The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Michelle Willis is either already one of your favorite singer-songwriters, or she's about to be one. If you haven't already discovered her from her work with Snarky Puppy, Becca Stevens, or David Crosby, prepare to fall in love with her intelligent, soulful, emotive singing, writing and playing. Her latest record, Just One Voice invites us into a world of doubt, anxiety, hope, balance and letting go—a process Michelle Willis skillfully guides us through with arresting arrangements that seem complex, but are deceptively simple—just like her subject matter. It features guest appearances by Michael McDonald, David Crosby, Gregoire Maret, Becca Stevens and Taylor Ashton, and was produced by Fab Dupont. We spoke recently about growing up in Canada, how she thinks about her music and her career, how working extensively with David Crosby has affected her, teaching songwriting, imposter syndrome, getting the right "blend", the job of the songwriter, reading poetry, and whether or not it's okay to be comfortable. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com www.michellewillis.ca

Nate Craig is an internationally touring comedian. He plays "Phil" in the Netflix series "Maniac" and was a cast member on TruTV's "World's Dumbest". He was recently featured on Comedy Central's "Roast Battle" and AXS Gotham Comedy Live. Nate has appearances on Comedy Central's Tosh.0 and "Mash-up", which he also wrote for. He's written for 3 seasons of "Ridiculousness" on MTV. Nate has been featured at the Bridgetown, RIOT LA, and HBO Las Vegas Comedy Festivals, and has headlined the "Laugh Your Asheville Off" and "San Francisco Comedy and Burrito Festivals". He's been on "You Made it Weird" with Pete Holmes, has written for "A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keillor, and was featured on the "Best of the Bob & Tom Radio Show". He does theater tours with Bill Burr, headlines all over the country and has multiple full length comedy albums available. We got together recently to talk about the parallels between music and comedy, what is the "job" of a comic, how "what's funny" has changed over the last 25 years, the "contract" between audiences and comics, how he got started and what it means to be successful as a comic today. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.natecraig.com/

Vocalist Lauren Henderson is unusual in all the best ways. Described as "somewhere between a comforting whisper and a cogent declaration" by The New York Times, she sings with an intimate, sultry, haunting intensity. Her music might be mysterious, but she is an open book. Raised in Marblehead, Massachusetts (birthplace of the American Navy and just down the road from Salem, MA) she attended some of the finest schools in New England. She was a varsity field hockey player at Wheaton College, and then went on to receive her MBA from Brown University. She spent much of her early life being one of the few people of color in a largely white environment. She says her journey of discovering and celebrating her heritage has gone hand in hand with her music career. She describes it as uncovering "the layers of her diverse background in English and Spanish. Her compositions paint stories reflecting journeys imposed through the African Diaspora in connection to Henderson's Panamanian, Montserratian, and vast Caribbean roots as they interplay with her North American upbringing." Almost immediately after meeting her for the first time in 2017, I was inspired to write the song "From The Inside Out" for her to sing, and we ended up performing it as a duo on her 2019 release Alma Oscura. Lauren Henderson is a kind of classic character wandering through the modern world. She is incredibly poised, elegant, and hip. She's often dressed to the nines, full makeup and hair, ready for her closeup at any moment. She plays with some of the finest musicians today - notably she has worked for over a decade with pianist Sullivan Fortner. Lauren is also a proudly independent, sharply focused business woman who produces her records, runs her own label and until recently has booked her own tours. Often I feel like she was sent here from another time - I just can't decide if it's the past or the future. So today, we get the story. Lauren Henderson tells it to us, from the inside out. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.laurenhendersonmusic.com

Jake Sherman is everywhere at once and yet somehow maintains a certain air of mystery. There he is singing romantic 80s inspired jams. Here he comes making a jazz Hammond organ record at Dizzy's Coca-Cola Club and jamming with Larry Goldings. Don't look now but he's hanging out in LA with his friends in Scary Pockets, or with his project Jake and Abe (a duo with drummer Abe Rounds). Is that him playing on the new Rosalia record? Wait, he plays harmonica? With Jacob Collier? Maybe you heard him playing with Meshell Ndegeocello, Andrew Bird, Emily King, Bilal, Nick Hakim, or Chance the Rapper. Yes, all of this is true. But who is Jake Sherman really? Born in Boston, Jake learned classical piano by listening to his father play Bach every morning. If not for an intervention - stumbling upon the catalog of Weird Al Yankovic at 11 years old - he would have followed in his father's path or perhaps become a jazz purist. But Weird Al changed everything. Fast forward some years beyond his time studying at Berklee College of Music and it's clear Jake has found a way to combine his appreciation of great songwriting with his piano/organ-playing prowess. We spoke recently about his love of the hammond organ and Weird Al Yankovic, surrealist comedy, finding his lane, learning to sing, what he learned from Dr. Lonnie Smith, why LA is too sunny, making friends with social media, and why he keeps saying ladies' names in his songs. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.thejakesherman.com/

Saxophonist Melissa Aldana on growing up in Chile, her journey to America, practicing, teaching, numerology, playing the blues, "the gender thing", learning to embrace imperfection, her new record "12 Stars", her idea of success, and what she values most in music: sound, time and ideas. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.melissaaldana.net

David Poe is a songwriter's songwriter. He refers to himself as "a songwriter of a certain age". As a young man in Dayton, Ohio he got his first taste of success by winning a talent competition and using his prize (free studio time) to record what would become his first radio hit. That was back when a young musician might dream of a big record contract. He sings in a new song "Now I'm part of history, when the music cost money but the water was free." He has covered a lot of road since then and logged a lot of miles as a performing solo artist, producer, songwriter, collaborator, lecturer, and creative thinker. David Poe is a kind of Zelig-like figure who appears where you least expect him, and somehow manages to fit right in wherever he shows up. At the same time, his songwriting and singing are distinctive, personal and cultivated. Talking to Poe, one is reminded that at their best, songwriters are our popular philosophers. Rather than creating a diversion from everyday life, they illuminate the human struggle, and elevate the human experience. David might be confused for a rock and roll guy, but what he does defies genre. He's a songwriter who is dedicated to writing authentic music and "carrying the torch" of those who came before. He tells me "the song doesn't need to be true, it just needs to be honest." His plain spoken manner has a way of underselling the depth of his ideas. He tells me, for example, that "a culture that declares art to be disposable will get disposable art." But he says it casually, with a smile on his face. We spoke recently about his philosophy on songcraft, collaboration, art and commerce, New York in the 90s (he worked at CBGBs Gallery for years) and why his new motto is "don't hate fun". www.third-story.comwww.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.davidpoe.com/

Amir ElSaffar has spent much of his life in search of the ecstatic moments that help connect to something bigger. In his case, he does this through his relationship with music and culture. Trying to define or even explain what he does is not so simple, even for him. He leads five ensembles and has released seven albums over the past 16 years. His primary instrument is the trumpet, and he has devoted much of his career to expanding the vocabulary of the instrument. He also sings in the Arabic maqam idiom and plays the santur, the Iraqi hammered dulcimer. As a composer and band leader, he's devoted to what he calls "transcultural creation" in which he explores the space in between jazz, Iraqi Maqam music, and various other musical traditions from around the world, which have included Spanish flamenco, and Egyptian tarab. In late 2021 he released The Other Shore with his Rivers of Sound ensemble. We spoke recently about his ongoing search for the ecstatic by way of what he describes as the human "sea of connectivity", how working with Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Cecil Taylor influenced him, the value of coming of age in Chicago, and how his Zen Buddhist practice has helped him to "lift the veil" between his sense of what's outside of him and what's inside. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.amirelsaffar.com/

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 composer and arranger Chico O'Farrill, the son of the cultural boundary-pushing composer and pianist Arturo O'Farrill, and pianist-educator Alison Deane. Last year he was voted the No. 1 "rising star trumpeter" in the DownBeat magazine critics' poll. He was 26 years old at the time. But of course age is really just a number, and Adam seemed to shoot out into the world fully formed, not only an accomplished player, but a developed artistic thinker. At an early age, he was putting in time with the likes of Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mary Halvorson, and his father's Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. Adam's family background is so diverse that refers to himself as "the United Nations in flesh". That sense of inclusiveness is found in his music as well - freedom and control, tradition and exploration, intention and "tumult," as he tells me. Recently he released Visions of Your Other, the third statement by his group Stranger Days, which features his brother on drums as well as the bassist Walter Stinson and recently, saxophonist, Xavier Del Castillo. Here he talks about belonging to that rich musical legacy, how video games, literature and most of all the films of PT Anderson have informed his work, the hazy lines around labels and categories, the importance of making space for other musicians to support one another, and how he strives to remove "the external" from his playing. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.adam-ofarrill.com/

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 session at Smalls, and when Covid shut down indoor gigs, he took it to the street, setting up outdoors and keeping the flame lit. Somewhere along the line he started to take his singing more seriously too. He always sang - his mother is a singer, and he understood the value of being able to deliver a tune from early on. But more and more the signs were pointing him towards singing and playing - and towards the art of stagecraft, entertainment, and presentation. Today he says, only half joking, I think, that he is a song and dance man. This turned out to be an incredibly interesting and provocative talk, and we covered an enormous amount of ground. Benny is extremely thoughtful, completely aware of where he fits in, where he's coming from, and where he would like to be going. Along the way he talked about "the relentless commitment of playing trumpet", the value of stagecraft, jam session etiquette, keeping old songs fresh, why he's sometimes accused of being "too entertaining", how come he takes his trumpet on dates, and what he calls "the elephant in the room." www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bennybenackjazz.com/

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 Blanchard and Hancock. And since then he has gone on to play with an incredible list of greatest, most creative and influential players alive. Today he lives in Luxembourg, teaches at the Jazz Campus in Basel, Switzerland, and in non Covid times, tours and records relentlessly. A brief scan of his recent solo recording work tells the story: In 2019 he released an ambitious album aptly named The Journey - the title reflects both his odyssey from childhood in Benin to his current life as a globe-trotting jazz star while also mirroring his musical development. He followed that up in 2020 with a much more intimate album called HH featuring solo guitar performances, punctuated by vocals and vocal percussion, of Herbie Hancock compositions. And in 2021 he released Close Your Eyes, a more loosely structured blowing record of classic repertoire, in musical conversation with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland. He tells me that after trying as hard as possible to remove the African influences from his playing and trying to sound more like his jazz heroes, he ultimately realized that they were all compatible, and he began to reintroduce more of the sounds of his childhood into his approach. The result is a very personal, very musical and emotional sound. I think maybe that's what makes him such an appealing collaborator. His voice is so identifiable and personal, but you can feel the road that he has traveled in his playing. In fact, he ends up telling me exactly that. He says "our story is what we play, the story of somebody from the beginning to the time they play, that's what we are presenting." www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.lionelloueke.com/