The Third Story Podcast With Leo Sidran

Riley Mulherkar grew up in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest enclave that has been home to so many musical innovators over the years. He went to Garfield High School, a school that has fostered countless talents going all the way back to Quincy Jones who was himself a young trumpet player at the school in the 1940s. Riley was just eight years-old when he began seeing the legendary Garfield High School big-band play free gigs in his Seattle neighborhood; it’s one of the reasons he picked up the trumpet. He was clearly meant to play the instrument.  By the time he got to Juilliard in New York, Riley had shown up on the radar of Wynton Marsalis, who became a mentor. If this story is sounding familiar, it’s because it resembles the experience of so many musicians of his generation who have similar origin stories.  On a deeper level, it’s a story that echoes through the history of jazz - young musicians who are compelled to move to New York after only a small handful of interactions with their heroes.  Riley Mulherka

Jesse Harris belongs to a generation of New York singer songwriters who came of age in the late nineties. He has made over 20 solo albums that walk the line between folk, jazz, pop, Brazilian and art rock. He’s also a much sought after co writer and collaborator who has written songs for and or with many others like Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot, Lana del Rey, and most famously Norah Jones.  Jesse was already well into his career when he met a young Norah Jones on a road trip through Texas and played his songs for her. He had already been signed and dropped from a major label with his band Once Blue (a project he started with Rebecca Martin, and which also featured musicians Ben Street, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Kenny Wollesen), and had already been exploring a space in his songwriting that played in between jazz and pop.  But that chance encounter with Jones, who was still a student at the University of North Texas at the time, was the one that would change the course of Jesse’s career. They stayed in touch an

Ella Rae Feingold is a guitar player, composer, orchestrator, educator and content creator. She has spent three decades devoted to the soulful side of the electric guitar, and has worked with an impressive list of artists, including Bruno Mars, Erykah Badu and Common, The Roots, Jay-Z, Janet Jackson, Alicia Keys, Jill Scott, Queen Latifah and many more. On her Instagram and TikTok she is a rhythm ambassador, focussing on the importance of groove, pocket and feel in her playing and demonstrating various techniques and traditions in rhythm guitar. Hearing Ella play and talk about music, it’s clear that she has thought deeply about her craft for a long time. Guitarist Charlie Hunter recently referred to her as “one of the baddest, greasiest guitar players on the planet.” (Of course in this context “bad” and “greasy” are two of the highest compliments one can pay.) And yet she is also very much a new arrival.  Feingold has been hiding in plain sight for years - both figuratively and literally - standing in the

Paula Cole on her early success, dreaming big, her life and career, the power of “the beginner’s mind”, the distinction between being an artist and an entertainer, the feeling of being pregnant with song, speaking for those who cannot speak, navigating a life in the music business, learning from young people, and her new album, Lo.  www.third-story.com www.substack.leosidran.com www.wbgo.org/studios

In a career spanning over fifty years and thirty five records, Ben Sidran has established himself as a philosopher poet. Equally celebrated for his precise, probing writing style as he is for his improvised spoken word jazz raps, he has carved out a truly unique space for himself. The Times of London aptly described Ben as “the world’s first existential jazz rapper,” and The Chicago Sun Times once referred to him as “a renaissance man cast adrift in the modern world.” He is one of a kind. And he is, of course, also my dad.   There is no one else like Ben so it’s not uncommon for his fans and followers to search his songs for meaning in times of trouble. When the world is uncertain, many find comfort in the wisdom of his words (myself included!). Some of those songs have become classics among his elite tribe of hipster devotees, like “Life’s A Lesson,” “Face Your Fears,” and “Don’t Cry For No Hipster”.  So it was curious when, during the Covid pandemic, Ben chose to make his first ever fully instrumental recor

Shabaka Hutchings grew up between the UK and Barbados. He started playing clarinet as a young boy in Barbados and eventually moved back to England to go to music school in the early 2000s.  After college he began a period of working furiously on a kaleidoscopic range of projects and became an icon of the new sound of London jazz, which integrated African rhythms and modes, Caribbean and Middle eastern sounds and was largely danceable. Shabaka himself has never fully embraced the jazz label. While the music is highly improvised, and it owes much to the American jazz tradition, his influences are very broad. Over the course of the past decade, the majority of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. In these formations he displayed a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the South African jazz tradition.   Part of his signature on

Singer Jose James on his new record 1978, his professional and personal journey, the unique demands of being a jazz singer today, why he believes good art should be transformative, how he stays healthy, the creative challenges brought on by happiness and whether or not one needs to suffer in order to make good art.  This episode is dedicated to the late saxophonist and vocoder master Casey Benjamin who passed away on March 30th at the age of 45. Casey, a brilliant and influential musician, spent much of his career at the crossroads of jazz and hip hop. I never knew him but I was always very aware of him and a big admirer of his playing.  During this conversation with Jose James, Casey’s name came up several times. Given the context of his recent passing, what was originally a set of casual commentaries about Benjamin’s dedication to music and community was transformed into a tribute to him and I am heartened by how much admiration Jose and Taali had for their friend. www.third-story.com https://leosidran.sub

säje, the vocal group made up of singers Sara Gazarek, Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage won their first Grammy on Sunday for their arrangement of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning”.  They recorded it with one of the most admired musical minds today, Jacob Collier.  And like much of what has happened with so far, that recording was both unintended and totally right, somewhere between the reward for the hard work of talented artists, and magic.  The story plays like a dream. One day Jacob Collier stopped by the LA recording studio (Lucy’s Meat Market), where was working on their debut album. One thing led to another and he ended up playing a few free form takes of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” There’s footage of it online and you can see him improvising his arrangement. You can also see his childlike enthusiasm, his playful energy, his request to do just one more take, because he was having so much fun.  After Jacob left, the singers in säje built their vocal arrangement around

Ten years ago, on a bit of a whim, I invited bassist Will Lee to come over to my home studio in Brooklyn to do an interview with me for a new project I was starting: a podcast. A year or two earlier, my friend Michael Fusco-Straub had turned me on to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and I was totally hooked on the concept of casual long form interviews among peers. At the time Maron spoke almost exclusively to comics, and I thought there might be a space for something similar but focused on music. Although I didn’t have any real experience as a journalist or a broadcaster, I knew I could do it. In fact, maybe more than anything else I’ve ever done professionally, it was the most natural decision I can ever remember making.  But the format was a bit of a mystery. Who was I supposed to be? An expert on music? A friend of my guests? I thought maybe we would perform together. Or maybe they would demonstrate something. Or maybe it would be a document of the local scene in New York - in the early episodes I asked my guest

Trumpeter/composer Keyon Harrold was born and raised in Ferguson, MO to a musical family. He is the son of pastors and one of 16 children. As a boy, a trumpet was placed in his hands, and the rest is history.  He moved to New York to study at The New School in the 1990s and became part of a legendary generation of musicians associated with the neo soul movement, including Common, Bilal, Roy Hargrove, The Roots, and Robert Glasper.  Harrold is a reliable and sought after player among big acts, and he’s worked with Jay-Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, Eminem, Maxwell, Mac Miller and Snoop Dogg.  At the same time he’s a seriously gifted jazz improviser and composer, who was mentored by trumpeter Charles Tolliver, and who was once referred to as “the future of the trumpet” by Wynton Marsalis.  He supplied all of the trumpet playing in Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, playing to match Cheadle’s on-screen performance as Miles. The soundtrack to the film won a Grammy.  But while Keyon has enjoyed what might appear

Singer-songwriter Lau Noah grew up in the small Catalan city of Reus. She left Spain for America a decade ago, at age 19 and never really looked back. She makes celestial, dreamy music evocative of another era, yet influenced by her own very modern story.  Lau Noah is both a realist and a magical realist. She is an uncompromising and determined indie artist. She books her own shows, produces her own recordings, and advocates on her own behalf. She has a practical understanding of how to make compelling content, and how to communicate with her fans and her fellow artists. But she also appears to be searching the stars, deciphering her dreams, and following the river in her mind to the next location. Listening to Lau’s music is like watching a river flow. It’s all right in front of you, passing with natural fluidity. But you can never quite locate it, and you can never fully predict how it will move. The best way to experience it is to simply accept that it is flowing and let it wash over you.  The river, in fa

Ani DiFranco began recording and self-releasing her music as a 20 year old in Buffalo, New York in 1990. 34 years later she is widely considered to be a feminist icon. But in many ways she emerged iconic, fully formed and fearless.  A facile lyricist with a biting honesty, she played guitar with a virtuosic, rhythmic style. And she was ahead of her time as an independent artist who owned all her own masters and controlled most of the major aspects of her career. She’s sometimes called the mother of the DIY movement. DiFranco has released all of her albums (over twenty) on her Righteous Babe record label.  The label has also put out projects for other distinguished singer songwriters including Andrew Bird, Utah Phillips, Arto Lindsay, and Anaïs Mitchell whose own Hadestown project was first released as an album on Righteous Babe before being transformed into the Broadway hit that it is today. Ani Difranco’s most recent studio album Revolutionary Love came out in 2021. In 2022 she published a picture book for c

brad allen williams is not only a great guitar player but also a serious recording engineer, and someone who understands both the technical and emotional sides to record making. Known for his work with Jose James, Nate Smith and Brittany Howard, he released his album œconomy on Pete Min’s Colorfield label earlier this year.  Like all Colorfield releases, œconomy was born from an improvisatory spirit that reflects the label’s mission. Artists show up to the recording sessions with nothing written. They create spontaneously in the studio and then edit, arrange, and develop those improvisations into their record. In the case of brad’s œconomy album, he added string arrangements to his free form compositions and a few virtuosic cameos by drummer Mark Guiliana. This conversation is an exploration of that process and a master class in Memphis music history, a meditation on the merits of music with “layered emotions”, a conversation about the relationship between suffering and art, connecting the threads of noise ro

Pete Min is a recording engineer, producer and label owner based in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. His label Colorfield Records features artful collaborative explorations with musicians in unlikely configurations.  Pete’s studio Lucy’s Meat Market has become one of the most in demand spots for recording among a subset of musical artists with LA ties ranging from Ben Wendel and Larry Goldings to Andrew Bird and Feist.  Min started Colorfield Records to pursue a less traditional approach to recording, one that he refers to as “sculpted chaos.” He says, “I want what’s in the subconscious. I don’t want it ironed out. When people are just doing it and it’s coming out, that’s what I’m interested in.” Since launching in 2021 the label has released records by Abe Rounds, Larry Goldings, Mark Guiliana, Sam Gendel, Anthony Wilson, Brad Allen Williams and others.  Here Pete Min talks about his early development on the east coast, how moving to Los Angeles gave him the space to reinvent himself musically, and what it means to

Siblings Clyde and Gracie Lawrence have been making music together since they were little kids. They say there was never a moment when it switched from something they did for fun to something they did professionally. It has been a long, steady climb for them. Along with the other members of their band, Lawrence, they have been diligently chipping away at a pop music career, growing more popular every year, making music that straddles the line between pop, R&B and soul, and doing it on their own terms.  Here they talk about the overnight success that was a decade in the making, running their band like a business, taking matters into their own hands, writing songs with “epic messaging and specificity”, and how their experience as an independent touring band led to real meaningful change in the music industry. Listen to the first Third Story Podcast interview with Lawrence from 2020: https://www.third-story.com/listen/lawrence www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-th

Born in Bali, Indonesia, Joey Alexander has been performing professionally since 2013 when he was invited by Wynton Marsalis to perform at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Gala. He was 10 years old.   Alexander subsequently moved to the United States with his family and has been touring and recording ever since. Today he is 20 years old and releasing his seventh solo album Continuance.  Here he talks about his journey out of Bali and onto the bandstand, what it was like for him to be thrust into the limelight at such a young age, what he hopes for the future, and his new record. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios      

Bassist and composer Todd Sickafoose shows up in a lot of places: on stage with singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco or drummer Allison Miller, behind the scenes as a record producer for artists like Noe Venable and Anais Mitchell, orchestrating the music for the Broadway musical Hadestown (which earned him both a Grammy for record production and a Tony for orchestration), and as a bandleader.  His new record Bear Proof is his first album of original music in nearly 15 years. He describes it as “62 minutes of music for eight musicians.” The sound is evocative, melodically rich, rhythmically intense, and features a unique instrumentation of violin, accordion, electric guitar, acoustic piano, clarinet, cornet, bass and drums.  Here he talks about his multifaceted career, Hadestown and the process of putting together a Broadway show, working with Ani DiFranco, Bear Proof, releasing music in today’s world, why bass players make good producers, and how a skin cancer diagnosis influenced his life personally and professio

Alan Lightman is a physicist, writer (of novels, essays, memoir and science texts), and social entrepreneur. For this unusual episode, his interview served as inspiration for an original song. Made in collaboration with the Podsongs podcast, this conversation covers his career at the intersection of science and humanities, mortality, success, the cosmos, technology, consciousness, writing fiction, embracing ambiguity, out of body experiences, and the idea that there are no answers to profound questions. Also thanks to everyone who voted for the Signal Awards! We received a Silver Signal award for Music podcast.  www.third-story.comwww.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios www.podsongs.com    

Gregory "Hutch" Hutchinson is one of the most highly regarded and highly recorded jazz drummers on the planet. Part of what makes him so special is that he sits at the crossroads of the old school and the new school. He was mentored by old jazz masters like Red Rodney, Ray Brown and Betty Carter. He worked extensively with Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove, among many other innovative jazz musicians of his generation. He has also collaborated with the likes of Common, Karriem Riggins and James Poyser, all practitioners of a new school rhythm approach, influenced by pioneering producer J Dilla.  Hutch is able to summon the spirit authentically from both sides because both are part of his personal truth. But until now he has not been a recording artist. Now, at 53 years of age, after having played with everybody, he is releasing his debut solo record Da Bang, and it is not necessarily what one might have expected. Rooted in the jazz tradition, the album demonstrates Hutchinson's versatility, dynamism, and imagin

John “J.R.” Robinson is one of the most recorded drummers in history (some say he is the most recorded drummer) . He is the drummer on 20 number-one pop songs by artists such as Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie and Steve Winwood, and has been the drummer on more than 100 Grammy-winning tracks. He was said to be Quincy Jones’ favorite recording drummer. Here he talks about growing up in Iowa, falling in love with “groove music”, his incredible career, the stories behind some of his most celebrated recordings, what it means to have “contemporary time”, and his new band SRT. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast