the dichromatic grid of a piano keyboard and plays. His instrument could be a gleaming nine-foot Bösendorfer, or a Steinway, or some funky relic with several busted keys. He might be onstage alone, or joined by bass and drums; he could also be up there with a violinist, a couple of horn players, a DJ and a choir. He might be dramatically spotlighted on the stage of a German concert hall; perched atop a temporary platform in an outdoor plaza; or wedged into a corner of a poorly ventilated Lower East Side dive. His audience could be quite large, very small or any size in between. What never changes is the act itself: sitting and playing, hands on the keys. That act is a theme on which there are countless, ceaseless variations.
Lately it seems as if Uri Caine C’81 is never home. He’s off in Munich, or Perugia or Taipei. So it’s nice to catch him here, a stone’s throw from Central Park, on the Upper West Side. In his apartment building, Caine converses good-naturedly with a silver-haired woman at the reception desk. He stops to talk briefly with a young musician in the lobby. In the kosher restaurant next door, he greets one of the waitresses by name. The manager stops by his table with a handshake and an invitation to stay “as long as you want.”
But as usual, he won’t be staying long. This past summer, Caine spent nearly the entire month of July and the first part of August on the European summer festival circuit. Home for a few days, he was leaving for China at the end of the week. His bold appropriations of European classical music—work by Mahler, Wagner, Schumann, and now J.S. Bach—have met with surprisingly widespread enthusiasm, along with the anticipated consternation. Encompassing an encyclopedic range of styles and traditions, his still-developing oeuvre holds much promise and poses many questions.
Such big issues—expectation, promise—may lurk in the periphery during a conversation with Uri Caine, but they seldom come into focus. The pianist is not only laid-back but also wholly unpretentious. His basso voice rolls along in a measured cadence. His face—an owl-like, elliptical shape—wears an alert but studiously vague expression. He talks about his success in a tone that’s disarmingly matter-of-fact, as if it’s happening to somebody else.
Uri Caine’s relationship with the piano dates at least as far back as the mid-1960s, when his parents—Burton Caine C’49, a professor of law at Temple University, and Shulamith Wechter Caine, a poet and professor of English at Drexel—enrolled him in lessons. He was eight years old.
“I was moderately into it,” Caine recalls, “but when I was about 13 I met Bernard Peiffer, who was a French pianist who lived in Philly. He influenced a lot of the musicians who were coming up in Philadelphia. And he stressed the importance of studying classical music as a way to get towards a certain facility on the piano, in order to improvise. So I would say he was really the first big influence that I had.”
Two years later, while still working with Peiffer, Caine began an informal apprenticeship with the noted composer George Rochberg G’49, who had won renown within the academic classical realm in the 1940s and 1950s for his considerable contributions to serial music. At the time, serialism—the cerebral, atonal compositional method conceived by Arnold Schoenberg and refined by his pupil Anton von Webern—had just begun its reign of influence. Rochberg not only composed serial, or 12-tone, music; he also published the first study on the subject. But by the end of the sixties, Rochberg had become disenchanted with the movement, and gradually embarked upon a reevaluation of tonal music. This decision, perceived by most modernists as a defection, alienated the composer from the classical music establishment. Nevertheless, Rochberg chaired Penn’s music department from 1960 to 1968, and served on the faculty for another 15 years.
Now emeritus professor of music, Rochberg remembers the adolescent Caine for his intuition, his talent and his “very large flexibility of mind and nature.” He gave his young protégé weekly assignments in composition. Caine explains: “Basically he would take a form—like a Chopin prelude or a Bach chorale—and say: ‘Study examples of this.’ And we would study, and he would say: ‘Write one or two, and bring them in.’ So every week I would be writing pieces in different styles. It forced me to really break things down in terms of understanding—harmonically and formally—a lot of different pieces. I wasn’t really sure how that was going to connect with a lot of the jazz stuff that I was doing in terms of playing. But it was more a general music understanding; especially of harmony and form.”
Caine was also honing his craft on the bandstand. Philadelphia has always had a well-deserved reputation as an incubator for emerging jazz talent. In those years, the city boasted a haphazard network of clubs, bars and neighborhood joints. Caine dove into this scene headfirst. The jazz sound occasionally identified as the “Philly style”—a rhythmically aggressive branch of bebop exemplified by (but certainly not limited to) such musicians as Lee Morgan, Benny Golson and Philly Joe Jones—impressed itself upon the aspiring pianist. By the time he came to Penn as a student in 1977, he was playing at a professional level.
Caine notes that the University was not exactly a haven for jazz musicians. “Penn was the type of place where they didn’t even have a jazz program,” he says. “It was taught by the folklore department; they would come in and teach it because the music department didn’t feel that it was a valid form of music. A lot of the professors were really very academic and closed-minded.”
After entering the music department’s graduate program early (via a specialized University Scholars curriculum), Caine had more encouraging exchanges with the faculty composers—notably Rochberg, Richard Wernick and George Crumb (with whom he often played four-handed piano).
A hallmark of the program was its rigorous master’s exam, in which students were expected to identify individual pieces of music—from the Baroque period to the present—by hearing the briefest of passages or seeing a fragment on a page. Caine remembers this ordeal with masochistic fondness. He trained by way of marathon sessions in the music library (then a new arrival on Van Pelt Library’s fifth floor). “I went into this thing of listening to 20-second excerpts of different pieces, for hours every day,” he reminisces. “It had another really weird effect on how I was hearing.”
So did the aesthetic of avant-garde jazz musicians, many of whom visited the western reaches of campus, thanks to a concert series in the basement of St. Mary’s Church. There Caine saw Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, and Sonny Rollins for the first time.
Some aspects of Caine’s stint at Penn provoke no trace of nostalgia: the pretensions of the academy and the still-overwhelming dominance of serial composition. “A lot of the people that I was dealing with were totally into 20th-century music—which I was into also—but they weren’t really instrumentalists,” he explains. “So they had almost a bias against instrumentalists as being somehow just the tradespeople of music, while they were the great theoreticians. And I wasn’t relating to it that way. My gig at Penn was to play for the choirs. I just had so much fun playing, in all these different experiences, that I never really understood that attitude.”
While a student, Caine essentially supported himself as a musician. After moving across the Schuylkill River to Center City in his second year, he had begun playing with local tenor-saxophone mainstay Bootsie Barnes. Through Barnes he met (and played with) virtually every Philadelphia-based jazz luminary—from Hank Mobley and Philly Joe Jones to Grover Washington Jr.
Jan Galperin C’78 G’79, then a sculptor, remembers seeing Caine play in a Center City club. “He already had a name in Philly,” she remarks, smiling at the memory of her own rock ’n’ roll proclivities at the time. Galperin and Caine, acquaintances at Penn, were married in May of 1999.
Few of Caine’s peers in the music department were receptive to his gigging; many regarded jazz with clear disdain. “Different people would tell me: ‘You should really watch what you’re doing. This is not the path to go down,’” he recalls. On the rare occasions his fellow graduate students ventured out to hear him perform, it had the air of a delegation visiting a foreign shore. “We’d go out to some bar like the Watutsi, and they’re sitting there, and on so many levels that was bizarre to them.” He pauses for a moment, then adds: “They were scared, too.”
After
graduating in 1981,
Caine spent the rest of the decade as a sideman in a wide range of groups.
In Philadelphia, his buoyant swing, quick reflexes, and broad musical
understanding earned him the status of a first-call player. But after
moving to New York in 1985, the pianist found himself swimming in a much
larger pond. “I was sort of scuffling,” he now admits. So when, in 1990,
the clarinetist Don Byron asked him to join a brand-new group on a European
tour, he didn’t give the matter a second thought.
Byron
was then just emerging as a major jazz artist, and this was the project
that would catapult him into the public spotlight. Curiously enough, Byron
wasn’t leading a jazz ensemble so much as a klezmer band; their aim was
to pay tribute to the musical satire (and substance) of Jewish clarinet
virtuoso Mickey Katz. The incongruity of this group’s performances (which
would occasionally feature Byron, an African-American non-Jew, pattering
in singsong Yiddish) turned heads all over the Continent.
Caine
appreciated the Mickey Katz opportunity, even though the klezmer revival
had limited appeal for him. Unlike most of the Jewish musicians in the
movement, who used the music as a bridge to a heritage lost in assimilation,
Caine came from a very culturally conscious family. “I spoke Hebrew in
my house,” he says. “So I don’t feel so much that need to embrace it;
I know where to find it.” He was also concerned that it would restrict
his stylistic options. “I don’t think a lot of people who heard me play
in that group knew that I could play other types of music,” he says.
Fortunately,
Byron featured Caine in other projects, including a jazz quintet and a
modern chamber group called Semaphore. Of the latter ensemble, Byron recalls:
“We played Webern, Messiaen, stuff like that. And [Uri] was good for that,
too. He was somebody I could play a lot of different stuff with.” This
mutual stylistic range made Byron and Caine natural collaborators, and
they still work together often. A few hours after I spoke with Byron in
mid-September, he left New York for Buenos Aires, where he and Caine were
scheduled for two duo performances.
In 1992, having worked in New York as a sideman for six years, Caine gathered a handful of New York’s most adventurous straight-ahead musicians and bankrolled his own recording session. The resulting album, Sphere Music, was picked up by the German JMT label and released that year in Europe.
Sphere Music was an impressive debut, showcasing Caine’s instrumental prowess as well as his adhesive abilities in a group setting. The album also revealed a previously unheralded compositional gift; of particular note was a gem called “Jelly,” in which Caine summons the piano styles of not only jazz’s self-proclaimed inventor, Jelly Roll Morton, but also early stride-piano legend Fats Waller and avant-garde maverick Cecil Taylor. He also rendered two songs by Thelonious Sphere Monk, for whom the album was named. Monk’s ballad, “Round Midnight,” receives a graceful and sensitive interpretation as a Caine-Byron duet.
Because of a distribution snag, Sphere Music didn’t appear in the U.S. until 1995. By then, Caine had toured in Europe as a leader. He had also recorded another album. Toys picked up where its predecessor had left off, this time saluting the pianist Herbie Hancock. Caine’s ensemble—now an octet—delivered crisp renditions of several Hancock tunes, including the title track, along with seven original compositions by Caine. “Time Will Tell,” the disc’s opener, is a propulsive, salsa-tinged workout that barrels through several different time signatures (including a seamless 15/8). It also features a recurring bass figure borrowed from an unlikely source: the first movement of Mahler’s First Symphony.
This proved to be a fateful allusion. Stefan Winter, Caine’s producer at JMT, took special note of the reference; his brother Franz had recently completed a silent film about the German composer, which was scheduled to be screened at New York’s Knitting Factory club in November 1995 as part of a mini-festival celebrating the JMT label. The Winter brothers asked Caine to devise a Mahler program that could be performed as the movie was projected: a living soundtrack. Caine spent the better part of that year immersed in Mahler’s music, intent on transforming the material but preserving—even celebrating—its essential character. He enlisted a group of A-list musicians for the task. They premiered the new arrangements, with Franz Winter’s film, to an enthusiastic crowd.
Even as the festival was going on, however, JMT’s American parent company, PolyGram Records—increasingly uncomfortable with the venturesome ethos of JMT’s artists and wary of its limited commercial appeal—summarily fired Stefan Winter and shut down the label. Ironically, this led to one of the most propitious moments of Uri Caine’s career. With the rubble of JMT still smoldering behind him, Winter set the wheels in motion to start his own company. He wanted the Mahler project to be its first release.
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 Komponierhäuschen 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 “Frère 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 mélange of styles. “That’s sort of a cliché 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!”
The Goldberg Variations may well be Caine’s most daring leap. Conceived in part as a nod to the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death in 1750, the album features not only Caine’s usual contributors but also European classical musicians affiliated with West German Radio (WDR), which helped sponsor the project. The WDR’s involvement changed the playing field for Caine, who had initially considered performing the Variations in their original solo-piano instrumentation. Instead the endeavor features over 50 individual participants, dispatched in various small ensembles and at different moments.
The variations in this adaptation form a broken sequence; Bach’s original miniatures are presented in order but interspersed with pieces of Caine’s invention. This revision yields 70 variations, more than twice the original number. A few hew close to the script or subject Bach’s source material to subtle alterations in texture; in other cases, the alterations aren’t so subtle. As the Kettwiger Bach Ensemble sings an arrangement of Variation 10, David Moss fibrillates among them like a Tourette Syndrome sufferer; his incomprehensible mutterings are peppered with ejaculations like “IM-PORtance!” and “Hey Bach!” Meanwhile, Caine turns Variation 14—one of Glenn Gould’s most dazzling displays on his 1955 Goldberg recording—into a commentary on virtuosity, with a sampled harpsichord playing at unmanageable velocity and accompanied by various percussive splashes (courtesy of the two-man programming team known as Boomish). And in Variation 30, the Kettwiger choir slurs its notes in mock inebriation—a nod to Bach’s inclusion, within the piece, of two popular drinking songs.
Caine based his interpretive process on a simple premise: “The idea was to take a very fixed form and subject it—either by writing or improvisation—to new ways of playing. As well as having the joy of playing Bach in a group. It’s this double idea of trying to find a way for the group to be able to do many different things in one piece, and from moment to moment. So it could have been any other piece, but I’m glad it was the Bach, because the Bach theme is thirty-two measures with four eight-bar themes; it’s almost exactly like a pop song. It could be ‘I Got Rhythm.’”
In his own compositions, Caine highlights stylistic connections between Bach and his contemporaries, as in “Händel” (scored for harpsichord, gamba and baroque trumpet), and explores the vicissitudes of the 32-bar song form—“The Jaybird Lounge Variation,” for example, is a hard-driving post-bop romp. Finally, there are the variations that explore more abstract formal relationships with the originals. One can almost imagine Caine’s grin during one of these, “Variation on B-A-C-H,” a jagged serial composition based on intervals suggested by the letters in Bach’s name.
The rapid-fire presentation of Caine’s Variations may seem like a postmodern ploy. But even this is a logical extension of Bach’s original intent; the Goldberg Variations has always been known for its quick movement from piece to piece, and the extreme contrast between pieces. Caine describes this as “almost a cartoon effect.”
In Europe, response to the project was mixed, to say the least. “We played at a lot of Bach festivals where I’m sure they could not have sanctioned what we were doing,” Caine explains. “For instance, playing at the Dresden Bach Festival. You know: the mayor’s there, and all the officials, and immediately David Moss is screaming and you’re saying ‘No, man.’ The choir takes out their alcohol during the drinking song, and the officials are like: ‘Whoa, you can’t do that here. This is Dresden. This is a serious thing.’” By contrast, the band’s performance at the hallowed Salzburg Festival was followed by a 20-minute standing ovation.
Jazz audiences were less impassioned. In San Sebastien, where Caine had been commissioned to present seven different projects over the course of six evenings, the Goldberg went on after a piano trio and received a tepid response. At the Vienne Jazz Festival in southern France—whose relatively conservative atmosphere was best embodied by the presence of Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, a repertory ensemble currently engrossed in the music of the 1920s and 1930s—the crowd was just as equivocal. This pattern underscores an interesting phenomenon: the relative obscurity of Caine’s music among jazz audiences.
The contrast between Wynton Marsalis Hon’00 (the most prominent advocate of jazz as “America’s classical music”) and Uri Caine (whose methods challenge the very notion of classicism) could not be more pronounced. Marsalis is jazz’s Number One Celebrity; Caine resides in jazz’s eccentric margins, and rarely presents his projects in the United States. Although they were both in Vienne at the same time, Caine’s ensemble and Marsalis’ band never crossed paths.
Other musicians, though, have started to pay attention. At the Molde Festival in Norway, the legendary jazz pianist Chick Corea attended both the Urlicht and Goldberg Variations concerts. “It was intense,” Caine says. “Because he told me that he had been preparing for it by listening to the Mahler record and to [Glenn Gould’s] Goldberg Variations. And then he came backstage, and he was hanging. That was sort of thrilling for me, because when I was coming up I was really obsessed with early Chick Corea. It was very encouraging.”
The Goldberg Variations’ American premiere packed New York’s chic Jazz Standard club last June, and many in the audience were musicians. When I arrived, the only available seat was at the back of the room; I perched on a barstool between D.D. Jackson and Ravi Coltrane, both of whom listened with rapt attention. Between songs, Jackson—a pianist and promising young bandleader with training in both jazz and classical music—sipped a glass of cranberry juice. “I’m a big fan of Uri’s conceptual approach,” he enthused.
During the set break, Caine approached the bar. Spotting Coltrane—an excellent tenor saxophonist, and son of jazz icon John Coltrane—his face lit up. “Hey, man,” he called, from a few feet away. “Did you bring your horn?”
Coltrane demurred: “Oh no, man. I can’t play with you guys. You’re the man.”
Caine shook his head, smiling. “Nonononono.”
A few minutes later, the band was back on the crowded stage. At the bar, Ravi Coltrane munched thoughtfully on pretzels, nodding his head to the pulse of the music.
After the last set of the evening, the capacity crowd erupted in applause and cheers. It was a happy moment for Caine, who had never presented any of his classical adaptations in a jazz club setting. It was tempting to see this as a major step towards acceptance in the larger jazz community. But even Caine expresses doubts. For the time being, his projects are more or less relegated to European festivals, especially those with a classical bent.
“There are certain festivals that are prejudiced against jazz as something they’ve heard millions of times, but my stuff maybe seems new,” the pianist observes. “Even if people hate it, they say, ‘What are you going to do for us next year?’”
Back on West 72nd Street, Uri Caine and Jan Galperin ride an elevator to the eighth floor. Their apartment has a cluttered but comfortable feel. Jan, now a dollmaker by trade, works there during the daytime; her latest prototype, a cherubic baby girl, sits with imploring eyes atop a worktable. A few feet away, Uri’s upright piano hunches in the corner, surrounded by sheaves of paper. One of them, marked “Dave Douglas Sextet,” contains the charts for this evening’s gig. The pianist has only a few moments to spare before heading over to Lincoln Center, of all places, for a soundcheck. The band will be playing a free concert in a plaza, as part of an outdoor summer series.
A Uri looks at his reflection in the mirror, and asks: “Can I go like this?” He’s wearing an old polo shirt, a pair of shorts, and sandals. Jan doesn’t say anything. He changes into long pants.
A Soon the pianist is outside again. Late-afternoon August sunshine reflects off the hoods of passing cars. “Man,” he says, “I like these gigs that I can walk to.” He has been a member of the Dave Douglas Sextet since its inception in 1995. Douglas—one of jazz’s leading trumpeters—played with Caine in the Mickey Katz project, and on several of Caine’s albums.
During the 10-minute stroll to 65th Street, Caine talks about the Jazz at Lincoln Center organization, the difficulties of living as a musician in New York, and some of his future plans. He has received commissions from Concerto Cologne and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Moderne. He has committed to performing new material at the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Center and a festival in Holland. He’s also planning his next studio efforts: probably a solo piano disc, followed by “another trio thing, and something with electronics.”
Lincoln Center’s main plaza is strewn with students, tourists and miscellaneous loiterers when Caine arrives. He pauses next to a large fountain and wonders where he’s supposed to meet the band. Standing there with his folder tucked under his arm, he could be a sightseer from out of town, or a professor from the nearby Juilliard School.
Suddenly, a man in a light gray suit brushes past his right shoulder. It’s Wynton Marsalis, cutting a quick and purposeful diagonal across the plaza. As the trumpeter passes, his eyes meet Caine’s, and he gives a slight, inscrutable nod. It’s almost, but not quite, a wink. And then he turns a corner, and he’s gone.
Caine makes a wry expression. “What was that look?” he muses aloud. It’s unclear whether Marsalis recognized him; the two musicians have never met. Was that a grin, or a smirk? A tacit acknowledgment, or a smug dismissal? Whatever it was, it was weird.
A few minutes later, clarinetist/saxophonist Greg Tardy, another member of the Dave Douglas band, walks up. After greeting Caine, he heads for the northwest extension of the plaza; apparently that’s where they’ll be playing. Caine lingers a few more moments at the Fountain Café, drinks a Coke. Then he walks off in the same direction—toward the stage, where a grand piano awaits.
Nate Chinen C’98 is a freelance writer based in New York. His music features have appeared in Down Beat, Schwann Inside and the Philadelphia City Paper.