A feature by Mark Mazullo

As an artist, Caine lives in the contact points between genres, eras, and styles, and he does so freely. Prehistoric, early modern, modern, postmodern, classical, jazz, popular: styles and categories, disparate in time and space, mingle and merge, defying singularity, resisting isolation. His vision attacks the same parochialism that troubled Adorno, a mode of listening prominent not only in the classical context, but, as Caine intimates, in jazz and popular realms as well. Moreover, he proves time and again that when it comes to musical meaning, the performance is everything. The score is a mere skeleton frame, lifeless, cold, eager for human contact, a touch, a breath. In his exuberant and virtuosic experiments, he urges us to value equally the grandeur of the work and the necessity of the interpretive spark, the objective and the subjective, the limit and the limitless. Above all, he requires of his listeners a refusal of bias, an opening of ears, a leaving behind of fear.