LATER this week, one of our spring rituals arrives: The Ojai Music Festival kicks off on Thursday. It’s always a good time up there, and this year we’re doubly excited because of the artistic directorship by pianist Jeremy Denk, one of my generation’s most imaginative players, a gifted writer of prose on his blog and elsewhere, and a great advocate for Ives.
There’s 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.
California’s lovely and gentle Ojai Valley does not put us in the mind of the brooding Austrian Gustav Mahler, but that’s part of what Caine has cooked up for the festival. He’s developed a cottage industry interpreting classical composers in an improvised setting – Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, even Vivaldi – and he’ll present Mahler Re-Imagined as part of the festival’s Thursday night opening concert. (Caine will also interpret Gershwin Friday night with his sextet.)
Caine is aware that Mahler is not known for being light-hearted, and his music – even compared to other classical figures – doesn’t exactly swing. With all that rubato and agony, he’d not be the first to come to mind first for a jazz-oriented treatment. But he’s more complicated than his reputation, according to Caine.
“There are a lot of different traditions happening in Mahler,” Caine told me from a tour through Spain. “Mahler 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 – Wagner, Mozart. He could be simple and folk-like or very violent, very merry and very bleak.”
Mahler’s 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’s work is still not universally loved. “One thing people don’t always like in Mahler is that he goes off on some many tangents; he’s trying to develop so many different themes. As improvisers we do the same thing.
Read more: http://www.artsjournal.com/culturecrash/2014/06/the-ojai-music-festival-and-uri-caine.html
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