The Third Story with Leo Sidran

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/

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 players and producers alive, and has seen his music licensed in TV and movies for years. But he is perhaps at his finest when he’s alone on stage with a guitar and an audience. Martin Sexton can make more out of that simple recipe than most musicians could hope to achieve standing in front of an orchestra.  Earlier this year he released 2020 Vision, which is, for lack of a better term, his Covid EP, a tight collection of new songs about America, family and perseverance in these times of uncertainty.  Martin says, “I’ve always said that I love the idea of America, but I never loved the politics. I love the geography and the people.” He’s not political, but he is patriotic in his way. Or, more to the point, he’s dedicated to making music with a message. “No one can deny that what America has given to the world is great music,” he tells me. We had a great talk about his new project, his origin story, the journey that he’s been in now for over 30 years, the tension between art at mortgage payments, The American Dream, and how songs, like produce, grow naturally, as he says it, “out of shit.” www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.martinsexton.com/

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 things act versus what they are, the fallacy of Art, the search for timelessness, what is melodic math, and what do Ani DiFranco, The Beatles, Billie Eilish, or McDonalds have to do with any of it. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast http://errico.com/

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 McFerrin, probably the most famous and influential improvising singer alive today. She says that what she does really isn’t very related to what her father does, and she wears that legacy loosely and comfortably, drawing on his encouragement and advice but cautious not to seek comparisons.  One lesson she does borrow from him is in the way he avoids being placed in any one genre or style. She says, “my father calls himself a folk singer because he sings the music of the folk, and I consider myself to be a soul singer because I sing the music of the soul.”  Nonetheless, Madison McFerrin, like her father before her, finds herself skating (if not scatting) on the surface of jazz. On the one hand, as she says, “jazz is at the root of all popular music in America” so if she is a part of the contemporary jazz space, it’s because she’s a part of the world today. But on the other hand, she is contributing to the conversation whether she meant to or not.  This week, she’ll perform at the Bric Jazz Fest in Brooklyn. And in addition to playing, she also guest curated the lineup. She has a lot of thoughts about how to bring an audience that reflects her, both in terms of generation and identity, back to jazz. Or maybe, how to lead jazz back to people who reflect a different set of values. She tells me, “I originally thought I was just going to be an artist who showed up… but if you don’t adjust now you’re going to fall behind. The music industry is changing more rapidly than pretty much any other industry.” www.third-story.comwww.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.madisonmcferrin.com/www.bricartsmedia.org

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/