The Third Story with Leo Sidran

What is needed in these adverse times? We turn to our spirit guides, our philosopher kings, our rabbis: the musicians. Because although this particular form of adversity is new, musicians have been choosing to feel good in spite of adverse conditions for a long time.  In this episode, we explore the nature of the musician joke, particularly the jazz musician joke. Jokes about gigs, drummers, singers, trombone players, viola players, junkies, 3 legged pigs, bagpipes, bar mitzvahs, African safaris, little old ladies, family therapy, tattoo parlors, monkeys, genies, it’s all here. In other words, the classics. Featuring Steven Bernstein, Amy Cervini, Peter Coyote, Ethan Eubanks, Donald Fagen, James Farber, Steve Gadd, Hilary Gardner, Gil Goldstein, Steve Khan, Ashley Kahn, Tessa Lark, Will Lee, Phil Lyons, Les McCann, Adam Nussbaum, Ben Sidran, Janis Siegel, Larry Ratso Sloman, Dave Stoler, Jack Stratton, Neil Tesser, Michael Visceglia, Michael Winograd, and more.

Since the very beginning of this podcast, my father (Ben Sidran) and I have been having occasional, timely conversations to process our own shared experience and often the experience of the world around us. Here we are again, contemplating the future after Covid-19, considering the consequences, and wondering what jazz has to do with it (and what it has to do with jazz). www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bensidran.com

A life in the theater must be a pretty serious thing, because in these conversations with members of the Broadway community, the conversations are brutally real, big picture, somewhat cosmic and profound. André De Shields, Dale Franzen, Michael Thurber, Schele Williams and Rob Jost all weigh in on the fate of the Great White Way.   Meanwhile, original music for this episode is culled from Instagram and Facebook. Short (and unknowing) contributions from Cecile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner, Martin Leiton, Doug Wamble and Morgan James, Dan Zanes, Louis Cato, Pasquale Grasso, Victoria Canal, Trevor Exter, Ben Wendel, Michael League, Peter Himmelman, and the Please Stay Homeboys.   www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

How is the Coronavirus impacting the creative class? What happens when musicians lose their primary income overnight? What opportunities are there for creativity in this moment of social distancing? What is the conversation for performing musicians, online creators, and artists? How is it different in countries with a social safety net?  Victoria Canal, Jack Conte, Joe Dart, Joy Dragland, John Ellis, Ari Herstand, Ryan Keberle, Andrew Leib, Adam Levy, Lage Lund, and Gege Telesforo all weigh in. Original Music by Charlie Hunter (from his Instagram Livestream on March 13).  www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Michael League is learning how to sleep. A friend sent him a book called Why We Sleep and reading it “rang a lot of bells”. Until recently, he says, “the majority of my rationale for not sleeping was about guilt. Saying it out loud I realize how ridiculous it is.”  Then again, he’s responsible for a lot of creative output, and he feels “a lot of pressure”. Michael is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. He is the founder and leader of the band Snarky Puppy, and the international music ensemble Bokanté. He’s also an owner and founder of the record label GroundUP Music. Snarky Puppy has collaborated with a massive collection of international artists, helped to popularize a new wave of interest in both instrumental music, and in the visual aspect of record making, and represents a version of independent success and popularity in the new music business that most emerging artists covet. They have won 3 Grammys, and have toured constantly since their start as students at the University of North Texas in 2003. As Michael tells it, the band spent over a decade in uncomfortable circumstances and near obscurity playing often for audiences that were smaller than the the band itself. Tour after tour, record after record, Snarky Puppy started a ball rolling and kept rolling it, gaining momentum, relocating from Texas to New York, and building towards what from today’s vantage point looks like the inevitable global success that they have become, but what at the time being probably looked a lot like magical thinking.  League says he thinks of himself primarily as a student. And talking to him it’s clear that he is constantly absorbing and synthesizing new information. He’s thirsty for more - to know more, to do more. He seems, to me, to be unrelenting, non stop, and full on.  This conversation is a long time coming. Here he talks about Snarky Puppy, the advantages to the American musical perspective (“we are light on our feet”), why “to create something authentic isn’t really possible to me”, how playing wedding and steak house gigs in Texas taught him about “humility and strengthening the muscles of versatility”, the importance of making everything as fun as possible on the road, why he sees himself primarily as a student, getting good sleep, and moving to Spain. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://groundupmusic.net/

What do A Tribe Called Quest, David Byrne, The Roots, D’Angelo, Pat Metheny, Erykah Badu, Jason Moran, Me’Shell N’degéocello, India.Arie, J Dilla, Run DMC, and Theo Croker have in common?  They all benefited from the sound of Bob Powers’ recording, mixing or production.  Bob has had a profound effect on the sound of Hip Hop and modern music in general. Despite the fact that he says “I learned early on from working in television that if someone notices your work, you’re probably screwed,” I did notice what he was doing and I think a lot of people did. He has degrees in classical composition and jazz performance, and spent his early professional years both gigging and composing music for television. He was 30 years old and living in San Francisco when he decided to move to where the action was in the music business at the time: New York.  An unexpected gig as a recording engineer for early rap sessions ended up re-orienting Bob’s career. He says he thinks he was one of the few people in the recording establishment who took the new music seriously and cared enough to make it as good as possible, even though it was being made in a different way (using samples, drum machines and intuition). He tells me, “Great music is made by people who either don’t care or don’t understand what is ‘normal’ so they do something extraordinary.” And he says, “In popular music, wrong has become right, and we love it.” Talking to Bob, one gets the sense that his contribution has been multi-fold. Part of it is indeed the sound that he gets. It’s undeniable that his records have a sound: it’s in the depth of his mixes, the way they round and present, deep and forward at the same time. They have dimension. He tells me, “Just being able to hear everything in a mix is a lifetime of study.”  But the other part of what he offers in the room is his way. It’s his personality. Bob is happy to talk about his technical approach, the way he thinks about recording, mixing, and mastering. But he is equally happy - maybe even more so - to talk about pop sociology, Marshall McLuhan, Malcolm Gladwell, Timothy Leary and larger cultural trends of the the last 50 years. He says, “The state of the art in electronic media, the bar is very high. So making things fluid in the creative atmosphere is the thing.” Bob teaches at NYU and it would seem that teaching and producing are related to him. He tells me, “I want my students to see that there’s all different flavors of good.” And he says, “A lot of artists want to show all the different things they can do. No! Show the one thing that you do that is totally yours and no one else can do, and then find every way in the world to exploit and enrich that.” We got together in his studio in the Flatiron to talk about history, technology, fat beats, staying in your lane, and keeping things fluid. This conversation is both granular and global. There is quite a bit of tech talk but there’s also a lot of big picture thinking going on here.  www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast http://www.bobpower.com/

Victoria Canal is a 21-year old Spanish-American, LGBTQ, differently-abled, singer-songwriter with a massively powerful message of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Everything about Victoria is completely exceptional - from her life experience to her demeanor and her talent - and at the same time maybe her greatest gift is her empathic, generous spirit. She’s just a good listener and incredibly seems to make people comfortable to be who they are. She released an EP in 2016 called Into The Pull and a series of singles since then that have racked up millions of Spotify streams. She’s set to release her next EP later year but already has put out two singles from the project. The first, “Drama” came out late in 2019, and the second called “Second” came out last week. Her writing is direct, catchy and compelling. Talking to Victoria, one gets the sense that she spent so much time as an outsider in her life - moving from country to country, school to school, with a different kind of childhood, and a different kind of body, and a different kind of talent - that the outside became a kind of inside for her. And she has a way of making you feel like an insider when you’re around her. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.victoriacanal.com/

Kat Edmonson will tell you that, “A lot of the time we don’t need permission to do great things.”  Kat Edmonson will say, “There are certain things we know about ourselves and we get in our own way assuming that there’s some gate we have to go through to be recognized to then finally say I’m allowed to do this now.” Kat Edmonson will tell you that “There’s a quiet power in merely having a dream.” Kat Edmonson knows of what she speaks. She is a dreamer, a romantic who knew she was destined to be a singer, songwriter and actress long before she knew how she would do any of it. Her new record Dreamers Do explores concepts around dreaming, “all of the wonderful things and the fearful things, the things that keep us awake in the middle of the night.” Here we talk about her journey out of the Lone Star State and into the Big Apple, her love of old well-made things, why “a tree is not scheming”, enjoying the moment, working with Woody Allen, loving “the limitations in a room”, acting vs singing, her new record, and not asking permission.

Video editor, bass player, recovering sketch comedy and improv player Mark Hervey on the journey that took him flying “too close to the sun”... twice. Along the way, he discusses why video editing is like playing bass (if it’s very noticeable, you’re probably doing too much), the alt comedy scene in New York in the 90s, what to do when the best work of your life goes uncredited, and how “death has no satisfactory resolution”. It's a real deep dive.  www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Mark Guiliana is having at this very moment a profound influence on the way the drums are played. There’s a conversation happening in his playing between organic, traditional sounds and electronic music. Part of his innovation is to get his acoustic drums sounding more electronic, and to approach the drums in some ways as though he were a dj or a programmer.  Mark was born and raised in New Jersey, and until six months ago he lived there. Now he lives in LA. But he was in New York for the Winter Jazzfest - he was the artist in residence this year, which meant that he was invited to put together a series of shows and events. Over the course of the week, he did a different show every day with a different group, different configurations, some completely free improvised, some very organized, as is the case with his project Beat Music, his most electronic band.  The sound of Mark’s drumming and drums are so identifiable, and here he tells me that he thinks “Sound is everything.” He says “If the sound can be right, then you can really play anything.” We got together just before Mark left New York for the airport to fly to Europe, and spoke about Mark’s philosophy and approach. He explained his ideas of coincidental interaction, and proactive repetition (“Repetition is one of the most powerful tools that we have in music and in life,” he tells me), the importance of familial relationships with his musical partners, how “sound is everything” and why for him “the music does the talking”. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast