The Third Story Podcast With Leo Sidran

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’s story is the stuff of legend. After finally getting his hands on a guitar as a teenager, he put together enough technique and understanding to get himself to the Ivory Coast to attend music school, and then managed to get to Paris for further musical study. Eventually he went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and then to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at UCLA  in Los Angeles (now called the Hancock Institute) where he had the opportunity to study and work with his greatest mentors: Terence Blanchard, Wayne Shorter Herbie Hancock. Soon he began to work with those same mentors, appearing on albums by B