The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Benny Benack III didn't necessarily start out thinking he would be a hipster crooner. He spent his 10,000 hours dealing with the trumpet, and he's still dealing with it. He tells me that he brings it with him everywhere - even on dates. He says, "Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Roy Hargrove, and Clark Terry were my early idols and everything about my musical identity is steeped in the trumpet voc...

When Lionel Loueke was coming of age as a young guitar player in his home country of Benin in West Africa, there were no music stores of any kind. He would have had to travel to Nigeria - the next country over - just to get his hands on some new strings. So he made due with what he had, cleaning and soaking, reusing his strings and even going so far as to tie knots in them when they broke. Lionel'...

Before Tyler Duncan was a Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist producer/composer with credits including Carly Rae Jepsen, Vulfpeck, Lake Street Dive, Theo Katzman, Scary Pockets and Antwaun Stanley , he was just a kid from Michigan who was obsessed with bagpipes.  Tyler is still based in his hometown Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he makes artful, patient, beautifully crafted productions in his home...

Advice from friends and family ranging in age from 10 to 93 about how to stay young, what makes a meaningful life, ambition, desire, fear, success and music.  With  Sol Sidran, age 10 Zelta Sils, age 10 Zane Gruber Baruth, age 21 Michael Thurber, age 34 Michael Leonhart, age 47 Jorge Drexler, age 57 Daniel Levitin, age 63 Gil Goldstein, age 71 Ben Sidran, age 78 Howard S. Becker, age 93 www.third-...

30 years ago Martin Sexton made a record called In The Journey . It wasn't so much a record as it was a glorified demo tape that he sold while busking on the streets of Boston. He had moved there from his hometown of Syracuse, New York where he grew up in a large family (he was the 10th of 12 siblings). From the very beginning, Sexton figured out how to marry dynamic, soulful live performances wit...

Mike Errico's new book Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter is about songwriting, and the life of the songwriter.  Errico teaches songwriting at NYU, Yale and Wesleyan. He's a serious thinker, and a serious talker. But he's also a musician - he came of age in a music business that no longer exists, where a young songwriter could get signed to a contract on the streng...

Madison McFerrin says she's "Shedding the narrative about what it means to be an artist in the music industry." In fact, she says she's had to learn to shed a lot of things. Like her "identity".  She calls herself an independent singer-songwriter, which is both true and also not entirely the whole story. Questlove calls her a "soul-appella" singer because she first found a wide audience doing solo...

In this bonus episode, actor, author, poet, director, screenwriter, narrator of films, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote talks about Buddhism, the "JewBu" phenomenon, the distinction between suffering and affliction, the limitations of language, the True Self, why it's so difficult to speak about attachment, the creative process, and his newfound passion for poetry.  This conversation was organ...

Monica Martin was 18 years old, driving in the car with her friend Matt and singing along with the radio. She had always enjoyed "hamming it up" and singing along to music, but she had no intention of taking it seriously. But the universe had other plans for her. Her friend, who  Matt, who was a musician, coaxed her into performing; she started to sing in public and on friends' records, which all...

Drummer, composer and bandleader Nate Smith is known and celebrated in many circles.  In recent years his drumming has become as influential as it has been ubiquitous. Transcription books of his playing have been written, and any drummer trying to play funk or pocket oriented music today will have to confront Nate's playing one way or another. He has a very specific and personal way of drumming, b...

Family musicians Dan and Claudia Zanes had just moved to Baltimore from Brooklyn when Covid came on. In an effort to be useful, creative, and connected, they decided to record a video of a new song every day until it was over. They called it their  "Social Isolation Song Series." They imagined it would continue for a month or two. Two hundred musical days later we wrapped it up. As they tell it, s...

George Wein opened his first jazz club, Storyville, in the early 1950s when he was a young man. He then created the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. The festival became an icon among music festivals and influenced the way music was presented around the world. I spoke to George just before he turned 90, in 2015. At the time he was still vital and vibrant, working tirelessly to further the mission of...

Joe Alterman is a southern guy with a sunny disposition. He came from Atlanta, and despite having put in years in New York, he never managed to shake off the southern charm.  Joe is a piano player who wears his influences on his sleeve. While his contemporaries were deconstructing the music, Joe was drawn to the playing of more classic masters, like Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis and Les McCann. He lov...

By the time Antwaun Stanley entered the University of Michigan in the late aughts, he was already 15 years into what could be considered to be a successful singing career. He was signed as a contemporary gospel artist, had made the rounds on TV shows and singing contests, had been through a series of managers, producers and handlers who all recognized the immense electricity in his singing and his...

For the third year in a row, I talked to my dad, musician/producer/journalist/philosopher Ben Sidran in honor of his birthday. This time he's turning 78, and we consider the "buddhist roots of jazz", joy and pain, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer , the final recordings of Lester Young, saxophonist Willis Jackson's 1978 album Bar Wars , drummer Nate Smith's latest record, how you know when you're ol...

Jon Lampley knows how to "get in where you fit in." He's been doing it since he was a boy in an Ohio suburb, spending his week as "the only black kid at school" and his Sundays at Apostolic church in Akron, learning to play gospel music and call the spirit down.  He also learned early on that commitment is crucial to what he does, commitment not only to the music he plays but also to the people he...

If you've ever seen or heard Michael Bland play drums, you probably didn't forget it. He was legendary practically from the moment he started playing professionally as a teenager in Minneapolis. Maybe you've heard him with Nick Jonas & the Administration, Cory Wong, Chaka Khan, Maxwell, Soul Asylum, Mandy Moore, Jo hnny Lang, David Crosby or Vulfpeck. Chances are, you definitely heard him playing...

Philip Lassiter spent his early years in Mobile, Alabama. He was the son of a white pentecostal preacher. "They clapped on one and three in my father's church," he says. Moving to Peoria, Illinois as a teenager was a revelation for him. As he tells it, "They beat the racist out of me in Peoria." Lassiter's story, both musical and personal, is a bit hard to unravel. He somehow managed to pay dues i...

When Julian Lage plays guitar, it's hard not to get swept up in it. His relationship with the instrument is natural and contagious. Maybe that's because it's been with him for most of his life. When he was just 8 years old, Julian was the subject of an Academy Award nominated documentary film called Jules at Eight . Before he entered his teens, he had already performed with Carlos Santana and jazz...

Michael Mayo is cautious when it comes to labels and categories. He prefers for the language he uses to be "descriptive rather than prescriptive." It's easy to understand why: because he defies category in many ways.  A singer and composer who draws equally from the deep well of jazz vocal language and from neo soul, he's a modern classic.  Growing up in a musical family in LA (both of his parents...

A story about stories. How seven years and nearly 200 episodes of podcast interviews inspired the record The Art Of Conversation . Excerpts of conversations with Amy Cervini, Andre De Shields,  Jorge Drexler, Kat Edmonson, Kurt Elling, John Fields, Larry Goldings, Tatum Greenblatt, Ryan Keberle, Jo Lawry, Orlando le Fleming, Adam Levy, Howard Levy, Anya Marina, Matt Munisteri, Ricky Peterson, Becc...

When singer/songwriter/educator Roxana Amed moved from her home in Argentina to the United States, she didn't walk. But she might as well have. She describes her new record as being like "a bag full of songs and memories" that she collected on her way from one shore to another. She seems to stand with one foot wading in the waters of the Hudson River and the other in the Rio de la Plata.  When she...

For a farmer's daughter from Western Kentucky like SG Goodman, a career as a singer-songwriter was not the obvious choice. Her family had farmed the same land for generations, and the path was laid out for her. On the other hand, coming from a long line of "some of the best storytellers who ever lived" a life spent writing and singing songs made plenty of sense.  Pretty much everything out of her...

There are some musicians who live in multiple universes at the same time. Clyde Stubblefield was one of those. From 1971 until his death in 2017, he lived and worked in Madison, Wisconsin. He was a local treasure, a celebrated adopted son of the midwest, and a legendary character. For those who had the chance to know him, to play with him and to see him in action, he was like a brother. At the sam...

This year musicians and creative people have had to confront themselves, their work, and their ambitions head on, and Bob Reynolds is no exception. But unlike so many of us, Bob already had some mechanisms in place to process that struggle in a creative way.  Bob Reynolds is a Grammy Award-winning saxophonist, composer, and educator known for his work with Snarky Puppy, John Mayer, and 12 solo alb...