272: Ben Sidran on Rainmaker

Paula Cole on her early success, dreaming big, her life and career, the power of “the beginner’s mind”, the distinction between being an artist and an entertainer, the feeling of being pregnant with song, speaking for those who cannot speak, navigating a life in the music business, learning from young people, and her new album, Lo.  www.third-story.com www.substack.leosidran.com www.wbgo.org/studios

In a career spanning over fifty years and thirty five records, Ben Sidran has established himself as a philosopher poet. Equally celebrated for his precise, probing writing style as he is for his improvised spoken word jazz raps, he has carved out a truly unique space for himself. The Times of London aptly described Ben as “the world’s first existential jazz rapper,” and The Chicago Sun Times once referred to him as “a renaissance man cast adrift in the modern world.” He is one of a kind. And he is, of course, also my dad.   There is no one else like Ben so it’s not uncommon for his fans and followers to search his songs for meaning in times of trouble. When the world is uncertain, many find comfort in the wisdom of his words (myself included!). Some of those songs have become classics among his elite tribe of hipster devotees, like “Life’s A Lesson,” “Face Your Fears,” and “Don’t Cry For No Hipster”.  So it was curious when, during the Covid pandemic, Ben chose to make his first ever fully instrumental record in 2022, Swing State. It was as if he had finally run out of words, at least for that moment, and he chose to let his piano tell the story that he was unable to sing about.  But those who know Ben well understand that he’s never really out of words, so it was just a matter of time before he began to write again. And last summer he found himself back in a Parisian studio joined by a group of American and French musicians to make what would become his latest record, Rainmaker.  In many ways Rainmaker is just another in a long line of Ben’s records - a new collection of songs written in his particular style of hipster philosophy set against a backdrop of easily digestible grooves. On the other hand, he describes the process of making it as “wrestling with the devil.” The accumulation of political, environmental and personal conditions made this particular project resonate differently for him.  We spoke recently about the process of making Rainmaker, the stories behind the songs, his belief in the power of humor to help survive adverse situations, how Philip Roth’s retirement from writing affected him, whether or not he thinks retirement is truly possible for an artist, if this is in fact his last record, and what French rapper MC Solaar has to do with any of it.  Ben has been featured on this podcast many times, most recently on his 80th birthday last August. On each of his birthdays going back a handful of years we have talked, as well as on various other episodes. If you have heard any of them, then you know that it is always a huge treat to have him, and in fact the episodes with him are among the most listened to and shared on the podcast. www.third-story.com https://leosidran.substack.com/

Shabaka Hutchings grew up between the UK and Barbados. He started playing clarinet as a young boy in Barbados and eventually moved back to England to go to music school in the early 2000s.  After college he began a period of working furiously on a kaleidoscopic range of projects and became an icon of the new sound of London jazz, which integrated African rhythms and modes, Caribbean and Middle eastern sounds and was largely danceable. Shabaka himself has never fully embraced the jazz label. While the music is highly improvised, and it owes much to the American jazz tradition, his influences are very broad. Over the course of the past decade, the majority of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. In these formations he displayed a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the South African jazz tradition.   Part of his signature on the saxophone has been inspired by rappers, and his sound is often evocative of the human voice, conversational, expressive, and rhythmic. A somewhat chance encounter with a flute maker in Japan several years ago led him to develop an interest in the Shakuhachi flute tradition, and during covid he committed himself to the flute. Last year he announced that he would be putting away his saxophone and ending all of his bands to dedicate himself almost exclusively to playing wooden flutes. His latest release Perceive its beauty, Acknowledge its Grace (Impulse!) is his first full length album since making that transition. It’s more meditative, contemplative and introspective than his earlier work. But it’s still clearly Shabaka. The album features appearances by pianist Jason Moran, drummer Nasheet Waits, harpists Brandee Younger and Charles Overton, vocalists Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney and Saul Williams, string wizard Miguel Atwood Ferguson and percussionist Carlos Niño. I talked to Shabaka earlier this year at Winter Jazzfest as he was embarking on a new adventure, both personally and musically. It was an absolutely fascinating conversation about his own creative development and philosophy, his new record, and why this historical moment is “showing the importance of slowing down, of patience, of contemplation.”   www.third-story.com www.leosidran.substack.com/ www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story  

Singer Jose James on his new record 1978, his professional and personal journey, the unique demands of being a jazz singer today, why he believes good art should be transformative, how he stays healthy, the creative challenges brought on by happiness and whether or not one needs to suffer in order to make good art.  This episode is dedicated to the late saxophonist and vocoder master Casey Benjamin who passed away on March 30th at the age of 45. Casey, a brilliant and influential musician, spent much of his career at the crossroads of jazz and hip hop. I never knew him but I was always very aware of him and a big admirer of his playing.  During this conversation with Jose James, Casey’s name came up several times. Given the context of his recent passing, what was originally a set of casual commentaries about Benjamin’s dedication to music and community was transformed into a tribute to him and I am heartened by how much admiration Jose and Taali had for their friend. www.third-story.com https://leosidran.substack.com/ https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story    

säje, the vocal group made up of singers Sara Gazarek, Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage won their first Grammy on Sunday for their arrangement of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning”.  They recorded it with one of the most admired musical minds today, Jacob Collier.  And like much of what has happened with so far, that recording was both unintended and totally right, somewhere between the reward for the hard work of talented artists, and magic.  The story plays like a dream. One day Jacob Collier stopped by the LA recording studio (Lucy’s Meat Market), where was working on their debut album. One thing led to another and he ended up playing a few free form takes of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” There’s footage of it online and you can see him improvising his arrangement. You can also see his childlike enthusiasm, his playful energy, his request to do just one more take, because he was having so much fun.  After Jacob left, the singers in säje built their vocal arrangement around what he had played. It’s a beautiful marriage of improvisation and arrangement, and the result ends up sounding completely inevitable. They contextualized Collier’s spontaneous approach, brought it fully into their world, built a frame for his impressionistic gestures, and then filled in the landscape.  This was not their first experience with serendipity. Before was , back when it was just an idea floated by Sara Gazarek in 2018 to put some kind of vocal group together, the four women gathered at a rental house in Palm Springs, California to get to know one another and discuss the possibility of doing something together.  They came out of that weekend with a song “Desert Song”, a sound, and the makings of a story.  The members of don’t live in the same place (Sara and Erin live in Los Angeles, Johnaye and Amanda live in Seattle), but they started to work as a group, and eventually recorded “Desert Song”. They submitted the song to the Grammy’s  - their first song! - and it was nominated in 2020.  Eventually released their debut album in 2023. It featured guest appearances by Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Mayo, Terri Lynn Carrington, and of course Jacob Collier, among others. But at the core of the album was the signature silky sound which is a little hard to define, but very easy to identify. It’s technically challenging to execute - suspended chords and interweaving lines - and very satisfying to experience.  They like to say that they ascend beyond their training, and into artistry.  We met at a photo studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn late last year and had a beautiful talk about their formation, their journey - from that first weekend retreat in Palm Springs to the release of their first full length album and its subsequent Grammy nomination for Best Arrangement Instruments and Vocals with Jacob Collier for “In The Wee Small Hour of the Morning”, collective lyric writing, managing logistics and juggling four schedules, the emotional space that feminine energy allows, and discovering who they are in public. www.third-story.comwww.substack.leosidran.com

Ten years ago, on a bit of a whim, I invited bassist Will Lee to come over to my home studio in Brooklyn to do an interview with me for a new project I was starting: a podcast. A year or two earlier, my friend Michael Fusco-Straub had turned me on to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and I was totally hooked on the concept of casual long form interviews among peers. At the time Maron spoke almost exclusively to comics, and I thought there might be a space for something similar but focused on music. Although I didn’t have any real experience as a journalist or a broadcaster, I knew I could do it. In fact, maybe more than anything else I’ve ever done professionally, it was the most natural decision I can ever remember making.  But the format was a bit of a mystery. Who was I supposed to be? An expert on music? A friend of my guests? I thought maybe we would perform together. Or maybe they would demonstrate something. Or maybe it would be a document of the local scene in New York - in the early episodes I asked my guests “where are you coming from today” and “where are you going after this”. Actually, those are pretty good questions. Maybe I should go back to asking them again.  I spent a month futzing with my Will Lee interview, carefully editing each pause and “um”, working and reworking the introduction. I designed a crude logo based on a Google Earth image of my house in Park Slope, and built a website on Squarespace.  I posted the episode and sent an email to my friends to explain the new project. I wrote:  Since moving to New York nine years ago, I have tossed around the idea of conducting informal interviews with musicians in my studio when they come in to record. Over the years so many great players and singers have shared tremendous insights and history with me, and it seemed like such a missed opportunity not to record it. Of course, everything changes when the “red light” is on, so the question for me became how to maintain that same level of spontaneity and candor in a somewhat more formal setting. Then I sat nervously with a pit in my stomach, not knowing what I had just done. Would anyone like it? Would anyone care? Was I any good at it?  Ten years and 268 episodes later, I continue to refine, to tweak and futz, to agonize and scramble to the finish line every time. As I write these words it is 12:30am, and I sit in my darkened studio - essentially an extension of my bedroom - with my wife, Amanda asleep just a few feet away, and our daughter asleep in the next room. That is to say that The Third Story has become an extension not only of my life, but of my entire household. Fortunately the initial nausea has passed but it has been replaced by a constant sense of urgency to get the next episode finished.  I have also developed a style, an unstructured but intentional approach to talking to people, in search of a narrative thread in each journey, an attempt to get somewhere together. Sometimes it’s more technical, sometimes it’s more esoteric, sometimes it’s personal. There is no real theme to the show, and there is no real dogma. If it’s interesting to me, the hope is that it will be interesting to others too.  The good news about an ongoing show like this one is that there’s always another episode to make, so you can never get too precious about any of them because there will be more. The bad news is the same as the good news: no matter how much time you spend on one episode, or how good it was, you still have to make another one, and you’re probably already behind schedule. The project has become a way of moving through both space and time for me. It provides a kind of structure when I travel - nearly everywhere I have gone over the last decade, I have returned home with at least one interview.  Whether talking to Gabriela Quintero in Mexico, Jorge Drexler in Spain, Madeleine Peyroux in Paris, Butch Vig in Los Angeles, Howard Levy in Chicago, David Garibaldi in Oakland, David Maraniss in Madison, or Jack Stratton in Cleveland, the interviews have provided purpose to my movement through the world.  I have traveled specifically to cover jazz festivals like Copenhagen, Newport, Montreal and Umbria, and chronicled my own tours too. I have used the platform to mark the passage of time and significant events along the way. From The 2016 and 2020 Elections to the Covid outbreak, from my 45th birthday to my father’s 80th, from the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris to memorializing lost friends like Tommy LiPuma, Clyde Stubblefield, Tim Luntzel or Richie Cole.  I have captured both first and final conversations with some remarkable people. I did the first long form interview with Jacob Collier in his house in London in 2014, and the last long form interview with Creed Taylor in his New York apartment 2015. Interviews with Peter Straub, Howard Becker, Clifford Irving, George Wein and Al Schmitt now live on as part of their legacies.  While The Third Story has never become what you might call “popular” it has become kind of a cult show. I continue to be astounded when I meet someone who knows the show. It happens more often than I expect, and I have made more than a few real meaningful friendships that way too.  When several years ago I was invited to publish my episodes on All About Jazz, I knew I was making credible content. When in 2022 I was asked to partner with WBGO Studios, it was an acknowledgement that I was on the right path, and when we won a Signal Award in 2023 I was further encouraged.  By the way, my logo was eventually redesigned by a real graphic designer, Michael Fusco-Straub (the same guy who turned me on to Marc Maron to begin with). Last month, on another whim, I called Will Lee again to see if he would like to meet up for a reunion and to help me celebrate my tenth anniversary. When I first talked to Will for episode one, he was still performing nightly on The Late Show with David Letterman and we talked about his career as one of the most recorded bassists in history, his early education, playing on Letterman, his solo projects… the kind of general overview conversation that has come to loosely define what I do here. This time was more casual and more conversational. We sat on the couch in his Manhattan apartment and traded quips, and I managed to gently extract some new information from him.  Then I asked my wife, Amanda, to join me to help process this anniversary in more domestic terms: how does it look and feel to live with someone who is constantly in the process of mining another life story for content and making podcast episodes? What are the similarities between her career as a yoga teacher and mine as a… whatever I am? What do raising a child and producing a podcast have in common? It was extremely entertaining, as is usually the case when Amanda joins me on the show.  At the risk of getting too sentimental, I will simply say that making The Third Story is one of the great privileges and joys of my life, I am grateful to all of the extraordinary people who have shared their stories with me, and I am even more grateful to you for listening to it. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios www.leosidran.substack.com  

Trumpeter/composer Keyon Harrold was born and raised in Ferguson, MO to a musical family. He is the son of pastors and one of 16 children. As a boy, a trumpet was placed in his hands, and the rest is history.  He moved to New York to study at The New School in the 1990s and became part of a legendary generation of musicians associated with the neo soul movement, including Common, Bilal, Roy Hargrove, The Roots, and Robert Glasper.  Harrold is a reliable and sought after player among big acts, and he’s worked with Jay-Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, Eminem, Maxwell, Mac Miller and Snoop Dogg.  At the same time he’s a seriously gifted jazz improviser and composer, who was mentored by trumpeter Charles Tolliver, and who was once referred to as “the future of the trumpet” by Wynton Marsalis.  He supplied all of the trumpet playing in Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, playing to match Cheadle’s on-screen performance as Miles. The soundtrack to the film won a Grammy.  But while Keyon has enjoyed what might appear to be a charmed career, he has also had a series of unexpected setbacks and heavy lived experiences that contribute to his musical journey.  His new album Foreverland is a celebration of his multidimensional career and his sensitivity as an artist, proving that Harrold is a master of channeling his lived experience through his horn. The album features 10 original songs that explore themes of empowerment, positivity, love, loss, and vulnerability.  And it’s  a family affair — nearly every musician is a longtime friend, including Common, Robert Glasper, Laura Mvula, Chris Dave, Marcus Gilmore, Nir Felder, Randy Runyon, BIGYUKI, Burniss Travis and many others.  Here he talks about Foreverland, how a series of losses in his life ultimately led him to make “something beautiful, something positive, something inspiring,” and his reflections on the early days of his career as part of a community of like minded musicians who were “always open.” www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Singer-songwriter Lau Noah grew up in the small Catalan city of Reus. She left Spain for America a decade ago, at age 19 and never really looked back. She makes celestial, dreamy music evocative of another era, yet influenced by her own very modern story.  Lau Noah is both a realist and a magical realist. She is an uncompromising and determined indie artist. She books her own shows, produces her own recordings, and advocates on her own behalf. She has a practical understanding of how to make compelling content, and how to communicate with her fans and her fellow artists. But she also appears to be searching the stars, deciphering her dreams, and following the river in her mind to the next location. Listening to Lau’s music is like watching a river flow. It’s all right in front of you, passing with natural fluidity. But you can never quite locate it, and you can never fully predict how it will move. The best way to experience it is to simply accept that it is flowing and let it wash over you.  The river, in fact, is a familiar image in her songs. Lau seems to relate to the river, steady in its unyielding forward motion, unapologetic in its intransigent transience.  As a composer, her writing evokes a baroque classicism, her compositions are colored with counterpoint, and often sound like a conversation between Spanish guitar and voice. Sophisticated as she is, Lau is self taught, and actually lists Hannah Montana and Avril Lavigne as two of her primary influences.   Her new album A Dos ("for two") is a collection of duets with some of her most admired artist friends, and some of the friends who most admired her. These include Chris Thile, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Jorge Drexler, and Jacob Collier among others. Much of Lau’s access to these people came from posting videos online and letting the internet work its magic.  We spoke recently about her artful life, the journey that led her out of Spain and onto the world stage, how struggling with agoraphobia as a teenager helped her to become an artist, why adversity creates community, her adventures in babysitting, being comfortable as the odd one in any situation, and making A Dos.  

Ani DiFranco began recording and self-releasing her music as a 20 year old in Buffalo, New York in 1990. 34 years later she is widely considered to be a feminist icon. But in many ways she emerged iconic, fully formed and fearless.  A facile lyricist with a biting honesty, she played guitar with a virtuosic, rhythmic style. And she was ahead of her time as an independent artist who owned all her own masters and controlled most of the major aspects of her career. She’s sometimes called the mother of the DIY movement. DiFranco has released all of her albums (over twenty) on her Righteous Babe record label.  The label has also put out projects for other distinguished singer songwriters including Andrew Bird, Utah Phillips, Arto Lindsay, and Anaïs Mitchell whose own Hadestown project was first released as an album on Righteous Babe before being transformed into the Broadway hit that it is today. Ani Difranco’s most recent studio album Revolutionary Love came out in 2021. In 2022 she published a picture book for children called The Knowing which she described as “an Ani DiFranco-style lullaby, inviting young readers to ponder the distinction between outer forms of identity and the inner light of consciousness.” And she will join the cast of Hadestown on Broadway in February, playing the role of Persephone, a part she sang on Anais Mitchell’s original Righteous Babe recording in 2010. So it’s both her broadway debut and a fill circle moment.  In recent years Righteous Babe has released anniversary editions of Ani’s early recordings. In 2022 she revisited the 1998 album Little Plastic Castle, sharing anecdotes and memories of the making of it on social media, and playing some of the songs live. Her memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, was published in 2019. Here she talks about how she sees her work today (“my job is connecting with people”), her early career (“it was relentless”), avoiding being labeled or boxed in (“I feel like a survivor of labels”), her idea of success (“successful artists are not necessarily the best selling”), raising children in an era of performative identity, practicing revolutionary love and why it’s easier to tell the truth than to hide yourself. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios 0:00 Intro 12:00 Interview 

brad allen williams is not only a great guitar player but also a serious recording engineer, and someone who understands both the technical and emotional sides to record making. Known for his work with Jose James, Nate Smith and Brittany Howard, he released his album œconomy on Pete Min’s Colorfield label earlier this year.  Like all Colorfield releases, œconomy was born from an improvisatory spirit that reflects the label’s mission. Artists show up to the recording sessions with nothing written. They create spontaneously in the studio and then edit, arrange, and develop those improvisations into their record. In the case of brad’s œconomy album, he added string arrangements to his free form compositions and a few virtuosic cameos by drummer Mark Guiliana. This conversation is an exploration of that process and a master class in Memphis music history, a meditation on the merits of music with “layered emotions”, a conversation about the relationship between suffering and art, connecting the threads of noise rock and bebop, specialization vs broad knowledge, the value of vulnerability in music, why he doesn’t capitalize his name, and the journey that led him from Memphis to Los Angeles by way of Southern Mississippi, North Texas, New Jersey, New York, and the moon. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast