The Third Story with Leo Sidran

On this final installment of the Mob Town Tour series, we visit Detroit, Cleveland and Toledo. In our first Mob Town episode we talked to Irv Williams, who at 98 years old, is still performing every week in his community. In our second, we talked to Dave Jemilo, the club owner from Chicago who has helped to shape the jazz scene in town. In our third chapter, we looked at jazz as regional music through the lens of Milwaukee. And today, we look at how the arts are the appetite for life, and how life on the road can change people. From the art deco elegance of Detroit’s Cliff Bells club, to the neighborhood charm of Cleveland’s Nighttown, to the pop up art collective Collingwood Art Center in Toledo (a converted convent), each city has its own unique arts community. Particularly in Detroit and Toledo, two cities that have been hit hard economically, the arts showed some of the first signs of renaissance. Music and art grow up through the cracks in the concrete, like wild flowers. In Cleveland we connected with saxophonist Richie Cole, a lifelong road warrior, who at 70 years old is finally tired of traveling. “I’m the luckiest guy I know,” he says. www.third-story.com

On this third installment of the Mob Town Tour series of episodes, we explore the Milwaukee jazz scene. I’ve always been interested in the Milwaukee players and sound, going back to when I was a young musician coming up in Madison. Here I talk to pianist David Hazeltine, bassist Jeff Hamann and pianist Mark Davis, and my father Ben, about the history of jazz in Milwaukee. We’re also exploring the idea of regional dialects when it comes to jazz, and music in general. What does it mean to have a bunch of creative people leaning in the same direction, or speaking in the same accent, and what brings that on? Particularly today, is it still possible retain local flavor and speak a regional dialect in a global world? Today all musicians have access to the same information - and that’s all the information. But do they still have access to their scene? third-story.com

On week two of the Mob Town Tour series of podcasts, we explore the Green Mill in Chicago. One of the greatest jazz clubs in the world. It’s a kind of jazz unicorn. A joint that walks the line and manages to serve the community at large and the musicians too.  You’d think this would be normal, but it’s not. It’s very rareAnd that is due in no small part to the owner, Dave Jemilo.  In this episode we spend some time talking with musician Bob Rockwell (the saxophone player in the Ben Sidran Quartet) about the Chicago musical legacy, and we also check in with vocalist Kurt Elling and organist Chris Foreman about playing at the Green Mill. But the real meat in this pod sandwich comes from Jemilo himself, perhaps the finest example of a real Chicagoan that you will ever meet.  Pull up a stool and make yourself comfortable because we’re going to do this one Chicago style. Deep dish, baby. Third-story.com

The first in a series of road documentaries capturing our journey, some conversations about it and what it means. Notably it features an in depth conversation with Minneapolis based jazz saxophone player Irv Williams, the oldest working jazz musician alive.

Morgan has a soulful voice: big pipes, lots of power, a certain swagger, and incredible technique. But although she has a classic sound,  fed by by the likes of Chaka Khan, Nina Simone and Eva Cassidy, she has a modern career. Her path has been completely unexpected, unpredictable, and in some ways unbelievable. Here, as she says, we “dig deep into the journey”. Her new album, Reckless Abandon, came out last month.  www.third-story.com

Author Peter Straub started out with dreams of writing poetry and literary fiction. After publishing his first two novels and two books of poetry, he asked himself the question that so many artists find themselves asking: how do I make a living at this? An agent suggested he try writing a “gothic novel”, advice that reoriented him for much of the rest of his career. His natural ability to write novels that as he says, would be appealing to people who love Philip Roth and those who love Stephen King, connected with a huge audience that picked up what he was putting down over the course of many years. But before he became a writer in earnest, he was a jazz lover. He discovered jazz as a boy growing up in Milwaukee in the late 1950s. He gravitated toward Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond, Clifford Brown, Bill Evans and Miles. While the swinging sounds of his favorite soloists followed him from stage to stage and page to page, there was something else that stayed with him as well: the darker moments of his childhood. A car accident that shaped his first years in school and left him alone and isolated in a body cast and a wheelchair, just as he was learning to read. He recovered, but it turned out to be a kind of catalyst for his career as a writer. And there was an even darker secret that he somehow managed to hide from even himself well into adulthood. In our conversation we explore all of this. The through line of jazz and fiction, improvisation and writing, how the past stays with us into the present, and how watching his Norwegian farmer relatives taught him how to write diligently. www.third-story.com

Trombonist, composer and educator Ryan Keberle has been active on the New York scene for nearly 20 years - which is really saying something considering he’s still a young man by many standards. He’s worked extensively with both the Maria Schneider orchestra and indie singer songwriter Sufjan Stevens, each of whom have influenced his own music enormously. Along the way, he’s worked as a sideman with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, and Alicia Keys, Ivan Lins and played in the house band on Saturday Night Live. Ryan’s project, a pianoless ensemble called Catharsis, started in 2004. The group has a new record coming out later this spring called “Find the Common, Shine a Light” which Ryan refers to as a “Response to Growing Political and Social Turmoil, An Urgent Call for Change”. Here we talk about the legacy of trombone players and arrangers and how the instrument is undergoing a revolution today, what being a side man taught him about listening, and why all improvised music is a form of protest. www.third-story.com

David Garibaldi is one of the funkiest, most influential drummers of his generation. Those who know, know. They know about his incredible feel, technique, books and instructional videos, interest in afro Caribbean music, and those iconic beats with Tower of Power, the group he joined for the first time nearly 50 years ago. Those who have had the pleasure to meet him all talk about his positivity, his generosity, his curiosity, and his energy. The moment you meet him, it’s clear that he’s a cultivated person, in the sense that he’s precise, orderly, focussed, almost military in his presentation. But he’s also what musicians might call a good hang. He loves to swap stories, talk about his experience, and laugh. Those who know, also know that earlier this year while walking to a gig on his home turf, at Yoshi’s in Oakland, California, David and another musician named Marc van Wageningen were actually hit by a train. It was slow moving, but no matter how you look at it, the two of them were hit by a train, and both men survived it. Here he explains why Oakland is the funky side of the Bay, the work ethic of Tower of Power, the Garibaldi family recipe for happiness and longevity, and why the book is still being written when it comes to his legacy.

Pianist, drummer, trumpeter, educator, blogger, George Colligan stopped by recently when he was visiting Brooklyn. After living in New York for 15 years, he relocated to Portland, Oregon for a teaching position in 2011. He touched on his long career as a sideman, his ideas about “creativity versus tradition”, jazz education, how standup comedy and jazz are similar, how playing changes and changing diapers are different, how 911 changed the scene in New York, kids these days, playing with Jack DeJohnette, why chops aren’t all that matter, and what flying business class does to improve performance. www.third-story.com

Drummer turned entrepreneur Ryan Gruss on building one of the most creative drum production libraries around (Loop Loft), developing the “Blue Note of drum loops” and the unusual journey to took to get there.