Uri Caine - Dark Flame (2003)

With his forays into Brazilian music, hip-hop, and Bach, musical boundaries have no meaning for the Philadelphia-born pianist Uri Caine. On this CD, Caine takes on composer Gustav Mahler. Caine, along with his jazz companions, clarinetist Don Byron and trumpeter Ralph Alessi, expand and elaborate on 14 of Mahler's lieders. With his spry allusions to Herbie Hancock and Glenn Gould, Caine manages to "keep it real" in the classical tradition, and introduce jazz and world themes into these compositions. Augmented by an eclectic array of singers, actors, and poets, Caine and company manage to pull of a musical mutiny of pleasing proportions with the inclusion of opera, Hebraic, and Germanic concert music. The title track is a mournful elegy to the atrocities of Columbine and the Holocaust while "Labor Lost" riffs on Freudian psychoanalysis. "The Lonely One in Autumn" and "On Youth," adapted from Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde," breathe with an Asian atmosphere, thanks to the Silk Road sonorities of the Chinese erhu, dizi, and pipa instruments. Mahler remarked that, "I am thrice homeless. As a Bohemian born in Austria. As an Austrian among Germans. And as a Jew throughout the world." Uri Caine's expansive art is a welcome home for Mahler's restless and rootless genius.