The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Within about a week of home quarantine in March 2020, pianist Emmet Cohen started live-streaming shows every Monday night from his apartment in Harlem. At first it was just Cohen and his bandmates, drummer Kyle Poole and bassist Russell Hall, set up in Cohen’s living room. Eventually they started inviting guests, and Emmet’s Place became one of the spots for live jazz in pandemic New York. Six months in, it had really caught on: the Emmet’s Place performance of “La Vie en Rose” featuring singer Cyrille Aimée has over 4 million views on Youtube. Since then, Emmet’s Place has become a kind of jazz incubator in New York; featured guests have included legends like Houston Person, Victor Lewis, Joe Lovano, Sheila Jordan, Randy Brecker, Regina Carter, Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, and dozens more. Cohen has one foot planted in the future and the other in the past. Maybe that’s why he chose to call his most recent record Future Stride: as a nod to the stride piano that he loves and the modern world in which he lives. That tension between these two impulses, the old school and the new, is at the heart of the Emmet Cohen phenomenon. He’s deeply rooted in the jazz tradition, and believes in the importance of oral history and intergenerational connection. When he was in his 20s (not so long ago!) he made a series of albums, live interviews, and performances featuring jazz masters Jimmy Cobb, Ron Carter, Benny Golson, Albert “Tootie” Heath, and George Coleman. He called it the Master Legacy Series. Meanwhile, he’s an active digital citizen. He was quick to embrace streaming, NFTs, and direct-to-fan connection. (He offers a subscription service to his fans to support his work directly.) He’s a product of the 21st century and he understands how to thrive in both physical and virtual space. We got together recently to talk about how he straddles the line between tradition and modernity, starting out as a prodigy in Miami, being a “repertory player,” his community in Harlem, “blues therapy” and the common lesson he learned from all his mentors. The Third Story is made in partnership with WBGO Studios. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios

Although the conditions that created jazz are distinctly American, without Europe it seems clear that it might not survive. Every summer hundreds of the greatest practitioners of the music and hundreds of thousands of fans gather across Europe at the major festivals to come together and celebrate it. These gatherings provide a much needed opportunity for what the musicians refer to as “the hang”. Producer Matt Pierson explained it this way: “It is an American music and we love our homeland but in reality if you ignore the borders, the base of most jazz adjacent music is in Europe… You get to do a lot of hanging.” I spent a day at Umbria, hanging and exploring. Conversations with Matt Pierson, artistic consultant Enzo Capua, drummer Terence Higgens, saxophonist Dave Koz, and singer Kurt Elling help to illuminate the situation. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios

After a two-year slowdown due to COVID, the Montreal International Jazz Festival came back this year. I had been there a couple times, in and out, as a musician. I went this year to cover the festival's full return for WBGO and The Third Story. When you’re a musician at a festival like MJF, the job is actually pretty clear. You get to the gig, play the gig, pack up and go to the next gig. But what does a member of the press do in this situation? I was given a credential badge to wear with the word JOURNALISTE written on it and an assignment to “find the story.” Pretty quickly, a narrative started to reveal itself. Or rather, several narratives, all classics. The story of the young versus the old. The story about the past versus the present. And ultimately, the story of today’s community of musicians, what’s on their mind as they travel this Silk Road of Rhythm which is the summer jazz festival circuit —from Montreal to Marciac, from North Sea to Umbria and beyond. Conversations with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Bill Charlap, Scott Colley, Aaron Goldberg, Samara Joy, Allison Miller, Gregory Porter, and various concert-goers, festival organizers and locals all helped to fill in the story. Self-expression, politics, social media, technology, and conservationism were all part of the fabric, but the common thread between all of them was one of empathy and communion. “This Music,” as so many of the musicians call it, represents human potential. And humans are complicated beings. But at our core, we are social beings and that is reflected in this Montreal Jazz Festival experience. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios

When Julian Lage plays guitar, it’s hard not to get swept up in it. His relationship with the instrument is natural and contagious. Maybe that’s because it’s been with him for most of his life. When he was just 8 years old, Julian was the subject of an Academy Award nominated documentary film called Jules at Eight. Before he entered his teens, he had already performed with Carlos Santana and jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton. While still in highschool he was a faculty member of the Stanford Jazz Workshop.    Lage plays like someone in love. Despite his productive personal relationship with singer-songwriter Margret Glaspy - who produced his forthcoming album on Blue Note View with a Room - perhaps the deepest love affair of his life may in fact be with the guitar itself.    In this conversation from last year, we talked about his 2021 release Squint, which Glaspy produced with Armand Hirsch - his first on Blue Note, which he recorded with drummer Dave King and bassist Jorge Roeder. He told me how he traversed those murky waters of youthful exceptionalism and came out on the other side - with more sensitivity, to the music, to his audience, and to himself. During the course of the conversation, Julian also described  the connection between the artist and the audience and how he thinks about notes as having the weight of speech. “I want it to feel like I’m talking to you when I play.” The Third Story is a collaboration with WBGO Studios. www.wbgo.org/studios

Singer Stacey Kent says she tends to be attracted to the “feeling of unrest,” and she thinks that her fans like to feel it too. Over the course of a 30 year career that has produced over 20 albums (including  including the Grammy-nominated Breakfast On The Morning Tram), Stacey has mined that feeling again and again in different ways.  Maybe she understands how to express the complicated emotions around identity, romance, displacement and longing because she has lived them so fully herself. Raised in New Jersey, Stacey moved to England for graduate school. Almost immediately she met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson and the two set out together to build a life both personal and professional.  As Stacey describes it, meeting Jim was a major inflection point in her life and it’s clear that the relationship between the two is at the center of the story. Eventually, they befriended the Japanese born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, which has led to an ongoing creative partnership between Tomlinson and Ishiguro who compose original songs for Stacey’s repertoire.  In this conversation, recorded on location at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London we talk about why she’s a fatalist, escaping from New Jersey and from the bounds of category, crossing borders (in many senses), and her latest release Songs From Other Places. The Third Story is made in partnership with WBGO Studios. www.wbgo.org/studios www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Just when you think you know all there is to know about Donald Fagen, he surprises you. There are legendary stories, traded like playing cards in chat rooms, fanzines, and merch lines. Along with his musical partner, the late Walter Becker (who passed away in 2017), Fagen influenced countless musicians, producers and songwriters by setting the gold standard in record production and arrangement with his band Steely Dan. This is known. There are the solo records, including The Nightfly (released in 1982), which was nominated for seven Grammys and continues to serve as a reference for hi-fi aficionados around the world 30 years on. This is known.  Much is known about Donald Fagen and his work, it’s true. But much is still left to be revealed. Stage fright, a general aversion to appearing on television (he and Becker lacked the large heads and “swaths of cheek” that they felt necessary to really make it on the small screen), and nearly 20 years with no touring created a mystique that endures to this day, despite the fact that they’ve toured regularly since the mid 90s.  So Donald can surprise you. He does it not by telling you what happened, but rather what he thinks about it. Or more to the point, how he thinks about it. He tells you that Steely Dan has “more in common with punk than with the confessional California singer songwriters” that they were often compared to. He tells you why Stravinsky was a precursor to funk music. He tells you what’s postmodern about his music, why making his first solo record was so personally disruptive to him, how he falls asleep, when he decided to finally grow up, and who he never wants to see again. This conversation was recorded in summer of 2019. This summer, Steely Dan is back out on the road playing to crowds of delighted fans around the country. The Third Story is now a collaboration with listener supported WBGO Studios. Visit www.wbgo.org/studios to find out more about their award winning podcasts. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Ryan Lerman has a few tricks up his sleeve. Best known as the cofounder of Scary Pockets, a dynamic funk band from LA who came to prominence on YouTube, Ryan is also an accomplished singer songwriter, bassist, arranger and producer.  His early work with Michael Bublé, John Legend, Vanessa Carlton and Ben Folds prepared him for a career as a session player, and his early solo records showcased his plain spoken, plaintive and soulful connection to the human condition.  Lerman met his Scary Pockets cofounder Jack Conte when the two were still in high school in Marin County, California. It’s a relationship that has informed and influenced him musically and professionally since then. He says that they “tend to be systems level thinkers” who “focus on the process instead of the outcome.”  That kind of process oriented approach has paid off: Scary Pockets and Lerman are extremely productive: they have released at least one new video each week since 2017, racked up millions of views and a loyal audience of funk enthusiasts around the world. They’ve recorded hundreds of songs featuring a continuously rotating line up of quality musicians and singers.  Collaborators have included many former guests of this podcast including Jacob Collier, Louis Cato, Louis Cole, Tyler Duncan, Joey Dosik, Larry Goldings, Caleb Hawley, Cory Henry, Theo Katzman, Lawrence, Adam Levy, Monica Martin, Jake Sherman, Antwaun Stanley, Jack Stratton, and Cory Wong. Here he talks about his happy place (“in the middle of business thinking and artistry”), what he learned about leadership by working as a sideman, how tried to become a lawyer but ended up playing funk music instead, and what minor nine chords have to do with any of it. www.third-story.com www.wbgo.org/studios

When Lionel Loueke was coming of age as a young guitar player in his home country of Benin in West Africa, there were no music stores of any kind. He would have had to travel to Nigeria, the next country over, just to get his hands on some new strings. So he made due with what he had, cleaning and soaking, reusing his strings and even going so far as to tie knots in them when they broke.  Loueke’s story is the stuff of legend. After finally getting his hands on a guitar as a teenager, he put together enough technique and understanding to get himself to the Ivory Coast to attend music school, and then managed to get to Paris for further musical study. Eventually he went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and then to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA in Los Angeles, now called the Herbie Hancock Institute, where he had the opportunity to study and work with luminaries like Hancock, Terence Blanchard and Wayne Shorter. Soon he began to work with those same mentors, appearing on albums by Blanchard and Hancock. Since then, he has gone on to play with an incredible list of the most creative and influential players alive. Today he lives in Luxembourg, teaches at the Jazz Campus in Basel, Switzerland, and in non-COVID times, tours and records relentlessly.  A brief scan of his recent solo work tells the story: In 2019 he released an ambitious album aptly named The Journey — the title referring to his odyssey while also mirroring his musical development. He followed that up in 2020 with a much more intimate album called HH, featuring solo guitar performances, punctuated by vocals and vocal percussion, of Herbie Hancock compositions. And last year saw the widespread release of Close Your Eyes, originally issued only on vinyl several years ago; it’s a more loosely structured blowing record of classic repertoire, in musical conversation with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland.   Loueke tells me that after trying as hard as possible to remove the African influences from his playing and sound more like his jazz heroes, he ultimately realized that they were all compatible, and began to reintroduce more of the sounds of his childhood into his approach. The result is a very personal, musical, and emotional sound. I think maybe that’s what makes him such an appealing collaborator. His voice is so identifiable and personal, but you can feel the road that he has traveled in his playing.  In fact, he ends up telling me exactly that. “Our story is what we play,” he says, “the story of somebody from the beginning to the time they play; that’s what we are presenting.” We spoke recently about growing up in Benin; discovering the guitar, and eventually jazz, by way of a George Benson record; making his way out of Africa, through France, to America; finding his voice and his style; how he sees his contribution as a teacher; and much more. This is the final in a month of encore episodes as part of a new partnership between The Third Story and WBGO Studios. In June, new episodes will drop every other week.  www.wbgo.org/studios www.third-story.com

We’re back with another classic episode from the archive in honor of the new partnership between this podcast and listener supported WBGO Studios. All month I’m revisiting some of my favorite episodes from over the years, and starting in June I’ll be back with all new fresh episodes. You can find these at www.wbgo.org/studios where you will also discover their ever expanding selection of hipster content. And if you want to dig on the full Third Story archive, you can find that at www.third-story.com where we’ve always been.  Eric Harland thinks about time. He thinks about taking time, he thinks about giving time, and he thinks about sharing time.  He’ll tell you: “Time is a joint effort. It’s everybody at once. You want to talk about synergy, alliance, brotherhood and sisterhood? Just watch people getting together and having to play time. So much shows up in that. There’s so much judgment, so much blame. But then you get to these points of surrender and ecstasy. Something wonderful happens because you went on this journey together. It’s so revealing and it’s so fulfilling.” Eric Harland is one of the most in demand jazz drummers of his generation. He has played with everybody. Betty Carter, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson, Michael Brecker, Terrence Blanchard, Wayne Shorter, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Esperanza Spalding, Taylor Eigsti, Julian Lage, Robert Glasper, Joshua Redman, Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Charles Lloyd, John Mayer, and on and on and on. He has appeared on over 400 recordings, and continues to appear at the top of critics’ and readers’ polls. Plus he once played a solo so intense that it sent my wife to the hospital.  Here he shares his incredible story of growing up in Houston and how he came to weigh 400lbs by the time he was 16 (he eventually lost the weight in college), attending the Manhattan School of Music, becoming an ordained minister, living with singer Betty Carter (“not like that”), learning from legendary mentors, and exploring “time”.  He also shares his thoughts on practice, community, natural wine, and what you can learn about a person by how they drive. 

The fact that he grew up in Toronto is not necessarily crucial to understanding guitarist Matthew Stevens point of view. He’s regarded to be one of "most exciting up-and-coming jazz guitarists" in his generation, in any part of the world. His songs and guitar playing are featured on albums by the likes of Christian Scott, Esperanza Spalding, Terri Lyne Carrington, Dave Douglas, Linda Oh, Harvey Mason. He has worked as a guitarist with producers Quincy Jones, Glen Ballard and Tony Visconti. As a producer himself, he worked on Esperanza Spalding’s albums Exposure and the Grammy winning 12 Little Spells and on Terri Lyne Carrington’s Grammy nominated album Waiting Game. In addition to his solo recordings, he has also made three albums with Walter Smith III who I spoke to recently: they call the project In Common, and on each record they call together a different collection of collaborators to round out the group. The most recent In Common project came out earlier this year on Whirlwind Recordings and features Dave Holland, Terri Lyne Carrington and Kris Davis.   Matthew gets around. I think it’s because he’s so open, and so collaborative. He brings his personality to all his projects, but he’s clearly also very sensitive and empathic. And maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with Canada. Describing his own musical development, he speaks very affectionately and knowingly about a whole community of guitar players in and around Toronto - a school of playing that I admit, I didn’t know so much about before we talked. So many of the players he named share a kind of gentle, swinging sophistication, elegance but also a little bit of grit. I think Matt has applied some of that to his playing - he’s certainly not afraid of some distortion - his sound is often very gritty - but even when he rocks out, I hope he’ll forgive me for saying this - there’s still a kind of gentleness to it. He’s a nice guy, and it shows up in the music.  We spoke recently about Canada, how the business of jazz has evolved in his lifetime, how the pandemic reoriented him both personally and musically, gear, practice, teaching, the local scenes in Toronto and Pittsburgh, and one of my favorite topics: what is production?