The Third Story with Leo Sidran

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

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