the most exciting musician i ever saw

In the early 1980's, Philadelphia was possessed of as lively and vital a music scene as any. Our punk rock scene was as switched-on as any (despite that relatively few record deals resulted), as was the local rap scene (Schooly D), etc etc.

In 1983, my somewhat mentor Eric Spiegel took me over to a bar on 18th St (between Sansom and Chestnut), where he wanted me to hear a jazz recorder player, Joel Levine. I said sure, and Joel Levine -- who looked like Tevye from Fiddler On The Roof -- was there, playing in a duo with a piano who looked like Groucho Marx. Joel took the first solo, and it was stunning. I'd heard few horn players that developed (still ain't). Then the Groucho looking guy took a solo that just about made me quit playing music. I'd never heard anyone quite hit an instrument like that.

That was my introduction to Uri Caine. Punk rock dared ask the musical question "Now what?", and he was the best answer I'd come to.

His playing through the 1980's was, for me, the most exciting thing of a very exciting decade. It didn't matter who or what was going on elsewhere. The Blasters would come to town, cool. X came to town, sweet. Wynton came through with Kenny Kirkland on piano, you bet. Muti was at the podium of the Philly Orch (oh well). Although Uri moved to NYC in 1985, he was still doing most of his gigs in Philly. A lot of the drummers were too loud (he was usually playing a shitty house piano mic'd badly) and often enough with bass players who didn't always lead the charge the best way. Generally, the nights I heard Uri play his most inspired were when the rhythm section was drummer Mickey Roker and either Wayne Dockery or Steve Beskrone on bass.

His playing at the time was based in a kind of cross between sixties Chick (his harmonies) and McCoy Tyner (his strength and rhythmic drive). All kinds of other stuff figured in -- his personal musical culture was the deepest I'd encountered up to that time -- but those two influences seemed to guide his playing at the time.

He had the most unapologetic playing style I've ever seen. He brought everything he ever heard, and he didn't disqualify. Enough reverse racism poked its head through into the music that -- and mind you, not enough to dominate anything, but just enough to make a young white guy wonder how well he fit -- that looking too educated might be a bad policy decision.

Uri was unapologetically cerebral, not only in his playing, but also in his speech. On the other hand, the same rhythmic boisterousness that characterized his playing for it's social form in his warm, loud laugh and his ability to get along with anyone. He spoke a little bit of several languages, too, which I thought was very hip. He reminded me of Fiorello LaGuardia, who was mayor of New York during those Damon Runyon years.

By the late 1980's, it was apparent that Uri was becoming one of the New York piano stars. He'd just started playing with Don Byron in the Don Byron Plays The Music Of Mickey Katz project (that established the place of klezmer music in the downtown scene of the period, and with it helped introduce several key players, including Uri, Josh Roseman, Mark Feldman, and most obviously Dave Douglas, especially when the DB Plays MK album dropped in '93). When Uri's own CD Sphere Music came out around the same time on the then-prominent JMT label, the feeling was, "Well, finally he's definitely not local anymore."

This clip is sometime in the last seven or eight years (around the last time I saw him, actually), playing with Dave Douglas' quintet. It gives you an eye (ear) into the thing I saw, that I heard all those dozens of times through the 1980's and for roughly twenty years more. The spark, brains, drive, and humanity. Probably the most exciting musician I ever saw.