The Third Story with Leo Sidran

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 experience to Latin music, and produced a series of groundbreaking and genre defying records that would impact modern Latin music (Los Amigos Invisibles, Aterciopelados, Ely Guerra, Marisa Monte, and his own band Yerba Buena to name a few). He has had some notably lengthy creative relationships with the likes of Arto Lindsay, David Byrne and the singer Cucu Diamantes. For more than 15 years, he has spent at least half his time in Havana, and is deeply enmeshed in the Cuban scene, both as a musician and a culture broker - he organized the first TED conferences in Havana, and works as a liaison for foreign projects on the ground in Cuba. He tells me that he spent much of 2020 quarantining in an apartment in Havana, operating his international business from an island that is notoriously disconnected from much of the rest of the world. That's how he ended up, after three decades of being the guy behind the guy, writing and singing the song "Ode To Quarantine" and then filming a kind of retro futuristic post apocalyptic video for his love song dedicated to the virus. We talked about where he is, how he got there, how long he plans on staying, and where he's going next. Along the way we also talk about learning how to produce, being comfortable in any room, programing synthesizers, eating sushi all day, and when to turn up the kick drum.

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 came out recently. Incidentally that is also the name of his new line of Cannabis products. We talked just after it was released about growing up in Berkeley, discovering the world from the back of his parents' delivery van, managing success & guilt, diversification, finding the lane, building a brand, traveling around the world and giving back to his community.

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 when people gathered together unmasked and unconcerned to experience something collectively. The record in many ways is an encapsulation of his career - it includes some of the most famous songs from his artist and composer lives, as well as some of his favorite songs by other songwriters. We talked recently about his career, his songwriting, technology in music, how becoming a father has influenced his work, his life in Covid and what it means to release music in these strange and trying times, and what exactly is semiotics anyway.

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 actor, notably voicing characters on the animated comedy Family Guy (the creator of the show, Seth McFarlane, was a huge fan of the Jerky Boys). Now, after over 20 years without a new record, Johnny Brennan is back with a new Jerky Boys record. We talked recently about how he developed his characters, why his career was an unexpected success, the role of improvisation in his calls and how he knows when it's a good one, what makes a classic skit (hint: it involves what he calls "catchphrases up the ass"), how the world has changed since he first started and why this was the perfect time to launch a comeback. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.jerkyboysstore.com/

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, being a better person, staying up late into the weird part of the night, "insanity music", money, honesty, humor, the problem with 100bpm, YouTubePoops, and what Nate Wood, David Binney, Bob Mintzer, and Jack Conte have to do with any of this. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://louiscole.bandcamp.com/

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 records later. Right now it's important to be in the moment, in the time. I want when you hear the record to think 'this is what's happening now!'" We got together on Zoom recently to talk about his early development playing music in church, learning to make music on Saturday night and on Sunday morning, how losing his parents at a young age affected his life and career, his experiences playing with saxophonist Kenny Garrett (Cory toured with Garrett at age 18), Snarky Puppy, and The Funk Apostles. Along the way he gives a master class on some of his favorite Gospel music, and an introspective explanation of much of the material on his new record. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://coryhenry.com/

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 beginner at," his concerns about his "own memory and the world's ability to focus," and what happened to him after playing over 1000 performances of Dirty Dancing The Musical. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.briankrock.com

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 act like a big band chart, the double edged sword of having a lot of experience today, the intense value of commitment, and how his life in music helped prepare him for comedy. www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.third-story.com https://www.jeffcesario.com/