{"id":1797,"date":"2014-06-09T14:19:14","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T21:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=1797"},"modified":"2014-06-09T14:19:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T21:19:14","slug":"the-ojai-music-festival-and-uri-caine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2014\/06\/the-ojai-music-festival-and-uri-caine.html","title":{"rendered":"The Ojai Music Festival and Uri Caine"},"content":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”Scx4VCooDHhyWVBgymxHy3X9hGhGh8Y4″]\"220px-George_Gershwin-signed\"<\/a><\/p>\n

LATER this week, one of our spring rituals arrives: The Ojai Music Festival<\/a> kicks off on Thursday. It\u2019s always a good time up there, and this year we\u2019re doubly excited because of the artistic directorship by pianist Jeremy Denk<\/a>, one of my generation\u2019s most imaginative players, a gifted writer of prose on his blog and elsewhere, and a great advocate for Ives.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always a lot to see at Ojai, but for now we want to talk about two performances by longtime jazz pianist and downtown experimentalist Uri Caine.<\/p>\n

California\u2019s lovely and gentle Ojai Valley does not put us in the mind of the brooding Austrian Gustav Mahler, but that\u2019s part of what Caine has cooked up for the festival. He\u2019s developed a cottage industry interpreting classical composers in an improvised setting \u2013 Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, even Vivaldi \u2013 and he\u2019ll present Mahler Re-Imagined as part of the festival\u2019s Thursday night opening concert. (Caine will also interpret Gershwin Friday night with his sextet.)<\/p>\n

Caine is aware that Mahler is not known for being light-hearted, and his music \u2013 even compared to other classical figures \u2013 doesn\u2019t exactly swing. With all that rubato and agony, he\u2019d not be the first to come to mind first for a jazz-oriented treatment. But he\u2019s more complicated than his reputation, according to Caine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of different traditions happening in Mahler,\u201d Caine told me from a tour through Spain. \u201cMahler is using all these elements, and as improvisers we use them as jumping-off points. Bohemian folk music, military music he heard growing up, funeral marches, and the music he studied and conducted \u2013 Wagner, Mozart. He could be simple and folk-like or very violent, very merry and very bleak.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mahler\u2019s synthesis of different styles confused people at the time, Caine says, but his fragments and allusions make him in some ways a man for our postmodern times. Of course, the composer\u2019s work is still not universally loved. \u201cOne thing people don\u2019t always like in Mahler is that he goes off on some many tangents; he\u2019s trying to develop so many different themes. As improvisers we do the same thing.<\/p>\n

Caine\u2019s taste is catholic and wide-ranging, but that doesn\u2019t mean he treats every composer\u2019s work the same way. In fact, he insists that he pays enormous attention to the differences between each figure. \u201cIt has a lot to do with listening to the music, and then, like a student, trying to understand it. Letting the impressions dictate where you go with it,\u201d observing the underlying structure, and then seeing what his bandmates respond to in their improvisations.<\/p>\n

And while he knows some classical folk \u2013 musicians, audiences and critics alike \u2013 don\u2019t see improvisation and classical music have anything to do with each other, he disagrees vehemently. \u201cThere is a tradition of improvisation in classical music that\u2019s atrophied now,\u201d he says. But Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin were great improvisers. \u201cIn the old days before records, people were basically writing out piano improvisations.\u201d Cadenzas, especially, were typically improvised in concert. \u201cSometimes when modern composers try their own cadenzas, people are scandalized. But that\u2019s the point!\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the tradition Caine and his players work in \u2013 improvising over chord changes \u2013 comes more directly from jazz; he\u2019s especially impressed with the styles developed by John Coltrane (with its \u201cswirling\u201d quality and sheer speed), Miles Davis (for its understatement and apparent simplicity) and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson (for its swing and sense of humor.)<\/p>\n

Far closer to jazz than Mahler is the work of George Gershwin. Caine will also be reimagining the music of Gershwin, including Rhapsody In Blue<\/em>, at Ojai. Gershwin was a bit like Mahler, he says, a synthesizer who brought a number of styles together \u2013 \u201cRachmaninoff, klezmer with the clarinet, a bit of Latin at the end.<\/p>\n

Like a lot of jazz musicians, Caine spent his early years jamming on the changes to \u201cI Got Rhythm\u201d and other Gershwin songs, so it was natural for him to come back to one of his earliest sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was an amazing pianist, able to absorb ragtime and a lot of the New York players. You hear stories of him as a teenager, working for Irving Berlin \u2013 he was already a prodigy.\u201d He differed from some of his contemporary songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway orbits in being more steeped in jazz harmony, and by \u201cself-consciously imitating a lot of classical composers \u2013 the Russians, the French \u2013 with added 6ths, added 9ths, moving by major 3rds.\u201d And of course, much of his music drips with the blues.<\/p>\n

Caine laments that Gershwin, who left so many great songs \u2013 \u201cThey Can\u2019t Take That Away From Me\u201d and \u201cOur Love is Here to Stay\u201d are two favorites — died so young, at the age of 38 from a brain tumor.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe lived long enough to play tennis with Arnold Schoenberg,\u201d Caine says. The Austrian composer, he imagines, \u201cprobably looked at George Gershwin and said, \u2018America is an amazing country.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n

CultureCrash looks forward to seeing you at Ojai.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”Scx4VCooDHhyWVBgymxHy3X9hGhGh8Y4″] LATER this week, one of our spring rituals arrives: The Ojai Music Festival kicks off on Thursday. It\u2019s always a good time up there, and this year we\u2019re doubly excited because of the artistic directorship by pianist Jeremy Denk, one of my generation\u2019s most imaginative players, a gifted writer of prose on his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,42,618,445,582],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-classical-music","7":"category-jazz","8":"category-jeremy-denk","9":"category-jewish-culture","10":"category-ojai-festival","11":"entry","12":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}