The Third Story Podcast With Leo Sidran

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 albums. He is no stranger to large stages and tour busses. At the same time, much of his career has been a series of self generated projects.  On his YouTube channel, he shares tips, tricks, anecdotes and ideas, and he has coached thousands of students through his online Virtual Studio. I found Bob at the crossroads of what’s happening and where am I going, and we had a beautiful talk about managing that existential crisis that so many of us are having. He talked about his influences, approach, playing with Snarky Puppy, John Mayer, the subtle but significant distinction between practice and the practice, what it means

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 opportunities of the first Covid year, and how they see the future.  Italian singer Gege Telesforo, saxophonist John Ellis, bassist Joe Dart (sort of), guitarist Adam Levy, trombonist Ryan Keberle, artist manager Andrew Leib, singer songwriter Victoria Canal, artist and advocate Ari Herstand, guitarist Lage Lund, mud trudging songwriter Joy Dragland and funk magician Charlie Hunter (in his way) all weigh in.  Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and following the podcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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 culture into writing, and today she’s one of the most important advocates for Latin music in America. Her new book Decoding Despacito features 19 oral histories about some of the biggest and most significant latin hits of the last 50 years. With two acclaimed novels, two top-selling biographies and a landmark Latin music industry guide, Leila is one of the world's foremost experts in Latin music, as well as a prolific published author and speaker and the VP of Latin content for Billboard, widely recognized as the Bible of music worldwide. We spoke recently about the book, her personal journey, and the nuances of Latin musi

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 “everything is just a little more special on that day”.  While her daughter sings herself to sleep in the next room, Imogen talks about creating the Mi.Mu Gloves that she invented for her own performances before developing them for commercial use. “They are the world's most advanced wearable musical instrument, for expressive creation, composition and performance.” As the night unfolds, she’ll tell you about her app (ImogenHeap.app) where she connects regularly and directly with her fans (self proclaimed “Heapsters”), sharing song demos, weekly live stream concerts, works in progress, and casual conversations about hers

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, with a half-dozen solo records to his credit, and plenty of pavement behind him too. He says, “I woke up every day for 10 years with a list as long as my arm of things to take care of.” Until the success of that album, despite recording for the biggest labels in the world, he never had a manager. But he was determined, and with each new record he climbed just a little further up the mountain, searching for the next thing.  In fact he always thought of himself as more of a searcher or a traveler than he did a musician. “Music was my ticket,” he says. Maybe that’s why he has been known to take extended hiatuses fro

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 get to these points of surrender and ecstasy. Something wonderful happens because you went on this journey together. It’s so revealing and it’s so fulfilling.” Eric Harland is one of the most in demand jazz drummers of his generation. He has played with everybody. Betty Carter, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson, Michael Brecker, Terrence Blanchard, Wayne Shorter, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Esperanza Spalding, Taylor Eigsti, Julian Lage, Robert Glasper, Joshua Redman, Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Charles Lloyd, John Mayer, and on and on and on. He has appeared on over 400 recordings, and continues to appear at the top of

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 he is a full time YouTuber - his channel “Everything Music” has over 2 million subscribers - and has made nearly 800 videos, on subjects including Ear Training, Music Production, Improvisation, Scales and Modes, Film Scoring, Music Theory and Composition, Perfect Pitch, and Guitars. For curious musicians, music students, and music appreciators in the YouTube generation, Rick’s channel is simply part of the furniture, something you probably have come across one way or another. But despite being a very public facing teacher and generator of ideas, there is not so much information about him. If you watch his videos th

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 idea of play and experimentation in art. He is also totally serious about what he does, he’s a serious thinker, and he takes enormous care with what he does and how he does it. He might be playing, but he’s not messing around.  A lifelong student, his path has been somewhat self directed. He spent his formative musical years taking lessons at the Drummers Collective in New York, where he came in contact with a group of musicians who would shape his music and his career, and got what he calls “the inside stuff”. Notably, he refers to drummer and composer Bob Moses as one of his primary mentors.  He made a documentary fi

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 child of immigrants (an exile baby, he calls himself), Jewish, his father is an electronic musician. But in middle school he ended up spending time in North Carolina where he connected with black culture and music. After heading back to Venezuela for high school he ended up moving to Boston and then New York for two years of college. But quickly he left school and started assisting the legendary producer Nile Rogers. So before he was 25 he had worked on records for the B-52’s, Chic, Chaka Khan, CeCe Peniston, Tina Turner, even Eddie Murphy.  Then he started thinking about how to apply his already not insignificant expe

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 life and those around him.  He’s sensitive in his approach musically and lyrically - his vibe is not aggressive even when the subject matter is uncomfortable. At the same time, he’s a big guy. He played Division 1 football at Boise State before committing to music full time.  Raj is prolific and seems to be constantly making videos and releasing singles. One recent single from earlier this year was  called Tesla in a Pandemic about he got a new car this year. He uses that image to meditate on the world around him, friends who have not been so lucky or successful, his youth and his parents.  His new EP California Poppy 2

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 of 2006's Spring Awakening, a hit rock musical that featured Sheik’s score (and which won the Tony for Best Original Score as well as a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album) planted him firmly in the world of Broadway. He has continued to write for theater, often collaborating with poet and playwright Steven Sater.  Over the years he has explored electronic music, folk music, and enjoyed covering songs by his favorite writers, many of whom were influential to him as a boy.  His new record Live at the Cafe Carlyle, a small format live concert was recorded in the pre pandemic playground of the upper east side, back whe

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 involved and the duo would eventually call themselves The Jerky Boys. Those original tapes started circulating, being passed around at college campuses and among musicians. The Jerky Boys became one of the most bootlegged acts in the world, before ultimately signing a proper record contract (their first record was on Atlantic Records) and going on to sell millions of copies of their prank call collections. They made a movie, did commercials, became famous, launched careers, and created classic characters. Then the Jerky Boys stopped making new recordings and the two friends went their separate ways. Johnny became a voice a

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 for me that just makes sense.  Louis is a prolific multi instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, arranger, video maker, surrealist, funk monkey, producer and personality. Despite his extensive output as a solo artist, with his band Knower, and as a guest with others, he is slightly reclusive and still somewhat of a mystery.  After more than three years of attempting to set this up, Louis and I spoke recently to talk about where he came from, what he’s doing now, and where he hopes to go. Along the way he touched on writing “nostalgic music that feels almost like a memory of something that never happened”, overcoming fear,

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 about all of the above. Somehow, along the way we touch on his thoughts on the beauty of old things, Tikun Olam (the Jewish concept of healing the world) as a response to a universal call from deep in the frontal cortex, “The cruelty of our own DNA”, Chaos theory, the future of small jazz clubs, and how “we are all survivors of chaos”.  Then we try to figure out what that has to do with Les McCann’s recording of the song “Maxie’s Changes” (with the largely unknown tenor saxophone player Frank Haynes). www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bensidran.com

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 both the New York gospel and R&B communities before he joined the band Snarky Puppy, but by the time he left the band in 2015 to form his solo project The Funk Apostles, he had become a kind of phenomenon. During his time with Snarky Puppy he played on the Grammy winning song “Something” featuring Lalah Hathaway. In recent years Cory has stretched out as a bandleader, songwriter and singer too. His new record Something To Say finds Cory writing and singing about “bigger things”. He says, “This is my opportunity to say what I want to say. Because my music is supposed to be in this time...I’ll get back to the party re

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 YouTuber. His Scorestudy video series unpacks the mechanisms and underlying processes informing his favorite composers, and explores ideas about composition, process, nature, technique, and history. ...a thoughtful guy. Here we consider the role of critical analysis in music, the “unintended consequences of the capitalist nature of music education,” what it means to improvise like a composer, how reading James Joyce influenced his relationship to listening to and writing music and led him to “create artwork that invites people to put forth some effort,” why he loves “to be actively involved in things that you're a b

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 starting a record label (after running one for 19 years). Here we discuss what happened in between.  Although this conversation was recorded in the before times of 2019, listening back I am struck by a few particularly interesting ideas that emerge in the talk: the distinction between culture and subculture; that we are now in an era of “constant content”; the shift over time from the taste maker as an institution to the taste maker as an individual personality; and what he describes as “the economy of cool”. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.brassland.org

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 Show. He has appeared on Adam Carolla, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Comedy Central Presents among other shows. Cesario was a part of two Emmy wins with Dennis Miller Live. He’s a real comedy success story, in his longevity and in his ease both behind the camera and in front of it. Jeff’s new standup album, What Was I Thinking, is out now and available in all the places you find albums. And his podcast Play With Pain with Chet Waterhouse is also available in all the podcast places. We spoke recently about the “power of insulation” (working out your craft inside of a small scene), how he approaches his standup

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 including Ben Wendel, Shai Maestro and Sullivan Fortner among many others, Philip moved to Denton, TX in 2019 to join the faculty at University of North Texas. Earlier this year, we got on the phone to catch up, and that’s what this episode really is: Something between a more structured career retrospective interview and a temperature check in the time of Covid, a conversation about what and how he thinks about playing, teaching (“preparing for my teaching is the most helpful thing that I’ve ever done for myself”), practicing (“the more specific your questions are, the more specific your answers will become”), potent

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 drives. But anyway, she decided that her original concept was too intellectual and that it was time to make something more intuitive. Encouraged by her musical (and personal) partner Ori Rousso, she wanted to make something that wasn’t so uncool.  So she began producing tracks that straddle hip hop, pop. electronic, inspired by Bjork, Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus. Her first record, Off The Radar, came out in 2017 and included the song “Dance While You Shoot” that was featured in an Apple Music commercial. She toured in the states and Europe, and was positioned for a big year in 2020 as she prepared to release her new