Michael Cain’s abilities reach into multiple spheres. A music educator who directs MacPhail Center for Music’s Electronic Music Recording Arts program, he also writes music, and recently composed a score for Boston Ballet. He’s a keyboardist/pianist equally comfortable in the studio and on stage— and a co-founder and CEO of a new app called Ekwe that connects learners of all abilities with musical instruments from around the world and offers compositional tools. You can see him perform this week at Berlin with bassist Ted Olsen and Adam Nussbaum playing drums.
“The amazing thing with Cain is that he’s a good DJ. He’s good at doing traditional jazz, free jazz, he’s done lots of hip hop stuff, lots of R&B recordings,” says Cain’s former student-turned collaborator Keith Price. “He’s a master musician.”
Price studied with Cain at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. “He was a fantastic teacher,” Price told me by phone. “I could ask him about hip hop. I could ask him about electronic music, and he was open to it all. He was kind of mindblowing. Studying with him changed my life.”
As a student, Price remembered Cain convincing the dean to buy a whole new set of turntables. “He was a breath of fresh air,” Price said.
Price went on to head the jazz program at University of Auckland, in New Zealand, and invited Cain to come down as a guest lecturer two years ago. Earlier this summer, he recorded a trio album in New York along with percussionist Pheeroan aklaff.
“It was a very relaxed session, actually,” Price said. “We weren’t so worried about getting things perfect, but there was room to kind of explore.”
I caught up with Cain earlier this summer at MacPhail, and had a long chat with the cool and collected musician about his latest goings on. He had recently wrapped up his project with Boston Ballet, a two-and-a-half year endeavor collaborating with the Ballet’s music director Mischa Santora and choreographer Ken Ossola. Inspired by Michelangelo’s “Prisoners” statues, an example of the sculptor’s unfinished (non-finito) works, the 6-movement score wove together orchestral and electronic sounds. Cain composed primarily the electronic elements in the score, and performed live on stage, tucking his keyboard, headphones, and interface in between the harp and the double bass.
Cain had met Santora around five years ago, when Santora was the artistic director for a concert series at MacPhail, and curated a concert where Cain integrated acoustic piano with electronics. They worked together a year later on a piece for the Minnesota Bach Ensemble, where Cain played electronic keyboard along with a baroque chamber ensemble.
“I’ve done these kinds of intersections of electronic and acoustic and other things for quite a few years,” Cain said.
Collaborating with a ballet company was a bit of a homecoming for Cain, as he began taking dance classes as a youngster, from the age of 5 to about 12. “It’s like, wow, I remember this world,” he said. For many of those years, Cain believed he’d pursue dance as a living, with piano as a close second option for a career path. Somewhere in his pre-teen years, he decided for certain that his path forward was with piano and keyboards.
Born in Los Angeles, Cain’s father, Henry Cain, was an organ player that had been a part of a noteworthy Los Angeles collective in the 1960s called The Wrecking Crew, made up of studio musicians who played for music that spanned Frank Sinatra to the Beach Boys to rock and roll. “Those musicians were incredibly fast,” Cain said. “They’d come in, play it perfectly the first time.”
Cain’s parents split when he was very young, and his father stayed in Los Angeles while his mother moved to Las Vegas. Eventually, his father moved to Las Vegas as well and was based there until he died in the 1990s.
Having grown up in Las Vegas, Cain considers it his “hometown.” He does most of his studio work in Las Vegas as well, most recently venturing into keyboard organ parts for country rock songs.
He calls the Las Vegas music landscape both high caliber and diverse, and growing more so in the last 20 years. He primarily works at a studio called the Tone Factory, where he operates as a kind of a house keyboardist, sitting in on sessions as an organist or creating synth sounds. “That’s probably my favorite work in the world, to do studio work,” he said.
Often, Cain said, there’s no sheet music or notation when he participates in studio sessions.
“I walk in the studio at 10 In the morning, and then I hear the song for the first time,” he said. “ I have to learn it instantly. I have to translate what the engineer or the producer or the artist is telling me.”
With changing technology, often Cain can now work outside the studio as well, which he’s able to do from his other home base in Minneapolis, where he lives with his wife.
“I really appreciate the value, and thoroughly respect the musical community here,” Cain said of the Twin Cities. “There’s a history here of strong Black music, gospel, roots that then fold into R&B and soul with Prince and Jimmy Jam. There’s a reason Janet Jackson was recording here, even though she was still living in LA at the time.”
He also performs here, but keeps things at a timed out schedule. “I’m 58 now,” he told me. “When I was 28, I was playing six nights a week. I was spending as much time in Europe as I did in New York, and as much time in Japan as I did, you know, wherever. And there was about a 15-20 year stretch where I was literally on hundreds of albums and was just touring all the time.”
“Now if I perform six times a year, I would consider that a really full year for me, but every one of those gigs would be like the Boston Ballet— really special, something that I go deep into and really care about,” he said.
Cain reduced the number of gigs he played in part because he found doing that shortened the time window to learn new music.
“The gigs pay what they pay, but the gift is the gift you get from the music,” he said. “And thinking about how this composer is thinking and learning it and being challenged. Every one becomes a growth opportunity. That’s the real reason you do it. You ain’t getting rich.”
After playing at Berlin on August 17, Cain’s Trio heads to Brazil for a music festival in September. In October, he’s gearing up for a performance at MacPhail featuring the Ekwe app, designed to help people digitally compose music, and also work with the sounds of instruments from around the world.
The app is used as an educational tool and it’s also been used by people with ALS. Liz Stanley, the arts program manager for the ALS Association, said participants in the association have used the app as a way to connect to their creativity.
One participant, a former professional musician, has been using the app through the program as a way to connect to music after playing her original instrument became impossible. “This has really opened new doors for her,” Stanley said. “She thought her music making practice was over. And this has really brought her a lot of joy. And she’s been using the app pretty regularly.”
Cain designed the app at the beginning of the pandemic with his partner Jeff Sugerman, and then spent about a year looking for the right coder that had the expertise they needed. Eventually they found a team of Romanian brothers who had experience in music software.
You’ll be able to see the app at work at the Samarth Nagakrkar, North Indian Classical Voice + Jazz concert at MacPhail on October 12. That event will feature international musicians performing North Indian classical music, and a fusion of that tradition with jazz music.
In the meantime, check out the Michael Cain Trio Saturday, Aug. 17 at 8 p.m. at Berlin ($15). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].