The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Gilles Peterson is one of the most influential DJs and music curators in the world. Whether as a broadcaster, live DJ, record producer, festival organizer, or music curator, Peterson has devoted his life to finding, contextualizing, and presenting music from around the world. He sees his job as “connecting the dots.” One of Peterson’s most recent discoveries, Kassa Overall is, in the words of Time Out New York, “a Renaissance man: part chopsy, super-funky jazz drummer, and part rising producer-MC.” www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast  

Steven Bernstein, Peter Apfelbaum and Will Bernard are all innovative, creative and boundary pushing musicians who are equally at home in the avant garde as they are in the swamp. It comes as no surprise that they grew up together in Berkeley, California, exploring the edges of the music they loved, finding “controlled substances” in their parents’ freezers, and improvising freely. We recorded this conversation at the Winter Jazzfest in New York. Here they talk about looking forward, looking back, the musical concept of opposition, defying category, broken mirrors, free improvisation, why coffee is so expensive and music is so cheap, the musical conversation between Berkeley and New York, spontaneous composition, rock and roll, Jewish weddings, Sly Stone, Bill Laswell, Trey Anastasio, and why “sex” is still a dirty word in jazz. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Here is what Caleb Hawley says about himself in his website biography: Caleb Hawley is a Harlem based, Minneapolis-raised singer, songwriter, and producer who has been shoveling Gobstoppers into ears for the past decade. Combining catchy melodies with dark and satirical lyrics, one has to be careful not to slip while dancing in a puddle of their own tears.  I don’t know about the Gobstoppers, but the rest of it feels pretty accurate to me. In our conversation he tells his journey of self discovery, addiction, creativity, Tourette Syndrome, longing, how telling the truth is like a drug, and why it’s so hard to write a happy song. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and following the podcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. https://www.third-story.com https://www.calebhawley.com/

When Ari Herstand first came on the Third Story Podcast in 2016, he was still in the process of becoming. He struggled with the what he saw as a “duality” between being a musician / performing artist and a business person. Would success in one realm undermine success in the other? “I got to the point where I have accepted that I am equally both,” he tells me now.  “Success is very personal and nobody can really define success for you,” he says. And Ari has spent much of the last decade examining many of the biggest successes in the independent music business, analyzing them, and then teaching them, first through is blog Ari’s Take, and then in his book How To Make It In The New Music Business. The Second Edition was published in November of 2019. It remains at the top of the Amazon charts and has been widely adopted by music business schools worldwide. In fact, because of the success of both the book and the blog, he eventually started Ari’s Take Academy, an online music business school that he hopes will eventually compete as an alternative to “the traditional brick and mortar music colleges.”  “Collectively we are smarter and more active than any other group or even professional marketing person out there,” he says of his Academy. “Because we have so many people working on this stuff and sharing their results with one another.” Ari lives in Los Angeles, but was in New York recently developing the “1973 immersive experience” around his band, “Brassroots District” with some of the team that developed the critically acclaimed immersive show  “Sleep No More”.   To start out the new year, this conversation covers a lot of ground around the state of the independent music business today. “How can a project be bigger than just the music. What is the story? What is the difference between transparency and authenticity. How does one play to the strengths and limitations of social media platforms? Is the internet a real community? Spotify. Instagram. Tik Tok. It’s all here. There was no way I was going to let Ari off the hook without having him give me a little free advice about my own career and social media game. Last time we talked, he hooked up my website - he pimped my page. And this time I was ready with a specific ask: is it time after five years of doing this podcast - to create Instagram and Twitter accounts for the Third Story. Ari told me unquestionably that it was time. So starting today, you can follow the Third Story Podcast on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, all of them @thirdstorypod. http://www.third-story.com/ http://patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://ariherstand.com/ https://aristake.com/  

Legendary recording engineer and producer Glyn Johns’ career and discography are so extensive that it’s very difficult to summarize quickly. The sound of his recordings has had an immeasurable influence on the way we listen to popular music, particularly Rock and Roll. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Beatles, Eric Clapton... he worked with them all.  Here he talks about his philosophy of recording, producing, and managing a career in record making.  www.third-story.comwww.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.glynjohns.com

boice-Terrel Allen (better known simply as boice) is a podcast host, musician, and writer. His podcast, Talk Music Talk, started in 2014 and features long form conversations with musicians, authors, music psychotherapists and meditation teachers, DJs, musicologists, MacArthur Fellows, Grammy nominees and such from all musical genres. In 2019 he started his second podcast, The Strandcast, a literary podcast from the Strand Bookstore featuring author interviews, reading recommendations and literary horoscopes. To celebrate the 200th episode of Talk Music Talk, here the tables are turned and he lays out his personal and professional development, creativity, spirituality, Buddhism, depression, perseverance and love of Tina Turner. We also compare notes on podcast life, techniques, strategies, and ambitions. www.third-story.comwww.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast http://www.talkmusictalk.com/

Zev Feldman is an independent record producer who got started in the jazz business as a young man (in his early 20s) and came up through the ranks of sales (“schlepping a bag of CDs”), merchandising, marketing, distribution - all of the pieces of the business as it existed at the end of the last century. Over time he came to settle comfortably in an area of the jazzosphere that focuses on locating, unearthing and releasing previously unknown recordings. Some people know him as “the jazz detective.” Variety magazine called him “possibly the most widely admired archival producer working in the jazz field today,” Downbeat refers to him as “The Jazz Sleuth” and perhaps most famously, Stereophile Magazine called him “the Indiana Jones of jazz.”  He works with almost every major jazz label and many small independent labels, but his primary professional residence is with Resonance Records. He has shepherded the release of previously unknown recordings by the likes of Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Joao Gilberto and many more (including my dad!). In the conversation it’s clear that as big of a jazz fan as he is, he is also in love with the business of jazz records. He goes out of his way to remember and name all of the people in the business who helped him along the way. Here he talks about becoming a producer (“it was like pouring gasoline on a fire”), the importance of “folklore and mythology” in the world of jazz collecting, why finding the right outlet for a recording is like finding shelter for an orphaned animal, and how he builds relationships. www.third-story.com www.resonancerecords.org

Vulpeck keyboardist Woody Goss on his early days growing up in the suburbs of Chicago where he learned to elevate rhythm playing to high art, when he connected with the crew that would become his Vulf family at the University of Michigan, how talking about evolutionary psychology is emotional, why organized religion is dubious, where he likes to go bird watching, and who he really is when the spotlight is turned away. This conversation is surprisingly provocative, enlightening, and funny. Woody is not entirely as he appears to be. He is, in fact, much more. www.third-story.com https://woodygoss.bandcamp.com/ https://www.veryvulfychristmas.com/

When ALA.NI was growing up in West London, she wanted to be a ballerina. Eventually she realized that there were almost no black ballerinas and the message that was sent to her quietly but consistently was that there would be no easy place for her in the world of ballet. She started to sing. She loved musicals, especially The Sound Of Music, & Grease. Again and again, she was told that she didn’t sound “black enough” because she was so influenced by Julie Andrews and Judy Garland. Too black to dance, not black enough to sing, she started to feel like there was no way forward for her in London. Her father was a bass player, her great uncle had been a famous musician and singer from Grenada, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson – one of the first musical success stories to emerge from the West Indies in post war England. She remembers spending her childhood tagging along with her father to pot-smoke filled rehearsal rooms and hearing the bands play. Despite her family’s creative background, she says, “I love my family but I’m very much the black sheep.” So ALA.NI decided to leave London and follow the well worn path of black artists who have felt more at home with self imposed creative expatriation in Paris than in their home countries. “I feel free here as an artist here,” she explains. “I feel seen.” Her haunting, elegant and somewhat otherworldly singing style has established her firmly as one of the most intriguing new musical artists in Paris today, and she has also started to work in America, (she has performed at Lincoln Center & on NPR’s Tiny Desk). While she remains a bit of a mystery, she is in many ways an open book. “The things that I can’t get away with socially, I can do on stage,” she says, adding, “If people want the truth, they know where to come to get it.” ALA.NI’s upcoming sophomore album ACCA will be released on January 24th. So far the album has been celebrated by NPR Music, The FADER, and Vibe, who praised the first single, “Van P” for its “sparse, spacious soundbed that leaves space for ALA.NI's breathy vocals to shine.” She initially envisioned this album as a completely a capella project, and indeed ACCA is made up almost entirely of human voices (beatboxing serves as percussion, and she lowered her own vocals with an octavizer on several tracks to create the illusion of bass). Along with Lakeith Stanfield, Iggy Pop makes an appearance on the album, but ACCA is primarily solo ALA.NI. She wrote, produced, and arranged each song herself, layering up hundreds of vocal tracks in order to create an immersive, hypnotic world that blurs the lines between vibrating vocal cords, bowed strings, and blown reeds. We got together recently in Paris to talk about the job of the artist (“to see the world through a different lens and then share that experience”), the nature of Grenadians (“uppity”), improvised circle singing (“When we enter back into the child and the imagination, there’s no rules!”) and the genetic memory of violence in the black experience. In other words, all of it. This is one of those fly-on-the-wall conversations in which the microphone disappears into the furniture almost immediately and two people who have never met before slowly reveal themselves to one another. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.alaniofficial.com/

Singer-songwriter-guitarist Camila Meza on growing up in Chile, the nature of translation, improvisation, self observation, bootleg videotapes, identity, cruise ship living, synesthesia and distortion. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.camilameza.com