New York-based jazz musician Uri Caine and ambience musician DJ Olive have arrived in Taiwan for the second time to perform with Taiwanese electronic music talent, poet and radio show hostess Summer Lei (
Coming from different cultural and musical backgrounds, the only aspect the three seem to share is their musical versatility.
Since Sphere Music, his first album in 1993, the prolific Caine has put out 13 albums to date, mostly crossovers between classical music and jazz, with cabaret songs and folk dance music sometimes thrown in the mix. Through reinventing a range of pieces from Thelonious Monk, Tin Pan Alley, Richard Wagner, Johannes Sebastian Bach and others, Caine has established a reputation as a musical iconoclast.
Active in New York's underground club scene, DJ Olive has previously worked with musicians such as Sonic Youth guitarist Kim Gordon and avant-garde musicians like drummer and poet William Hooker.
Singer-songwriter Summer Lei is famous to the Taiwanese public for her voice that can be heard in television and radio commercials, as well as her classical music radio show at the Taipei Philharmonic Radio Station. Her album http://summerplanet.com gained her a reputation as being the pioneer of "noise folk music" -- combining traditional-style songs with ambient-like electronic sound effects -- in Taiwan.
Lei was the guest performer at Caine and DJ Olive's concert in Hsinchu last year. On that occasion, Lei recited her poetry, accompanied by Caine's piano, DJ Olive's turntable wizardry and several other musicians. After the concert, Lei showed Caine the English translation of her poetry, which greatly impressed Caine and led the trio to cooperate again this year.
The easygoing and open-minded Caine has comprehensive experience working with different musicians and is always on the lookout for possible collaborations. His first encounter with DJ Olive was at the Knitting Factory, the renowned free-jazz performance venue in New York, where they discovered their potential for collaboration while jamming together.
"Most DJs would rather work with electronic instruments than with people. But he's open to working with live musicians," Caine told the Taipei Times.
Their collaboration brought about the 1996 Gustav Mahler/Uri Caine: Urlicht/Primal Light, a studio album of recompositions on the Mahler's works, and Uri Caine Ensemble: Gustav Mahler in Toblach, recorded live at the Gustav Mahler Festival in Italy two years later.
These reworkings of Mahler's symphonies into Gypsy music, scat-singing, postmodern jazz and other styles won Caine the Best Mahler CD of 1997 Award from the Mahler Foundation.
But his creativity does not go down well with every audience.
"When we performed at the Gustav Mahler Festival in Toblach, after playing for five minutes, some of the audience got up and walked out of the concert. Mahler fans got very upset that we `messed up' his music. They thought we were ridiculing Mahler," said Caine, emphasizing that he sees himself mainly as a jazz musician who freely interprets classical numbers. "Audiences often expect to hear something faithful to the spirit of the original composition. However, there's no standard way to interpret past works, because there's no knowing what Beethoven, for example, had in mind when he wrote Symphony No. 9."
At both today's and tomorrow's concerts, Caine will perform some previously unreleased Mahler recompositions and pieces from last year's album Uri Caine Ensemble: The Goldberg Variations.
The pieces from that album, on which Caine again collaborated with DJ Olive, shows more of Caine's humor.
"I take my cue from Bach, then I work on the concept of `variation' and it becomes dance music, gospels and popular drinking songs," Caine said. He also admitted to having been influenced by the 1955 Glenn Gould version. "His playing was so strong and impulsive, that's the spirit of jazz. For me, Glenn Gould is the one."
While Lei recites her poetry on the main stage, Caine and DJ Olive will "improvise in parallel with the mood of her words," Caine says. The fact that Lei is going to recite her poems in Chinese -- a language neither of the two musicians understands -- does not affect the work, because, for Caine, who studied Chinese poetry in the Chinese Culture Center in New York, her work has a beauty both in the sound of the language and in its compact structure.
This is not the first time Caine integrates poetry into his music. In last year's Love Fugue, he ingeniously and comically interweaved Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet op. 47, a poem written by his mother, love poems by Julie Patton and translated haikus by Mariko Takahashi.
When setting poetry to music, Caine does not let the literal meaning of the poems restrain his work. This is all the more true of Chinese poetry.
"We once played Mahler's Song of the Earth. It is based on Tang dynasty poet Li Po's works, but is also Mahler's own interpretation because the poems he read had been translated first into French and then from French into German. It had become a different poem. So instead of being fixed by the words, we ... freely interpret them." he said.
It is more than Lei's poetry that brought Caine back.
He said he was impressed by Taiwan's vitality in his last visit. "We did not expect such a strong response from the audience. The intensity was what we've never seen in other countries," he said, also citing the hospitality of the people he met on that trip.
Though travelling and performing mostly in Europe, he is open to the possibilities of working with artists from Taiwan or other Asian countries in the future. One of the projects he has in mind is more music interpretation on poetry in different languages.
"If I happened to know there's someone doing interesting works, I would like to try working with that person just to see what would come up. It's the chemistry between people. Anything can happen."
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