Uri Caine’s “Passion” of Racial Prejudice

courtesy of DL Media

At the end of last month, 816 Music, which appears to distribute only through download, released The Passion of Octavius Catto, the latest project of jazz pianist and composer Uri Caine. The title character was a freedom fighter in 19th century Philadelphia, a time and place that were not ready to deal with issues such as civil rights for people of all races and backgrounds. Caine performs at the piano in a trio whose other members are Mike Boone on bass and Clarence Penn on drums. However, they are only a small fraction of the performing resources, which include a full orchestral ensemble (called The Catto Freedom Orchestra), two vocal groups (The Nedra Neal Singers and The Philadelphia Choral Ensemble), and solo vocalist Barbara Walker. Clearly, a conductor is required; and that post has been taken by André Raphel.

My “first contact” with Caine must have been about 15 years ago in Herbst Theatre. That was when his trio was working on approaches to the music of Gustav Mahler. The results recalled a joke that must have been old when my father learned it:

Uri Caine played Mahler in Herbst last night … Mahler lost.

Caine’s approach involved extracting “the best tunes” from Mahler scores and then trying to improvise around them. San Francisco is a town that takes its Mahler very seriously, whether in Herbst or in Davies Symphony Hall; and, those who really dig their Mahler know that the themes themselves are a mere fraction of what makes his music so compelling. Caine clearly had no sense of the fundamental essence of Mahler; and, to this day, I still remember the agonies of sitting through two hours of utter cluelessness.

The same can be said of his understanding of the Passion as a musical genre most often associated with Johann Sebastian Bach but considerably older in the full scope of music history. While the genre began simply as an account of New Testament scripture, Bach extended it to interleave Holy Writ with commentary. The closest that Caine’s version comes to “Holy Writ” is a delivery by Walker of the texts of the thirteen, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution against a choral background with Caine at the piano. The rest of the libretto amounts to a collection of episodes that never really congeal into a narrative emerging through an inchoate muddle of different musical styles.

If I read Caine’s biography correctly, it seems that he studied composition with both George Rochberg and George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvanian somewhere around the mid-Seventies. There is a good chance that, at that time, I was on the other side of the parking lot in my office in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. From time to time I would cross that lot, usually to use the Music Library; but I also attended a seminar at which I acquired some basic skills in paleography under the tutelage of Norman Smith, my first real encounter with the distinction between marks on paper and the practices of making music.

Bearing that time frame in mind, I have to wonder whether Caine ever encountered The Gospel at Colonus, a musical interpretation of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” conceived as a gospel service staged by Mabou Mines veteran Lee Breuer. Music was provided by Bob Telson, whose understanding of gospel music was, to say the least, prodigious. I was fortunate enough to attend one of the first performances of this piece in 1983, when it was presented by the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When placed beside Colonus, The Passion of Octavius Catto is weak in narrative and tedious in execution.

I hate it when I find myself saying, “Things were much better 35 years ago!”