The Third Story Podcast With Leo Sidran

Sometimes when a child of a musician shows an interest or an aptitude in playing music themselves, it’s called “the curse”. Sometimes the curse is revealed in mysterious ways, and the cursed child might not even realize that they have the curse until something clicks in them, a light goes off, a switch flips.  In the case of Adam O’Farrill, he says he discovered his curse when, at 8 years old, he went to his older brother’s Zach’s middle school band concert and saw the trumpet player. Looking back on it, he admits that part of it was simply the shine and brilliance of the instrument - he was called to it. He certainly wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last to react that way.  But for Adam, it was really just a matter of time. For the cursed child, there is no escape. He’s a quiet but intense observer, an omnivorous receiver of inputs and inspirations, from foreign films to video games, literature to cuisine. And he’s also what some people would call musical royalty - the grandson of Afro-Cuban-Irish compos

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 vocabulary.” Benny Grew up in Pittsburgh, the third in a trilogy of musical Benny Benacks (he follows in the footsteps of his trumpeter/bandleader grandfather, Benny Benack, Sr., and his father Benny Benack, Jr., a saxophonist/clarinetist). Young Benny (sometimes he goes by the moniker BB3) was made very aware of his own family ties to the music and also the Pittsburgh tradition that also produced Roy Eldridge, Earl Hines, Art Blakey, Billy Strayhorn and so many more. Benny is a serious musician, a deep swinger, who clearly loves both the blues and a sweet melody. He loves to be on the scene; he leads a weekly jam sessi

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

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 studio.  We had a wide ranging conversation about “just how rich the world sounds”, how producing a project is like “being the surrogate parent” of the music, and how when it comes to making pop music, “You can’t mold yourself to a moving target.” Plus, more Vulfpeck origin stories. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.tylerduncan.work/about

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 10Zelta Sils, age 10Zane Gruber Baruth, age 21Michael Thurber, age 34Michael Leonhart, age 47Jorge Drexler, age 57Daniel Levitin, age 63Gil Goldstein, age 71Ben Sidran, age 78Howard S. Becker, age 93 www.third-story.com

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 with plainspoken and thoughtful songwriting.  He’s a songwriter’s songwriter, but he’s also a masterful guitar player and singer who knows how to give the people what they want.  Maybe that’s how he managed to sell 15,000 copies of that first self produced cassette back in the early 90s, back before the idea of “self released music” was in the mainstream. He says, “People connect to honesty.”  In many ways, Sexton’s own journey began with In The Journey and he’s still on it today: he has averaged a new record every two years since he started. He takes record making seriously, has worked with some of the greatest session

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 strength of a handful of acoustic songs that played well in downtown coffee shops and song circles at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street. And that’s what happened to him - he was signed, sealed and delivered, fed to the lions and spit back out, and along the way he made a whole bunch of records, wrote a whole bunch of songs, and developed his approach both to writing and to teaching song craft.  We spoke recently about his own personal story, as well as the book. In our talk we considered such questions as “what is a song?”, what is means to make something non trivial and undeniable, the important distinction between how th

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 a cappella songs, just her and a looping pedal. In fact, from pretty much the start of her professional career, she was turning tastemaker heads. That’s due in large part, I think, to the quiet determination and courage of her music: just getting out on stage alone with a looper pedal and her voice and creating lush arrangements from scratch every time. And while some of her songs deal with the personal, the sensual, the searching soul, others are more overtly political or topical. Like her songs “Can You See” and “Guilty” both of which address police brutality.  Madison McFerrin is also the daughter of Bobby McFerr

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 organized and underwritten by Rabbi Severine from Temple Sinai in Newport News, Virginia.    www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.petercoyote.com/

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 led to her writing her own songs. She fronted experimental-folk-pop sextet, PHOX, formed in Madison, Wisconsin in 2012. PHOX released an eponymous album, played big festivals, national TV shows, and flew overseas to play shows far away from home. PHOX went on indefinite hiatus in 2017, and Monica moved to LA because “Wisconsin is cold as f*ck”.  She found herself a periwinkle casita and is feeling freer than ever in the city of misfits. She’s presently at work unpacking her mental confusions by cataloging/celebrating the “fuckery” of her ex-es (and herself) in lowkey pop songs with soul whispers, some golden-era holl

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, both deeply reliable and rooted, and also very fluid and flexible. Some know him from his early work with Dave Holland and Chris Potter. Some know him from his association with the Vulfpeck crew, and the Vulf adjacent project The Fearless Flyers. Some know him from his playing with southern rock singer songwriter and icon Brittany Howard. Some - many in fact - may have discovered him by way of the singer Jose James, and the viral videos that Jose made of Nate’s nightly solos back in 2016, which he tagged with the hashtag #thelegendarynatesmith. As Nate tells it, he was in his early 40s when he had his first viral vide

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, something happened during that experience. Our thoughts about music became bigger and broader. We started to realize more clearly what folk singers have always known: songs are here to inspire and uplift but they’re also here to tell the stories and reflect the times.” We spoke recently about their new record, and their new life in Baltimore, about their individual journeys that led them to this moment, about what they see as their responsibility as folk singers, artists and advocates, what they describe as the “racial pandemic in America”, how to practice productive antiracism, coming from “two different worlds”, the

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 his festival and his foundation (Newport Festivals Foundation). Although his festivals have been responsible for bringing jazz, folk and pop music to general awareness, he is unabashedly a jazzman. As he says, “you gotta stick with jazz.” We talked about his past, present, and incredibly, his future. We started out with him asking me my age. It caught me off guard, but as he explained “when you know someone’s age, you know a little bit about where they’re coming from.” George passed away this week. He was 95. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

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 loved the light touch of Red Garland and Hank Jones, but he also loved the blues and heft of Oscar Peterson, Monty Alexander, and Gene Harris. Early on, while he was learning to play the music by listening to those masters, he also began to establish personal relationships with many of his heroes.  Ramsey Lewis described his piano playing as ‘a joy to behold’, Les McCann states ‘As a man and musician he is already a giant’. Journalist Nat Hentoff championed three of Alterman’s albums, as well as his writing (Joe wrote liner notes to three Wynton Marsalis/JALC albums), calling one of Joe’s columns “one of the very best p

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 stage persona.  Meanwhile, he was also just a regular kid from Flint, Michigan, raised by a single mother and trying to walk the straight and narrow path. That dual identity was part of his journey almost from the very beginning - like a superhero. On Sunday mornings he was a star, but by the next day he was back to being a regular student. And when he got to college, he tried his best to blend in, joining an a cappella group and singing with student bands, while at the same time trying to manage his career as a budding gospel star. Even today, he lives with that same duality. While his work with Vulfpeck and collab

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 old, and the story of the Baal Shem Tov. www.third-story.com www.bensidran.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

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 plays with, and to the audience too. You get the sense watching Jon that if he doesn’t feel it, he won’t do it.  Maybe that’s why he’s so in demand in so many projects right now. He’s a member of Jon Batiste and Stay Human (catch him regularly on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert), Huntertones (a band he joined in college at Ohio State and that led him to New York), and Cory and the Wongnotes. And works often with O.A.R. and Lawrence, among others.  Jon says, “I’ve just prioritized the people. I’ve identified the people that I want to associate with and what I need to do, how I need to better myself as a musician a

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, Johnny Lang, David Crosby or Vulfpeck. Chances are, you definitely heard him playing with Prince - he was the drummer in The New Power Generation, and played on classic Prince records including Diamonds and Pearls, Chaos and Disorder, Emancipation, and more.  We talked recently about his early development in Minneapolis, the “guilt by association” of working with controversial artists, getting the gig, keeping the gig, losing the gig, recovering from the gig, confronting racial politics in Minneapolis, playing music with “endless potential”, his first time flying on an airplane, keeping the flame lit on local music, and much more. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast  

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 in multiple scenes seemingly  at the same time. Philip’s has been a hero’s journey.  Blink once and you’ll find him in the “Afrocentric” Dallas music scene running the band at a large church, mentoring a young Michael League during the inception of Snarky Puppy. Blink again, and you’ll find him doing the New York hustle. Turn around and he’s still there, this time living in Nashville. But what’s this? Then he’s an LA cat, writing arrangements for gospel and r&b records. Wait! Now he’s an expat, living in Holland and raising a family with his Dutch Caribbean wife (the talented singer Josje). Phil is a trumpet playe

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 vibraphonist Gary Burton. While still in highschool he was a faculty member of the Stanford Jazz Workshop. So he was undoubtedly a child prodigy. Lage plays like someone in love. Despite his productive personal relationship with singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy (she co-produces his new record, Squint along with Armand Hirsch), perhaps the deepest love affair of his life may in fact be with the guitar itself.  We talked recently about his new record - his first on Blue Note, which he recorded with drummer Dave King and bassist Jorge Roeder. He told me his story, how he traversed those murky waters of youthful excepti