New York jazz pianist Uri Caine will play his first New Zealand concert of a 2016 tour in Dunedin next week. He tells Rebecca Fox he is not sure how New Zealand classical audiences will react to his work.
Whether playing in a basement in a tiny town or a 150-year-old music conservatory, pianist Uri Caine is happy as long as his audience is.
Recently in Europe, he had just that situation from one night to the next.
‘‘I was in the basement of this little town in Germany and the people were sweaty and happy. The next I was in Budapest in a music conservatory.''
Next week he will have travelled across the world and be sitting down at a piano in Dunedin's Glenroy with the New Zealand String Quartet.
Whatever the occasion the trick was to ‘‘tune it all out and just play'', he said.
‘‘I like the feeling of a lot of types of jazz clubs I grew up playing in as the people were so close and it's also nice to play in a beautiful hall with a great piano but I try not to let it influence me too much.''
Caine is known for reimagining the classics and using classical music as a springboard for improvisation.
He collaborates with a range of musicians and ensembles, from the Beaux Arts Trio to John Zorn; the Woody Herman Band to the Moscow Chamber Orchestra.
Chamber Music New Zealand chief executive Peter Walls said he discovered Caine some years ago and was excited to be bringing him to New Zealand.
‘‘I was completely won over by his treatment of music that I knew and loved. His Goldberg Variations are a revelation because Uri recognises Bach has something to say, not just to jazz musicians, but to hard rock aficionados and early music buffs, too. Each variation is given a fresh treatment with enormous variety in the character and style, and humour.''
Caine grew up in Philadelphia, in the United States, and like many children learned the piano.
It was not until he began studying with US-based French jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer when he was about 12 years old that he became ‘‘completely obsessed'' with music.
He began playing at jazz clubs, learning from older jazz musicians, and also started writing music and learning composition.
Attending the University of Pennsylvania, he studied music composition with George Rochberg and George Crumb, all the while continuing to play in clubs.
After college he moved to New York where he played in ‘‘different scenes'' with singers and bands and solo just to ‘‘survive''.
‘‘I started to travel a lot, especially playing a lot in Europe and met Stefan Winter, who had a recording label. It was then his interest in electronic music began and he began to try improvisation alongside composition.
‘‘Some of the stuff I'll be doing with the New Zealand String Quartet is a reflection of some of that.''
Change also happened to the industry itself, he said. Whereas the older generation may have worked a club for three weeks, in his generation, with the number of musicians ‘‘exploding'' in New York they were lucky to get one night or a week here and there.
‘‘That is the nature of change. You have to train yourself in different skills and learn to play in a lot of different situations.''
Along with the Goldberg Variations, Caine has also reworked Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, as well as Wagner, Schumann and Mozart.
The BBC's Classical Music website describes Uri Caine's arrangements as ‘‘wonderfully inventive and they're brilliantly executed, too. There's humour aplenty, yet Caine respects musicality - each variation is crafted with due expertise. Parody? Pastiche? It's more a carnivalesque celebration of Bach's enduring appeal''.
Caine said while jazz had been built on change, classical music was quite different and often more formal.
‘‘I like the idea of how music reflects the history and culture of what is going on at the time.''
His approach - the reworking or ‘‘reimagining'' of classical works - has been seen as controversial by some.
‘‘Many people have made cheesy attempts to do it through the years ... maybe it was not very successful. That is the risk. It also depends on what the intent is.
‘‘This is what I want to do, so that is it.''
In 1997 his jazz tribute to Mahler received an award from the German Mahler Society, although it reportedly outraged some.
A Gramophone review of one of his Mahler recordings said ‘‘What Caine has done is much more radical and controversial than anything in, say, Jacques Loussier's Bach. Each shard is given a bizarre new slant, which means relocating it to a Broadway show, a dinner-dance in the Catskills, a jazz concert or a rock venue.''
He said for many people a piece of classical music can only be done one way.
‘‘One of the things I like about music is it was a very mysterious thing, there is a concreteness to it but also a mysteriousness. You let your imagination take you somewhere. Other times you wonder how you can get to a point.''
His work did not set out to ‘‘improve'' a piece of music but use it as a starting point.
In any classical performance there was some improvisation going on as conductors sped up a section or called for it to be louder in places and there was an element of improvisation already built into Mozart or Bach's work, he said.
‘‘Now there is just a different context to it. It is not such a far fetched idea. It's been happening throughout jazz's history.''
He was not sure how some of New Zealand's classical music audiences would react to his work.
‘‘How will classical audiences react to somebody improvising on Mozart?''
His concert tour with the quartet would include some of his original compositions for piano and string quartet Jagged Edges and String Theories along with improvisations on the Allegretto con variazioni of Beethoven's Harp Quartet Op. 74, and the Goldberg Variations, described by the composer as ‘‘diverse variations composed for music lovers to refresh their spirits''.
‘‘The variations I arranged are more like dance variations, variations in style of other composers. Bach also did variations. I wrote my own versions of those.''
Cain's career highlights include being appointed director of the Venice Biennale for Music in September 2003.
He has performed his version of the Diabelli Variations with orchestras including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the CBC Orchestra in Canada and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. From 2006-2009 he was composer in residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and premiered his Concerto for Two Pianos and Chamber Orchestra with Jeffrey Kahane in May 2006.
In 2009 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for The Othello Syndrome for best classical crossover album. The work re-imagined the Verdi opera Otello as a modern piece featuring a soul singer.
He also played with his own trio, a loose playing environment which he enjoyed but also composed for orchestras which might take more of an effort to get to performance, but it was still satisfying, he said.
To see
Uri Caine and the New Zealand String Quartet, Glenroy Auditorium, March 22, 7.30pm and Queenstown's Memorial Centre, March 26, 3pm
