The Third Story with Leo Sidran

In March 2020, just as the world was closing under the advancing cloud of Covid 19, I spoke to a handful of musician friends from around the world to hear how they were doing and to explore some of the pressing questions around the shutdown and the arts.  One year later, I check in with (almost) all of them to hear what the last year has been like for them, what were the challenges and opportuniti...

Before she became a journalist, writer, novelist, television show host, and the editor of Latin music coverage for Billboard magazine, Leila Cobo played the piano. She moved from her home in Colombia to New York to study classical piano at the Manhattan School of Music. Music was her mode of transportation.  Eventually she channeled her love of music and her understanding of Latin music and cultur...

Imogen Heap has to put her daughter to bed, then she can talk about what she's been working on. She can tell you about her latest single, " Last Night Of An Empire " which she released on December 9th. Coincidentally, that's also the day she launched The Creative Passport , a verified digital ID for Music Makers. In fact, December 9 has always been an auspicious day for her. It's her birthday and...

Just hearing the name Boz Scaggs evokes a feeling. It's a hip, laid back, soulful, approachable feeling. It's a southern thing. But it's a San Francisco thing too. He is, as his most recent record proclaims, Out Of the Blues. But he's played his share of rock and roll, r&b, and even jazz too.  When Boz hit it big in the late 70s with his record Silk Degrees, he was already knee deep in the swamp,...

Eric Harland thinks about time. He thinks about taking time, he thinks about giving time, and he thinks about sharing time.  He'll tell you: "Time is a joint effort. It's everybody at once. You want to talk about synergy, alliance, brotherhood and sisterhood? Just watch people getting together and having to play time. So much shows up in that. There's so much judgement, so much blame. But then you...

When record producer Rick Beato posted a video on YouTube of his 8 year old son in a dizzying demonstration of perfect pitch, complex harmonic understanding and a general fluency with the building blocks of composition, he had no idea just how big an impact it would have on his life. Already in his 50s, Rick had decades of experience invested in his career in the record business. Five years later...

Billy Martin (also known as illy B) is many things. He's a visual artist, a filmmaker, a teacher, a builder, a composer, a record producer... But if you know his name, chances are it's from his band Medeski, Martin and Wood, a project he's had for 30 years now along with bassist Chris Wood and keyboardist John Medeski.  Billy refers to his artistic approach as playful and he is committed to the id...

As Andres Levin will tell you, even he has trouble explaining his career and life in a succinct, organized, bite sized way. He's a record producer, bandleader, filmmaker, composer, philanthropist, New Yorker, Venezuelan, Jew, funk practitioner, latin soul ambassador, big picture guy with a granular understanding of the mechanics of the business for over 30 years.  Andres grew up in Venezuela, a ch...

Raised by a god-fearing mother and a Black Panther father in the mecca of progressive politics, singer, rapper and entrepreneur Rexx Life Raj's music perfectly articulates the beauty and struggle of being a young black adult in 2020.  His voice is soulful, buttery, sweet even. At the same time he's very real, very honest and confessional, unpacking all of the tragedies and successes of his own lif...

Duncan Sheik's career has not followed a straight line. After studying semiotics at Brown University, he emerged in the mid 1990s as a pop singer songwriter with his hit "Barely Breathing", and quickly revealed himself to bend toward more literate adult oriented rock. He continued to make records and land himself on the charts but also began exploring composition for film and theater.  The success...

Johnny Brennan was a wise cracking kid from New York who had a natural gift for doing voices and making up characters. First, he did it to crack up his family. When he started recording the prank phone calls that he made to try out his characters in the real world, he made tapes for his brothers. At the time, he was "hanging off of buildings, doing construction." His friend Kamal Ahmed got involve...

There are times when the right song reaches us at the right time. Sometimes it's a brand new song. Sometimes it's a classic. Sometimes it's something you've heard a hundred times before but the stars align just right, and you hear it with fresh ears. Other times, it's like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere. During these recent Covid months, the song "Things" by Louis Cole has been one of those fo...

Whenever my dad and I get together to talk, there is no predicting where the conversation will lead. It always has a way of making some kind of sense, and tying together the strands of our diverse interests, from jazz to sociology, popular culture to politics. Just as we did on the morning of the presidential election in 2016, here we discuss the results of the 2020 election and what it might say...

There is a video you can find on YouTube of Cory Henry at age four, playing Hammond organ in church, wearing a suit and tie. It's very clear in the video that he was made to play music. So it should come as no surprise that over the last decade, Cory has become one of the most celebrated, influential, exciting keyboard players of his generation.  Cory was already building a name for himself in bot...

Brian Krock is... ...a saxophone player. A self described "woodwind doubler" he has devoted much of his career to playing multiple wind instruments credibly. ...a bandleader and composer. His big band, Big Heart Machine is one of the most innovative and exciting large ensembles today, and his smaller band Liddle pushes the boundaries between composed and improvised music in new directions. ...a Yo...

Alec Hanley Bemis, writer and manager of cultural projects, co-founded the Brassland record label in 2001 along with his friends Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the band The National. Over the years, the label has become home to a community of like minded creative musicians who defy category. Last month Alec published a piece in Creative Independent called 19 things I'd tell people contemplating starti...

In the late 1970s Jeff Cesario was positioned to be one of the most in demand wedding band conga players in Wisconsin and some parts of Minnesota too. So why did he trade all that in and move to LA to pursue a career in comedy? Here, he tells that story.  Since then, Jeff has been an actor, comedian, producer and writer, who has written and produced for Dennis Miller Live and The Larry Sanders Sho...

Trumpeter Philip Dizack was once named by Downbeat Magazine as "[one of twenty-five] Trumpet Players for the Future". That's not to say that he isn't for the present and with a deep respect for the tradition as well.  After nearly 20 years in New York, playing with a long list of notable musicians ranging from mentors like Brian Lynch, Eddie Palmieri, and Bobby Watson to members of his own cohort...

Israeli singer Noga Erez thinks about the fallacy of authenticity, the advantages of creative limitations, the way personal stories can be perceived as political, and what it means to make music with your heart instead of your head.  She started out as a jazz singer, performing and recording her original songs with a piano trio. Those recordings are long gone, lost in a pile of defective hard driv...

For the second year in a row, I talk to my dad, musician/producer/journalist/philosopher Ben Sidran in honor of his birthday. This time he's turning 77, and we consider his recent projects, including the books The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma and There Was A Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream , and his latest single "Who's The Old Guy Now".  Of course these are atypical times, and so this is an at...

Eric Krasno is in a lot more places than one might realize. Known for his work with the bands Soulive and Lettuce, he also works with all kinds of groups as a player - including the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Phil Lesh and Friends, Oteil Burbridge and Friends...it's a lot of friends. Maybe that's because he has one foot in the jam band world: the universe of extended grooves, risky riffing and close co...

Drummer Jochen Rueckert has some things to get off his chest.  Born and raised outside of Cologne, Germany, Rueckert started coming to New York as soon as he possibly could. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was already well into paying his dues. He can be heard on over 120 albums and worked or recorded with musicians and bands such as the Marc Copland Trio, the Kurt Rosenwinkel new quartet,...

Rudresh Mahanthappa has the kind of biography that suggests he might be an intimidating and serious person to talk to. He's the Director of Jazz at Princeton University where he teaches improvisation and directs small groups. He has been listed frequently in the Critics' Poll of Down Beat magazine. He studied music in India and brought that exploration into his own style of hybridized jazz (done i...

Brother and sister Clyde and Gracie Lawrence say that they've been professional musicians all their lives, they just weren't always making money at it.  Raised around creative people (their mother is a dancer and their father a film director), Clyde and Gracie were encouraged to be creative from the very start. So it's no real surprise that at a very young age, they began making hip, accessible, f...

Singer-songwriter Louise Goffin says she is "uncomfortable with nostalgia". Louise Goffin says that "in order to take care of the world, you have to take care of your inner soul." Louise Goffin says "don't believe everything you think." Her new record Two Different Movies was co-produced by Louise and Dave Way, and features a long list of incredible musicians and collaborators. Our conversation it...