Podd: The Third Story with Leo Sidran

280: Ben Sidran | The Election

11 november 2024 | 42 min

279: Andrew Bird

31 oktober 2024 | 62 min

278: Aaron Goldberg

22 oktober 2024 | 67 min

277: Lucy Kalantari

10 oktober 2024 | 80 min

276: Riley Mulherkar

24 september 2024 | 85 min

Riley Mulherkar grew up in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest enclave that has been home to so many musical innovators over the years. He went to Garfield High School, a school that has fostered countless talents going all the way back to Quincy Jones who was himself a young trumpet player at the school in the 1940s. Riley was just eight years-old when he began seeing the legendary Garfield High School big-band play free gigs in his Seattle neighborhood; it’s one of the reasons he picked up the trumpet. He was clearly meant to play the instrument.

By the time he got to Juilliard in New York, Riley had shown up on the radar of Wynton Marsalis, who became a mentor. If this story is sounding familiar, it’s because it resembles the experience of so many musicians of his generation who have similar origin stories.

On a deeper level, it’s a story that echoes through the history of jazz - young musicians who are compelled to move to New York after only a small handful of interactions with their heroes.

Riley Mulherkar is very much a man of his moment, and also mindful of those echoes from the past. His new album - his first under his own name and called, simply, Riley is awash in the echoes of history but also boldly embraces contemporary sounds and textures, it reframes classic material that was influential to him and positions his original compositions in that continuum.

The album was a long time in the making. It’s the result of years of experimentation and reflection, and that patience is palpable in the music. Above all, the feeling of the record is totally compelling. And feeling was at the heart of the project all along. He says he was not interested in making something that sounded like an old record, but rather that felt the way he feels when he listens to his heroes, something he describes as “hyperrealism”.

We spoke earlier this year about how the Riley album came together - he worked closely with pianist Chris Pattishall and guitarist/producer Rafiq Bhatia - his diverse career as a collaborator, music presenter, composer, and now solo artist, and how thinking of jazz as a family tree helped him to find his place in the music.

www.third-story.com https://leosidran.substack.com/ https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

275: Jesse Harris

3 september 2024 | 75 min

Jesse Harris belongs to a generation of New York singer songwriters who came of age in the late nineties. He has made over 20 solo albums that walk the line between folk, jazz, pop, Brazilian and art rock. He’s also a much sought after co writer and collaborator who has written songs for and or with many others like Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot, Lana del Rey, and most famously Norah Jones.

Jesse was already well into his career when he met a young Norah Jones on a road trip through Texas and played his songs for her. He had already been signed and dropped from a major label with his band Once Blue (a project he started with Rebecca Martin, and which also featured musicians Ben Street, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Kenny Wollesen), and had already been exploring a space in his songwriting that played in between jazz and pop.

But that chance encounter with Jones, who was still a student at the University of North Texas at the time, was the one that would change the course of Jesse’s career. They stayed in touch and began working together when Jones eventually moved to New York.

Her debut album, 2002’s Come Away With Me contained five of his songs including the now ubiquitous standard “Don’t Know Why”. He also played guitar on the record. Their partnership has endured over the years - Jones and Harris have written together on and off ever since then - but it was that first record that arguably redirected the sound of certain strains of popular music and jazz for a generation.

The success of Come Away With Me also opened new doors for Harris as a solo artist and a composer. Ultimately he started a label (Secret Sun, named after a solo album of the same name) to put out the projects that he produced for himself and others, and recently has been dividing his time between New York and Paris. Jesse is a relentlessly prolific songwriter, someone for whom songs are like air and water; they are simply a fact of life.

Here he talks about Paper Flower, his most recent album recorded in Paris with American and French musicians, his approach to songwriting (“writer's block is a choice”) and production, taking things as they come, confession versus craft, venturing into the unconscious, and whether it is his fate to work with female artists.

www.third-story.com https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

274: Ella Feingold

28 maj 2024 | 102 min

273: Paula Cole

9 maj 2024 | 73 min

272: Ben Sidran on Rainmaker

30 april 2024 | 52 min

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/

271: Shabaka

18 april 2024 | 66 min

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

270: Jose James

8 april 2024 | 66 min

269: säje

7 februari 2024 | 70 min

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.com www.substack.leosidran.com

268: Ten Years of The Third Story - with Will Lee and Amanda Sidran

31 januari 2024 | 61 min

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

267: Keyon Harrold

23 januari 2024 | 64 min

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

266: Lau Noah

11 januari 2024 | 87 min

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.

265: Ani DiFranco

2 januari 2024 | 45 min

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

264: brad allen williams

19 december 2023 | 54 min

263: Pete Min

5 december 2023 | 69 min

262: Clyde and Gracie Lawrence

16 november 2023 | 94 min

261: Joey Alexander

3 november 2023 | 61 min

260: Todd Sickafoose

19 oktober 2023 | 48 min

259: Alan Lightman

12 oktober 2023 | 71 min

258: Gregory Hutchinson

3 oktober 2023 | 66 min

257: John "J.R." Robinson

20 september 2023 | 72 min

256: Jake Lamar

13 september 2023 | 70 min

255: Warren Zanes

6 september 2023 | 69 min

254: Prateek Kuhad

22 augusti 2023 | 62 min

253: Ben Sidran at 80

14 augusti 2023 | 98 min

252: Laila Biali

27 juli 2023 | 54 min

251: Scenes from the Montreal Jazz Festival 2023

14 juli 2023 | 97 min

250: Brandee Younger

27 juni 2023 | 51 min

When it comes to instruments that are not easily designed for improvising soloists, there is perhaps none more difficult to handle than the harp. And when it comes to contemporary jazz harpists, there is perhaps none more influential in this moment than Brandee Younger.

From the very beginning, as a young music student growing up on Long Island, Brandee Younger was toeing the line between her classical, orchestral musical education and the hiphop, soul and pop music that she grew up loving. She spent her early years musically code switching, trying to figure out how to make sense of her sensibilities.

But for those who listened closely to the samples on records by Jay Z, Pete Rock, The Pharcyde, J. Dilla, or Common it was clear that the sound of the harp had become part of the language of modern music.

Many of the harp samples heard on those in early hip hop records featured two African American women, who, like Brandee, learned to thrive beyond their perceived limitations: Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane. Eventually both Ashby and Coltrane would become two of her biggest influences.

Younger eventually made history as the first Black female solo artist to be nominated for a Grammy - for Best Instrumental Composition in 2021, for “Beautiful is Black” from her album Somewhere Different. She has also worked with the likes of Beyonce, John Legend, Drake & Lauryn Hill, as well as jazz artists including Christian McBride, Kat Edmonson, Marcus Strickland, Kassa Overall, Makaya Mccraven, and Ravi Coltrane.

On her recently released album Brand New Life she honors Dorothy Ashby and enlists icons of hip-hop and R&B, including Pete Rock, Mumu Fresh & Meshell Ndegeocello. The album was produced by Makaya Mccraven.

We spoke recently about her journey from orchestra girl to emerging icon, the challenges of playing the harp in a contemporary context, and why she’s done running from the harp police and the jazz police.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

249: Theo Katzman

13 juni 2023 | 103 min

248: Ben Wendel

17 maj 2023 | 34 min

247: Beth Nielsen Chapman

2 maj 2023 | 98 min

246: Vijay Iyer

11 april 2023 | 73 min

245: Christian McBride

29 mars 2023 | 31 min

244: Samara Joy

22 mars 2023 | 64 min

243: What's Trending

7 mars 2023 | 38 min

242: Braxton Cook

21 februari 2023 | 57 min

While almost everyone is sharing the most polished and curated versions of themselves, Braxton Cook is asking “Who Are You When No One Is Watching?”

Actually, as it turns out, it’s a question he’s asking of himself, and in a somewhat postmodern and ironic twist, he’s doing it quite publicly on his new record, called (surprise!) Who Are You When No One Is Watching? which comes out February 24 on Nettwerk Records.

Braxton Cook is an artist of his time - that is, he’s hard to define, hard to categorize, highly educated, determined to share his most authentic self and in a constant state of searching.

He’s a Juilliard trained jazz saxophone player who has worked with jazz artists Christian Scott, Christian McBride Big Band, Jon Batiste and Marquis Hill as well as more mainstream artists like Solange Knowles and Tom Misch.

He’s also a deeply sensitive solo artist, singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist who is committed to keeping the saxophone alive in soul music, speaking his own personal truth in his songs, and bridging the gap between jazz, soul, and alternative R&B. In other words, he’s a millennial jazz artist. No wonder he opened his 2017 album Somewhere In Between with the song “Millenial Music”.

We spoke recently about his trajectory, starting out on the local scene in Washington D.C. as a high school and college student (he spent two years at Georgetown University studying English with a concentration in African American Studies and playing gigs in town before transferring to Juilliard to pursue his jazz education), his evolution from soloist to singer, sideman to leader, and child to parent. We also talked about the value of nostalgia and deep emotional connection in his writing, intentionality in raising children, his determination to make “music with impact”, where he cut his teeth and if that has anything to do with his lifelong fascination with dentistry.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios www.braxtoncook.com

241: Andy Narell

8 februari 2023 | 73 min

Music is not only a form of expression, it’s also a way of traveling. It’s astounding how many people’s lives have been completely transformed by their relationship with music - and sometimes the simplest experiences we have as kids can profoundly alter the course of everything that follows.

A few seemingly unrelated events during Andy Narell’s early childhood in New York helped to lay out a path for him to follow, and he’s still following it today. They included Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare”, a rise in gang violence in Harlem in the 1960s, and the innovations of a musical instrument maker from Trinidad named Ellie Mannette.

Andy Narell is known as one of the most celebrated - if not the most celebrated steel - drummers in the world. Throughout a five plus decade career, he has contributed to both the development of steel drum music, and to the development of the drums themselves.

Andy has appeared on hundreds of records and film scores, he’s been the subject of two documentary films himself, made nearly 20 records as a leader or co-leader. He’s an educator, an advocate, and an ambassador for the music, culture and traditions of Trinidad where steel drums - or pans as they’re called - were born. If you’ve ever heard the sound of steel drums on a record or a movie, chances are you’ve heard Andy Narell.

His eventual partnership and friendship with Ellie Mannette, the so-called “father of the steel drum,” lasted until Mannette’s death in 2018.

Andy’s contribution to steel drums is immeasurable, his love of the music of Trinidad is deep, and his friendship with Ellie Mannette seems to have been one of the most important relationships of his life. But beyond all that, beyond all the technical, musical, or even historical details, Andy is an example of someone whose devotion and love for a thing took him around the world and the steel drum was his mode of transportation.

Here Andy shares his own personal story and also the story of the steel pan itself, the trajectory of calypso music from Trinidad to the UK and the US and then back to Trinidad. And he explains why he believes that “music is a powerful tool, and it’s revolutionary.”

www.third-story.com www.wbgo.org/studios www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.andynarell.com

240: Will Page (Tarzan Economics)

24 januari 2023 | 73 min

239: Rachael & Vilray

10 januari 2023 | 64 min

238: Best of The Third Story on The Art of the Story, 2022

27 december 2022 | 39 min

237: The Ones That Got Away (2022 Holiday Edition)

21 december 2022 | 77 min

Larry Goldings Revisited

13 december 2022 | 75 min

What's so funny about Larry Goldings?

He has been such a major musical force for so long, it’s hard to remember a time when he was not around. He’s one of the most accomplished, respected and admired hammond organ players alive and much of his career has been devoted to that instrument.

The trio he formed in the early 90s with guitarist Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart has been one of the pillars of his musical life for over 30 years, and the three have remained United for decades. Their most recent record, Perpetual Pendulum, was released earlier this year. The recording session for the album marked the 30th anniversary of the release of their first record together - the 1991 album The Intimacy of the Blues.

Larry eventually moved to the West Coast and carved out a reputation as not only a jazz musician but also a highly sensitive session player, sideman, collaborator, songwriter, and film composer.

Goldings is also no stranger to social media: For years he has posted clips of himself - not only musical, but also what you might describe as schtick or comedy. His alter ego, Hans Groiner, for example, claims to be an Austrian accordion player, pianist, educator and Thelonious Monk specialist who has improved Monk's music by making it "more relaxing, and less offensive to the ear."

In recent years he’s also become a regular fixture with Scary Pockets, the LA based YouTube famous funk collective. Larry Goldings and Scary Pockets even have their own side project called Scary Goldings, they’ve recorded a bunch of albums and videos together, and over time have brought in Larry’s longtime friend John Scofield to join them, as well as other viral superstars like MonoNeon and Louis Cole.

In this conversation, originally recorded in 2016, Larry talks about his early development and influences, his ongoing relationship with Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart, working with John Scofield, James Taylor, Maceo Parker, Jon Hendricks, the New York - LA thing, his approach to accompaniment, organ playing and telling jokes on the bandstand.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

Music in this episode:

John Scofield “Do Like Eddie”Goldings, Bernstein, Stewart “United”James Taylor “School Song”Johnny Bowtie Barstow “First Noel” Hans Groiner - YoutubeLarry Goldings “Ivermectin”Scary Goldings “Larry Pockets”Jon Hendricks “Freddie Freeloader”Christopher Hollyday “No Second Quarter”Larry Goldings Trio “The Intimacy of The Blues”Jaco Pastorious “Word Of Mouth”Dave McKenna “C Jam Blues”Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery “James and Wes”Peter Bernstein (feat. Larry Goldings) “While We’re Young”Chris Anderson “The Folks Who Live On The Hill”Jim Hall (feat. Larry Goldings) “Somewhere”Larry Young “Back Up”Billy Preston “Will It Go Round In Circles”Goldings, Bernstein, Stewart “Reflections In D”Weather Report “In A Silent Way”Jimmy Smith “The Sermon”Abdullah Ibrahim “Carnival”Maceo Parker “Shake Everything You Got”Maceo Parker “Pass The Peas”James Taylor “Country Road”

235: Antonio Sanchez

1 december 2022 | 97 min

When drummer Antonio Sanchez released his album Bad Hombre back in 2017, he was responding to a few events that took place in his world at the same time.

On a political level, the music was a response to the racism of the Trump campaign against Mexicans. In fact the title of the record Bad Hombre seemed to be an answer to Trump’s assertion that a wall needed to be built at the US Mexican border in order to get the “bad hombres” out of the US.

An immigrant from Mexico himself, Sanchez reappropriated the phrase. Itseemed, in fact, to be a perfect fit for him because not only did it work as a form of resistance - by using the term he made his feelings clear without having to say too much about it - but it also borrowed from the jazz vernacular. You know, when musicians really respect someone, they will often refer to them as “bad”.

And in that context, Antonio Sanchez is definitely a bad hombre.

Sanchez moved to the US in his early 20s from his native Mexico to go to music school. One of his first teachers, the Panamanian born Danilo Perez, was a supporter, and their work together was one of the early launchpads for Antonio. While he was playing with Danilo, the guitarist Pat Metheny heard him, and that led to a musical relationship that has been at the center of his life for 20 years.

Sanchez went on to become one of the most sought-after drummers on the international jazz scene. Has won four Grammys, and has been named Modern Drummer’s "Jazz Drummer of the Year” three times, and appeared on the covers of all the big jazz magazines.

From early on he thought about drumming, and particularly soloing, as a form of storytelling. He says “I’m a sucker for a good story.” So it was only a matter of time before some great storyteller would find a way to use Antonio Sanchez’s drums to help tell a story. And that was exactly what happened when the Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu asked Antonio to do an all drum score for his film Birdman in 2014.

The film went on to win three academy awards and the score earned Antonio awards (including a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media) and nominations at the Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards.

As significant as the awards and accolades were, maybe more significant was that the sound of Antonio’s drumming truly entered the zeitgeist after Birdman. And though he hadn’t planned for it to turn out that way, he realized that the level of expectation, curiosity, and even pressure on him to follow up that success with something equally resonant had risen.

So when in 2017 Antonio went into his newly built home studio to record Bad Hombre, he had a lot of psychic energy stored up and ready to use. He made an entirely instrumental solo record, he played all the instruments and did what has become his trademark production work of mixing drones, samples, programming and live drumming. In fact the only collaborator on the record was his nonagenarian grandfather, the Mexican actor Ignacio López Tarso who appears on the first track.

Five years, one pandemic, a few political cycles, and a handful of other projects later, he’s back this year with Shift: Bad Hombre Vol. II. This time the list of collaborators is a bit longer.

Somewhere in the dense fog of the pandemic, Sanchez decided to ask some of his favorite singers and songwriters — for material he could deconstruct and reimagine. The result sees Dave Matthews & Pat Metheny, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Meshell Ndegeocello, Lila Downs, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Kimbra, Ana Tijoux, Becca Stevens, Silvana Estrada, MARO, Thana Alexa (who is his wife) & SONICA sitting in on their own tunes — or ideas co written by Sánchez.

The idea of “shifting” might not only apply to the songs on Bad Hombre Vol. II, but also to a change in Antonio’s approach - In the first Bad Hombre release, he was extremely political. Over the years, his outrage and fury with Trump and the turmoil at the US–Mexican border muted – and Sánchez himself “shifted” how he thinks about what he does, and where he wants to go next.

We talked recently about that search, the same one that started back in Mexico when he was a competitive gymnast, classical pianist and aspiring rock drummer and brought him all the way to where he is today, the Bad Hombre.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

234: Ibrahim Maalouf

15 november 2022 | 74 min

When Ibrahim Maalouf’s parents decided to move to Paris from Beirut in the early 1980s, it was meant to be temporary. The Lebanese civil war was raging and they chose to raise their family away from the violence. But the intention was always to return to Lebanon when the war ended. They did their best to educate their children in the traditional way, and because they were both musicians themselves, music was hugely important to them. They played arabic music in the house, and young Ibrahim studied classical arabic trumpet from the age of seven.

His father, trumpeter Nassim Maalouf had even invented a special microtonal trumpet or "quarter tone trumpet", which makes it possible to play Arabic maqams on the trumpet, and Ibrahim developed his sound and style using that unique instrument.

But as a young boy growing up in Paris in the 80s and 90s, he was also influenced by all the popular sounds around him - Michael Jackson, De La Soul, pop and soul music and dance. In the end, Maalouf's family stayed in Paris rather than returning to Lebanon, and Ibrahim has been processing that distance for much of his life.

Ibrahim’s career has been, in many ways, an exploration of his two worlds. He has released 17 albums and became the first trumpet player to headline France's biggest arena. He's collaborated with everyone from Sting to Wynton Marsalis, 6 million people tuned into his Bastille Day performance in France last year. He has also written scores for many films.

This year he released two albums. The first Queen of Sheba is a collaboration with Angelique Kidjo. The second Capacity to Love is a deep exploration of r&b and hip hop production for the first time in his career. It features De La Soul, D Smoke, Erick the Architect, plus jazz singer Gregory Porter, Tank and the Bangas and international stars from Europe, Africa and South America. The album opens with Charlie Chaplin's famous speech from The Dictator, and ends with a spoken word piece from Sharon Stone.

Here he talks about his childhood in France, developing his sound and concept, making elevated popular music, embracing the historical moment, refusing to be limited by labels or genres, and what it means when Quincy Jones orders sushi.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast wbgo.org/studios

Jorge Drexler

1 november 2022 | 78 min

233: Tyshawn Sorey

4 oktober 2022 | 72 min

232: Daniel Lanois

20 september 2022 | 75 min

Remembering Peter Straub

13 september 2022 | 89 min

231: Cyrille Aimée

6 september 2022 | 69 min

Long before singer Cyrille Aimée spent any time on the road she was already a citizen of the world. She grew up in a small French town, Samois-sur-Seine, but says that she never felt fully French. She never felt fully any one thing. Her mother is Dominican, her father is French, and she says that “when you’re a mixed culture, you’re kind of your own thing.”

Samois-sur-Seine is very small but in the 1990s of Cyrille’s childhood it did have one claim to fame: it was the town where the legendary french gypsy jazz guitar player Django Reinhardt retired, and hosts an annual jazz festival in his honor. Musicians and fans alike descend on the town for the festival, and because of the ties to Django, some of them are Gypsies (Manouche in French).

Riding her bike through town one summer day, Cyrille had a chance encounter with some young Gypsy kids that would lead to a friendship that ultimately changed her life. The Manouche taught her to sing, taught her to perform, taught her to improvise and see improvisation as not only a musical pursuit but also a kind of life goal.

To watch Cyrille perform is to watch a kind of ecstatic manifestation. She’s very physically engaged, her whole body gets involved when she sings. She says that music was originally an extension of dance for her and that since her instrument is her body, dance is still a vital part of her singing. That physicality is part of her charm. She’s a natural performer.

But she’s also an accomplished singer, dance or no dance. She is naturally in tune with the language of jazz, bebop, funk, and soul. She’s a precise and fluent scat singer, technical and soulful at the same time.

Cyrille won awards and accolades along the way - she won the Montreux Jazz Festival Competition in 2007,was a finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010, and she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Competition in 2012. Her 2019 album Move On featured cover versions of songs by Stephen Sondheim. The album was praised by Sondheim himself and one of its songs, "Marry Me a Little", was nominated for a Grammy Award. And a live stream video of Cyrille on Emmet Cohen’s YouTube channel has racked up millions of views.

Aimée released two albums in 2021, Petit Fleur recorded with Adonis Rose and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and I’ll Be Seeing You, a collection of duets with her long time friend the guitarist Michael Valeanu.

When she’s not on the road, Cyrille has been living between New Orleans and Costa Rica.

We spoke about growing up in Samois-sur-Seine, what she learned from the Gypsies, moving to America, how to learn new languages, the importance of confronting and overcoming fear for creativity, how to be honest with the audience, and where to find good cheese.

Creed Taylor from 2015

30 augusti 2022 | 56 min

Louis Cato from 2018

23 augusti 2022 | 75 min

230: Ben Sidran at 79

14 augusti 2022 | 48 min

229: John Medeski

9 augusti 2022 | 77 min

Noga Erez from 2020

2 augusti 2022 | 88 min

228: Emmet Cohen

26 juli 2022 | 73 min

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

227: Umbria Jazz

19 juli 2022 | 13 min

226: Montreal Jazz Festival

12 juli 2022 | 88 min

Julian Lage from 2021

5 juli 2022 | 61 min

225: Stacey Kent

28 juni 2022 | 60 min

Donald Fagen from 2019

21 juni 2022 | 80 min

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

224: Ryan Lerman

14 juni 2022 | 79 min

Lionel Loueke (WBGO Studios Preview)

31 maj 2022 | 74 min

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

Eric Harland (WBGO Studios Preview)

24 maj 2022 | 69 min

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.

223: Matthew Stevens

21 maj 2022 | 64 min

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?

Bob Power (WBGO Studios Preview)

17 maj 2022 | 68 min

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 Power’s 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 back in February of 2020 to talk about history, technology, fat beats, staying in your lane, and keeping things fluid.

This is the third in a month of encore episodes as part of a new partnership between The Third Story and WBGO Studios. During the month of May, you’ll find another episode from The Third Story archive at wbgo.org/studios and then in June, new episodes will drop every other week.

www.wbgo.org/studios www.third-story.com

Jason Moran (WBGO Studios Preview)

10 maj 2022 | 79 min

Jason Moran is so prolific and multifaceted that any attempt to summarize his career poses a daunting challenge. Now think about what it’s like preparing for a conversation with him.

He’s a composer, conceptual artist, educator, and public intellectual with a critical disposition — critical in the sense of challenging the status quo, while still respecting the accomplishments of his mentors. First and foremost, he’s a piano player who straddles avant-garde jazz, the blues, classical music, stride piano, and hip-hop.

In other words, he’s just an incredibly thoughtful person.

Moran is interested in reframing and reassessing the relationship between music, history, and place. When we spoke for this episode of The Third Story, in the spring of 2020, he was in the midst of curating an exhibition at the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Given that fact and what was happening at the time, I was particularly interested to know how he was dealing with social distancing and isolation.

Our conversation is both a snapshot of that moment in time and a sweeping consideration of many of the larger themes in his work. Among other things, he talks here about coming up in Houston among a generation of jazz innovators; the idea of truth versus passion; promoting the “Freedom Principle”; America’s unfortunate way of forgetting the past; what it means for African American musicians to move freely “from the stage to the table”; the power dynamic within choosing repertoire; what Thelonious Monk and KRS-1 have in common; what we still have to learn from Louis Armstrong; and what it means to be the “personal embodiment of your history.”

This is the second in a month of encore episodes as part of a new partnership between The Third Story and WBGO Studios. During the month of May, you’ll find another episode from The Third Story archive at wbgo.org/studios and then in June, new episodes will drop every other week.

https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story www.third-story.com

222: Walter Smith III

7 maj 2022 | 83 min

From an early age, Walter Smith III began taking music very seriously. “My first gig was playing at a McDonalds in Houston with another saxophone player. I took a solo on “Blue Bossa.” It was terrible. People clapped, and I figured if I could get away with that and get applause, how could I fail?”

Although it may appear Smith is a new voice on the scene, he is widely recognized as an adept performer, accomplished composer, and inspired educator. This spring, Smith welcomes his newest release, In Common III. The boundary pushing album features some of the most important and talked about musicians in the world - Matt Stevens, Kris Davis, Dave Holland and Terri Lyne Carrington.

Smith has developed under the wings of many of the music’s greats. Walter is/has been a member of several legendary groups (recording and/or touring) including the Roy Haynes Fountain of Youth Band, Terence Blanchard Quintet, Eric Harland's “Voyager”, Bill Stewart Trio, Jason Moran’s In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet, the Christian McBride “Situation”, Marquis Hill “New Gospel Revisited”, Gerald Clayton Quintet, Christian Scott group and the Sean Jones Quintet to name a few.

Smith has performed all over the world participating in virtually every international festival as well as famed venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Village Vanguard, and the Kennedy Center. In addition, he has shared the stage and/or appeared on recordings with many important artists including Mulgrew Miller, Billy Childs, Joe Lovano, Herbie Hancock, Maria Schneider, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Terri Lyne Carrington, Ralph Peterson, and a host of others. To date, Walter has appeared on over 100 recordings that are released worldwide.

Originally from Houston, TX, Smith now resides in Boston, MA and is Chair of Woodwinds at Berklee College of Music helping to prepare the next generation of young artists.

We spoke recently about his early development, the Houston sound, his thoughts on education, practice, improvisation, leadership, raising a family as a musician, meeting your heroes, and LA real estate.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Jon Batiste (WBGO Studios Preview)

3 maj 2022 | 77 min

221: Michelle Willis

16 april 2022 | 78 min

220: Nate Craig

6 april 2022 | 75 min

219: Lauren Henderson

30 mars 2022 | 71 min

Vocalist Lauren Henderson is unusual in all the best ways. Described as "somewhere between a comforting whisper and a cogent declaration" by The New York Times, she sings with an intimate, sultry, haunting intensity. Her music might be mysterious, but she is an open book.

Raised in Marblehead, Massachusetts (birthplace of the American Navy and just down the road from Salem, MA) she attended some of the finest schools in New England. She was a varsity field hockey player at Wheaton College, and then went on to receive her MBA from Brown University. She spent much of her early life being one of the few people of color in a largely white environment.

She says her journey of discovering and celebrating her heritage has gone hand in hand with her music career. She describes it as uncovering “the layers of her diverse background in English and Spanish. Her compositions paint stories reflecting journeys imposed through the African Diaspora in connection to Henderson's Panamanian, Montserratian, and vast Caribbean roots as they interplay with her North American upbringing.”

Almost immediately after meeting her for the first time in 2017, I was inspired to write the song “From The Inside Out” for her to sing, and we ended up performing it as a duo on her 2019 release Alma Oscura.

Lauren Henderson is a kind of classic character wandering through the modern world. She is incredibly poised, elegant, and hip. She’s often dressed to the nines, full makeup and hair, ready for her closeup at any moment. She plays with some of the finest musicians today - notably she has worked for over a decade with pianist Sullivan Fortner.

Lauren is also a proudly independent, sharply focused business woman who produces her records, runs her own label and until recently has booked her own tours. Often I feel like she was sent here from another time - I just can’t decide if it’s the past or the future.

So today, we get the story. Lauren Henderson tells it to us, from the inside out.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.laurenhendersonmusic.com

218: Jake Sherman

22 mars 2022 | 66 min

217: Melissa Aldana

12 mars 2022 | 68 min

216: David Poe

22 februari 2022 | 85 min

215: Amir ElSaffar

7 februari 2022 | 56 min

214: Adam O'Farrill

29 januari 2022 | 48 min

Sometimes when a child of a musician shows an interest or an aptitude in playing music themselves, it’s called “the curse”. Sometimes the curse is revealed in mysterious ways, and the cursed child might not even realize that they have the curse until something clicks in them, a light goes off, a switch flips.

In the case of Adam O’Farrill, he says he discovered his curse when, at 8 years old, he went to his older brother’s Zach’s middle school band concert and saw the trumpet player. Looking back on it, he admits that part of it was simply the shine and brilliance of the instrument - he was called to it. He certainly wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last to react that way.

But for Adam, it was really just a matter of time. For the cursed child, there is no escape. He’s a quiet but intense observer, an omnivorous receiver of inputs and inspirations, from foreign films to video games, literature to cuisine. And he’s also what some people would call musical royalty - the grandson of Afro-Cuban-Irish composer and arranger Chico O'Farrill, the son of the cultural boundary-pushing composer and pianist Arturo O'Farrill, and pianist-educator Alison Deane.

Last year he was voted the No. 1 “rising star trumpeter” in the DownBeat magazine critics’ poll. He was 26 years old at the time. But of course age is really just a number, and Adam seemed to shoot out into the world fully formed, not only an accomplished player, but a developed artistic thinker. At an early age, he was putting in time with the likes of Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mary Halvorson, and his father’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.

Adam’s family background is so diverse that refers to himself as “the United Nations in flesh”. That sense of inclusiveness is found in his music as well - freedom and control, tradition and exploration, intention and “tumult,” as he tells me.

Recently he released Visions of Your Other, the third statement by his group Stranger Days, which features his brother on drums as well as the bassist Walter Stinson and recently, saxophonist, Xavier Del Castillo.

Here he talks about belonging to that rich musical legacy, how video games, literature and most of all the films of PT Anderson have informed his work, the hazy lines around labels and categories, the importance of making space for other musicians to support one another, and how he strives to remove “the external” from his playing.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.adam-ofarrill.com/

213: Benny Benack III

9 januari 2022 | 80 min

Benny Benack III didn’t necessarily start out thinking he would be a hipster crooner. He spent his 10,000 hours dealing with the trumpet, and he’s still dealing with it. He tells me that he brings it with him everywhere - even on dates. He says, “Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Roy Hargrove, and Clark Terry were my early idols and everything about my musical identity is steeped in the trumpet vocabulary.” Benny Grew up in Pittsburgh, the third in a trilogy of musical Benny Benacks (he follows in the footsteps of his trumpeter/bandleader grandfather, Benny Benack, Sr., and his father Benny Benack, Jr., a saxophonist/clarinetist). Young Benny (sometimes he goes by the moniker BB3) was made very aware of his own family ties to the music and also the Pittsburgh tradition that also produced Roy Eldridge, Earl Hines, Art Blakey, Billy Strayhorn and so many more.

Benny is a serious musician, a deep swinger, who clearly loves both the blues and a sweet melody. He loves to be on the scene; he leads a weekly jam session at Smalls, and when Covid shut down indoor gigs, he took it to the street, setting up outdoors and keeping the flame lit.

Somewhere along the line he started to take his singing more seriously too. He always sang - his mother is a singer, and he understood the value of being able to deliver a tune from early on. But more and more the signs were pointing him towards singing and playing - and towards the art of stagecraft, entertainment, and presentation. Today he says, only half joking, I think, that he is a song and dance man.

This turned out to be an incredibly interesting and provocative talk, and we covered an enormous amount of ground. Benny is extremely thoughtful, completely aware of where he fits in, where he’s coming from, and where he would like to be going. Along the way he talked about “the relentless commitment of playing trumpet”, the value of stagecraft, jam session etiquette, keeping old songs fresh, why he’s sometimes accused of being “too entertaining”, how come he takes his trumpet on dates, and what he calls “the elephant in the room.”

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bennybenackjazz.com/

212: Lionel Loueke

1 januari 2022 | 74 min

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. Lionel’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 at UCLA in Los Angeles (now called the Hancock Institute) where he had the opportunity to study and work with his greatest mentors: Terence Blanchard, Wayne Shorter Herbie Hancock. Soon he began to work with those same mentors, appearing on albums by Blanchard and Hancock. And since then he has gone on to play with an incredible list of greatest, 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 recording work tells the story: In 2019 he released an ambitious album aptly named The Journey - the title reflects both his odyssey from childhood in Benin to his current life as a globe-trotting jazz star 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 in 2021 he released Close Your Eyes, a more loosely structured blowing record of classic repertoire, in musical conversation with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland. He tells me that after trying as hard as possible to remove the African influences from his playing and trying to sound more like his jazz heroes, he ultimately realized that they were all compatible, and he began to reintroduce more of the sounds of his childhood into his approach. The result is a very personal, very 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. He says “our story is what we play, the story of somebody from the beginning to the time they play, that’s what we are presenting.”

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.lionelloueke.com/

211: Tyler Duncan

23 december 2021 | 83 min

210: The Art Of Aging Gracefully

27 november 2021 | 100 min

209: Martin Sexton

20 november 2021 | 60 min

30 years ago Martin Sexton made a record called In The Journey. It wasn’t so much a record as it was a glorified demo tape that he sold while busking on the streets of Boston. He had moved there from his hometown of Syracuse, New York where he grew up in a large family (he was the 10th of 12 siblings).

From the very beginning, Sexton figured out how to marry dynamic, soulful live performances with plainspoken and thoughtful songwriting. He’s a songwriter’s songwriter, but he’s also a masterful guitar player and singer who knows how to give the people what they want.

Maybe that’s how he managed to sell 15,000 copies of that first self produced cassette back in the early 90s, back before the idea of “self released music” was in the mainstream. He says, “People connect to honesty.”

In many ways, Sexton’s own journey began with In The Journey and he’s still on it today: he has averaged a new record every two years since he started. He takes record making seriously, has worked with some of the greatest session players and producers alive, and has seen his music licensed in TV and movies for years. But he is perhaps at his finest when he’s alone on stage with a guitar and an audience. Martin Sexton can make more out of that simple recipe than most musicians could hope to achieve standing in front of an orchestra.

Earlier this year he released 2020 Vision, which is, for lack of a better term, his Covid EP, a tight collection of new songs about America, family and perseverance in these times of uncertainty.

Martin says, “I’ve always said that I love the idea of America, but I never loved the politics. I love the geography and the people.” He’s not political, but he is patriotic in his way. Or, more to the point, he’s dedicated to making music with a message. “No one can deny that what America has given to the world is great music,” he tells me.

We had a great talk about his new project, his origin story, the journey that he’s been in now for over 30 years, the tension between art at mortgage payments, The American Dream, and how songs, like produce, grow naturally, as he says it, “out of shit.”

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.martinsexton.com/

208: Mike Errico

6 november 2021 | 68 min

207: Madison McFerrin

19 oktober 2021 | 64 min

Madison McFerrin says she’s “Shedding the narrative about what it means to be an artist in the music industry.” In fact, she says she’s had to learn to shed a lot of things. Like her “identity”.

She calls herself an independent singer-songwriter, which is both true and also not entirely the whole story. Questlove calls her a “soul-appella” singer because she first found a wide audience doing solo a cappella songs, just her and a looping pedal. In fact, from pretty much the start of her professional career, she was turning tastemaker heads.

That’s due in large part, I think, to the quiet determination and courage of her music: just getting out on stage alone with a looper pedal and her voice and creating lush arrangements from scratch every time. And while some of her songs deal with the personal, the sensual, the searching soul, others are more overtly political or topical. Like her songs “Can You See” and “Guilty” both of which address police brutality.

Madison McFerrin is also the daughter of Bobby McFerrin, probably the most famous and influential improvising singer alive today. She says that what she does really isn’t very related to what her father does, and she wears that legacy loosely and comfortably, drawing on his encouragement and advice but cautious not to seek comparisons.

One lesson she does borrow from him is in the way he avoids being placed in any one genre or style. She says, “my father calls himself a folk singer because he sings the music of the folk, and I consider myself to be a soul singer because I sing the music of the soul.”

Nonetheless, Madison McFerrin, like her father before her, finds herself skating (if not scatting) on the surface of jazz. On the one hand, as she says, “jazz is at the root of all popular music in America” so if she is a part of the contemporary jazz space, it’s because she’s a part of the world today. But on the other hand, she is contributing to the conversation whether she meant to or not.

This week, she’ll perform at the Bric Jazz Fest in Brooklyn. And in addition to playing, she also guest curated the lineup. She has a lot of thoughts about how to bring an audience that reflects her, both in terms of generation and identity, back to jazz. Or maybe, how to lead jazz back to people who reflect a different set of values.

She tells me, “I originally thought I was just going to be an artist who showed up… but if you don’t adjust now you’re going to fall behind. The music industry is changing more rapidly than pretty much any other industry.”

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.madisonmcferrin.com/www.bricartsmedia.org

206: Peter Coyote

12 oktober 2021 | 59 min

205: Monica Martin

9 oktober 2021 | 88 min

Monica Martin was 18 years old, driving in the car with her friend Matt and singing along with the radio. She had always enjoyed “hamming it up” and singing along to music, but she had no intention of taking it seriously. But the universe had other plans for her. Her friend, who

Matt, who was a musician, coaxed her into performing; she started to sing in public and on friends’ records, which all led to her writing her own songs. She fronted experimental-folk-pop sextet, PHOX, formed in Madison, Wisconsin in 2012. PHOX released an eponymous album, played big festivals, national TV shows, and flew overseas to play shows far away from home. PHOX went on indefinite hiatus in 2017, and Monica moved to LA because “Wisconsin is cold as f*ck”.

She found herself a periwinkle casita and is feeling freer than ever in the city of misfits. She’s presently at work unpacking her mental confusions by cataloging/celebrating the “fuckery” of her ex-es (and herself) in lowkey pop songs with soul whispers, some golden-era hollywood dramatics, and psychedelic flickers courtesy of a theremin. Monica is still figuring out who she is, but quite happy to share her cautionary tales: “I made hundreds of mistakes so you don’t have to.”

She recently released her new single “Go Easy, Kid” and is featured on the James Blake song “Show Me” from Blake’s latest release.

Monica and I did an ill fated interview in 2015 which was never released. We were both back in Wisconsin over the summer and decided the time was right to get together for an interview redo. Here she talks about discovering her musical talent in her late teens, what it means to be “Wisconsin sober”, the complex and delicate dynamics of her first band Phox, her mental health struggles, why it’s so expensive to be poor, the many ways that she has had to integrate in her life, staying in bed all day, the influence of Fiona Apple and Billie Holiday on her music, working with James Blake, Vulfpeck, Scary Pockets and how being a hairdresser is similar to being a therapist (but much less well paid).

204: The Legendary Nate Smith

27 september 2021 | 80 min

Drummer, composer and bandleader Nate Smith is known and celebrated in many circles. In recent years his drumming has become as influential as it has been ubiquitous. Transcription books of his playing have been written, and any drummer trying to play funk or pocket oriented music today will have to confront Nate’s playing one way or another. He has a very specific and personal way of drumming, both deeply reliable and rooted, and also very fluid and flexible.

Some know him from his early work with Dave Holland and Chris Potter. Some know him from his association with the Vulfpeck crew, and the Vulf adjacent project The Fearless Flyers. Some know him from his playing with southern rock singer songwriter and icon Brittany Howard. Some - many in fact - may have discovered him by way of the singer Jose James, and the viral videos that Jose made of Nate’s nightly solos back in 2016, which he tagged with the hashtag #thelegendarynatesmith. As Nate tells it, he was in his early 40s when he had his first viral video and it changed his life and career.

Some know him from his own compositions and solo records. He recently released Kinfolk 2: See The Birds, the second in a trilogy that seeks to tell Nate’s personal story through music. He says, “I’m interested in compositions that have a narrative and a concept. I think about ‘what’s the story’?”

One gets the sense that although Nate is an incredible drummer, the drums are not the end of the story for him, but rather, the means to an end. He’s so deeply funky and creative on the drums and also such an intensely sensitive and emotional composer - he even co-wrote and co-produced a track for Michael Jackson, back when he was still living in Richmond, Virginia, where he cut his teeth and earned his stripes.

We talked recently about the technical, emotional, strategic, mystical, unpredictable aspects to music and a life in music, how where you come from affects how you sound, the value and values of great leadership, the influence of other drummer-bandleaders on his conception, and what the internet taught him about his own playing.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.natesmithmusic.com/

203: Dan and Claudia Zanes

18 september 2021 | 64 min

George Wein (from 2015)

15 september 2021 | 57 min

202: Joe Alterman

7 september 2021 | 97 min

Joe Alterman is a southern guy with a sunny disposition. He came from Atlanta, and despite having put in years in New York, he never managed to shake off the southern charm.

Joe is a piano player who wears his influences on his sleeve. While his contemporaries were deconstructing the music, Joe was drawn to the playing of more classic masters, like Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis and Les McCann. He loved the light touch of Red Garland and Hank Jones, but he also loved the blues and heft of Oscar Peterson, Monty Alexander, and Gene Harris. Early on, while he was learning to play the music by listening to those masters, he also began to establish personal relationships with many of his heroes.

Ramsey Lewis described his piano playing as ‘a joy to behold’, Les McCann states ‘As a man and musician he is already a giant’. Journalist Nat Hentoff championed three of Alterman’s albums, as well as his writing (Joe wrote liner notes to three Wynton Marsalis/JALC albums), calling one of Joe’s columns “one of the very best pieces on the essence of jazz, the spirit of jazz, that I’ve ever read, and I’m not exaggerating.”

Joe established relationships with his heroes naturally, instinctively, and soulfully. He was clearly searching for some deeper truth in both the music and the musicians themselves. Eventually, his friendships with the likes of Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, Les McCann, Nat Hentoff, and Houston Person would begin to straddle the space between musical and spiritual.

He found himself turning to Ahmad Jamal for romantic advice, Sonny Rollins helped him with the adversity of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Les McCann illuminated the ties between the black community and the Jewish community.

Joe grew up going to Jewish day school, trying to find a way to feel as spiritually engaged by his rabbis and cantors as he did when he listened to his favorite records. He “found in Jazz and black music what [he] had tried to find in Synagogue.”

After putting in serious time in New York, he moved back to Atlanta and found himself running what was then called the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival (now called Neranenah) and exploring in earnest the question of just what exactly is Jewish music?

Subsequently, Joe has become one of the most creative voices in the conversion around contemporary Jewish culture and music today. While his own music may be steeped in tradition, his disposition as a presenter is wide open and radical in its way.

Joe recently released The Upside Of Down - recorded at Birdland in New York just before the Pandemic. He was finally able to do a record release gig to celebrate the project, back at Birdland, in late July. The record is one in a series of recordings that showcase his sweet, joyful, classic, swinging approach to the piano trio.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.joealtermanmusic.com/

201: Antwaun Stanley

22 augusti 2021 | 66 min

200: Ben Sidran at 78

14 augusti 2021 | 39 min

199: Jon Lampley

10 augusti 2021 | 79 min

198: Michael Bland

11 juli 2021 | 90 min

197: Philip Lassiter

28 juni 2021 | 71 min

Philip Lassiter spent his early years in Mobile, Alabama. He was the son of a white pentecostal preacher. “They clapped on one and three in my father’s church,” he says. Moving to Peoria, Illinois as a teenager was a revelation for him. As he tells it, “They beat the racist out of me in Peoria.”

Lassiter’s story, both musical and personal, is a bit hard to unravel. He somehow managed to pay dues in multiple scenes seemingly at the same time. Philip’s has been a hero’s journey. Blink once and you’ll find him in the “Afrocentric” Dallas music scene running the band at a large church, mentoring a young Michael League during the inception of Snarky Puppy. Blink again, and you’ll find him doing the New York hustle. Turn around and he’s still there, this time living in Nashville. But what’s this? Then he’s an LA cat, writing arrangements for gospel and r&b records. Wait! Now he’s an expat, living in Holland and raising a family with his Dutch Caribbean wife (the talented singer Josje).

Phil is a trumpet player, arranger, band leader, teacher, songwriter, cat. His first major recording opportunities were on gospel records, and he has done arrangements for dozens of major praise and worship albums and artists. Eventually that work led him to do arrangements for pop, r&b and soul artists as well.

His sound is identifiable, punchy, funky, funny, narrative, empathetic - in fact, you’ve probably heard his sound so often that you take it for granted. It’s that sound; the sound of a horn section hooking up a record, elevating a production, bringing the project to life in such a natural way that you almost can’t imagine the song without it.

Philip wrote for and toured with Prince as his trumpet player and section leader, and he has worked with a full roster of other top notch musicians as well. Most notably Ariana Grande, Chris Cornell, Kirk Franklin, Timbaland, Roberta Flack, Jill Scott, Kelly Rowland, Fantasia, Anderson. Paak, Yelawolf, Queen Latifa, Al Jarreau, Fred Hammond, The Isley Brothers and Ledisi.

Why does he get called so much? “People ask me how did you get this gig or that gig. I always tell them, ‘I didn’t get the gig. The gig got me.’”

Lassiter recently released his fifth solo album, Live In Love, a collection of nasty grooves and thoughtful messages, a love letter to his former life in Los Angeles, a manifestation for a better America, and a gathering of collaborators from around the world.

196: Julian Lage

13 juni 2021 | 61 min

195: Michael Mayo

7 juni 2021 | 75 min

Michael Mayo is cautious when it comes to labels and categories. He prefers for the language he uses to be “descriptive rather than prescriptive.” It’s easy to understand why: because he defies category in many ways.

A singer and composer who draws equally from the deep well of jazz vocal language and from neo soul, he’s a modern classic.

Growing up in a musical family in LA (both of his parents are successful musicians) he was exposed to a life in music from the very start and had two supportive role models. He says that one of the things he most admired about watching his parents at work was the diversity of the projects they did - from gospel to country and everything in between.

Michael was drawn to jazz - he studied at the New England Conservatory and then the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now called the The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) - but always had a wide range of influences as well including everything from J Dilla to The Beach Boys.

But beyond that, he is also a gamer - he loves video games, posts regularly on Twitch and has a band called Shrek Is Love dedicated to the movie Shrek. So he’s open.

When it came to the more subtle and tender questions of sexual identity, especially in the black community, there were no role models who looked like him. In fact, it would be a long time before he felt that it would be possible to be out as a bisexual black singer and live safely. He tells me, “Traumatized people traumatize people.”

One gets the sense that through musical liberation, Michael found some personal peace as well. He says, “Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.” And he says, “I love living in multiple worlds.” After years of coming to terms with questions of identity both personally and musically, he made his stunning debut solo record Bones.

Here he talks about managing his relationship with social media, which he describes as finding the “balance between staying sane and being seen”, the subtle space between process and performance online, live looping, bi erasure, shedding “Giant Steps”, generational trauma, the “syllables discussion” in jazz singing, tokenism, discernment, and living a life authentically without labels.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.michaelmayomusic.com

194: The Art Of Conversation

30 maj 2021 | 46 min

193: Roxana Amed

15 maj 2021 | 78 min

When singer/songwriter/educator Roxana Amed moved from her home in Argentina to the United States, she didn’t walk. But she might as well have. She describes her new record as being like “a bag full of songs and memories” that she collected on her way from one shore to another. She seems to stand with one foot wading in the waters of the Hudson River and the other in the Rio de la Plata.

When she left Buenos Aires, she was leaving with an already established career as both a singer and songwriter, having collaborated with many of Argentina’s most celebrated artists in both worlds. And when she arrived in America, she began to blow in the wind, like a tumbleweed. So it should come as no surprise that the first track on her new album Ontology is called ”Tumbleweed.”

When Roxana moved to America, she went to Miami, where one might think she fit in perfectly because of her Spanish speaking roots, but in fact in some ways she has felt like more of a stranger there than she would in New York, or Paris, or anywhere else for that matter.

Then again, maybe she would feel that way wherever she went, because she’s not really any one kind of artist, she’s not really sure where she or her music belong - maybe it’s somewhere along that long and winding road from Argentina to America. It’s that classic paradox when you belong to no-one, you’re available to all, when you belong nowhere, you’re always in the right place.

She is inclined to follow an arrangement of a Miles Davis song with something by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, or to adapt a Piazzolla tango piece in a jazz quartet, but then sing Cindy Lauper as Argentine folk music.

Roxana Amed is an eternal student - she’s constantly thinking about her craft, working on it, contemplating it. Maybe that’s what makes her such a celebrated teacher.

We spoke recently about her new record, and about the ongoing relationship and conversation between artist and audience. She says, “Art is not there to make you comfortable. You have to be surprised. You have to be challenged.” We talked about surrendering yourself to your art, about how and why different languages swing, about authenticity and freedom in music, and how the soul of America is black, and we talked about Argentina, Argentine music and identity.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.roxana-amed.com

192: SG Goodman

1 maj 2021 | 71 min

For a farmer’s daughter from Western Kentucky like SG Goodman, a career as a singer-songwriter was not the obvious choice. Her family had farmed the same land for generations, and the path was laid out for her.

On the other hand, coming from a long line of “some of the best storytellers who ever lived” a life spent writing and singing songs made plenty of sense.

Pretty much everything out of her mouth sounds like a story to me. She says “I’ve done my best to get my heart broken during this period just to have something to write about.” She says “It’s not easy having the palate of a Manhattan millionaire in Western Kentucky but I do.” She says “I don’t like to say that music is divinely given, but I definitely didn’t ask for it.”

SG (née Shaina) released her debut record Old Time Feeling in 2020 after years of watching her college friends become professionals with postgraduate degrees while she continued quietly with “that music thing”. The album leans into a soulful southern tradition, but also upends it in a way, or at least updates it, as she seeks to debunk rural stereotypes, while exploring mental health, living with OCD and the notion that you can still love your family and community even though you may disagree with them. SG is also an openly gay Americana singer, hailing from a part of the world that she describes as being years behind in its thinking about so many issues.

She uses a classic frame to paint a picture of a progressive south and “to stand up to stereotypes that exist about the south, to spread the message that we should all care what our neighboring states are doing, especially politically.” That’s where she manages to subvert whatever straight and narrow expectations you might have about an Appalachian storyteller and turns left, in more ways than one.

She has that way - of conjuring a melody, a mood, and pulling you into her own space time vortex. Listening to her record is like some invisible pointer finger is reaching out through the darkness and signalling you to follow it.

We had a conversation that was absolutely of this moment, in which she laments having to use Instagram and livestreams to connect with her audience in spite of her desire to maintain some mystery in her art. We talked about how Covid disrupted her tour plans, how she discovered K Pop at a gas station in Alabama, and how she feels about high end coffee.

We also had a conversation that is of every moment. About how music in many ways saved her life and gave her a sense of solidarity with a new chosen family when she had to leave her farm life behind. It also gave her a way to honor her storytelling tradition. We talked about how one keeps spirituality in life after leaving the church, the intersectionality of living in the south, and how solitude influences creative work.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.sggoodman.net

191: Clyde Stubblefield

20 april 2021 | 68 min

190: Bob Reynolds

8 april 2021 | 86 min

Covid Chronicles Vol. 1 - Reunion Episode

28 mars 2021 | 87 min

188: Leila Cobo

21 mars 2021 | 61 min

187: Imogen Heap

4 mars 2021 | 95 min

Imogen Heap has to put her daughter to bed, then she can talk about what she’s been working on. She can tell you about her latest single, “Last Night Of An Empire” which she released on December 9th. Coincidentally, that’s also the day she launched The Creative Passport, a verified digital ID for Music Makers. In fact, December 9 has always been an auspicious day for her. It’s her birthday and “everything is just a little more special on that day”.

While her daughter sings herself to sleep in the next room, Imogen talks about creating the Mi.Mu Gloves that she invented for her own performances before developing them for commercial use. “They are the world's most advanced wearable musical instrument, for expressive creation, composition and performance.”

As the night unfolds, she’ll tell you about her app (ImogenHeap.app) where she connects regularly and directly with her fans (self proclaimed “Heapsters”), sharing song demos, weekly live stream concerts, works in progress, and casual conversations about herself and her life. She’ll explain that she’s building her own artificially intelligent bot called Augmented Imogen.

She’ll remind you that she also owns a recording and performance facility called The Hideway built in an 18th century house in East London, which you can visit any time via an Oculus compatible virtual reality tour. That sums her up: she’s a traditionalist in some ways, she plays instruments, writes melodies, and cares about the creative craft. But at the same time she’s a futurist, constantly looking for new areas of technology and distribution to explore.

Even though it’s now close to 11pm where she is in England, and you’ve been talking for nearly 2 hours, she’ll gladly relive some of the major moments in her storied career “I’ve just done so many random things,” she says. Like making her first record I Megaphone when she was a teenager; forming Frou Frou with Guy Sigsworth and their unlikely post-factum success; writing the song “Hide and Seek” and being a witness to its many lives; working with Taylor Swift and with Jeff Beck; and composing the music for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child which opened in the West End before moving to Broadway.

Imogen has the kind of dizzying energy that truly creative people possess. She’s ready to build the team, to engage with the crowd, to share the experience. But first she just has to put her daughter to sleep.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.imogenheap.app

186: Boz Scaggs

18 februari 2021 | 67 min

185: Eric Harland

5 februari 2021 | 69 min

184: Rick Beato

29 januari 2021 | 67 min

183: Billy Martin aka illy B

18 januari 2021 | 73 min

182: Andres Levin

8 januari 2021 | 61 min

As Andres Levin will tell you, even he has trouble explaining his career and life in a succinct, organized, bite sized way. He’s a record producer, bandleader, filmmaker, composer, philanthropist, New Yorker, Venezuelan, Jew, funk practitioner, latin soul ambassador, big picture guy with a granular understanding of the mechanics of the business for over 30 years.

Andres grew up in Venezuela, a child of immigrants (an exile baby, he calls himself), Jewish, his father is an electronic musician. But in middle school he ended up spending time in North Carolina where he connected with black culture and music. After heading back to Venezuela for high school he ended up moving to Boston and then New York for two years of college. But quickly he left school and started assisting the legendary producer Nile Rogers. So before he was 25 he had worked on records for the B-52’s, Chic, Chaka Khan, CeCe Peniston, Tina Turner, even Eddie Murphy.

Then he started thinking about how to apply his already not insignificant experience to Latin music, and produced a series of groundbreaking and genre defying records that would impact modern Latin music (Los Amigos Invisibles, Aterciopelados, Ely Guerra, Marisa Monte, and his own band Yerba Buena to name a few). He has had some notably lengthy creative relationships with the likes of Arto Lindsay, David Byrne and the singer Cucu Diamantes.

For more than 15 years, he has spent at least half his time in Havana, and is deeply enmeshed in the Cuban scene, both as a musician and a culture broker - he organized the first TED conferences in Havana, and works as a liaison for foreign projects on the ground in Cuba.

He tells me that he spent much of 2020 quarantining in an apartment in Havana, operating his international business from an island that is notoriously disconnected from much of the rest of the world. That’s how he ended up, after three decades of being the guy behind the guy, writing and singing the song “Ode To Quarantine” and then filming a kind of retro futuristic post apocalyptic video for his love song dedicated to the virus.

We talked about where he is, how he got there, how long he plans on staying, and where he’s going next. Along the way we also talk about learning how to produce, being comfortable in any room, programing synthesizers, eating sushi all day, and when to turn up the kick drum.

181: Rexx Life Raj

23 december 2020 | 42 min

180: Duncan Sheik

14 december 2020 | 68 min

179: Johnny Brennan (The Jerky Boys)

2 december 2020 | 59 min

178: Louis Cole

16 november 2020 | 78 min

177: Election 2020

9 november 2020 | 25 min

176: Cory Henry

27 oktober 2020 | 84 min

175: Brian Krock

13 oktober 2020 | 92 min

174: Alec Hanley Bemis

5 oktober 2020 | 83 min

173: Jeff Cesario

18 september 2020 | 87 min

172: Philip Dizack

12 september 2020 | 65 min

171: Noga Erez

31 augusti 2020 | 89 min

Israeli singer Noga Erez thinks about the fallacy of authenticity, the advantages of creative limitations, the way personal stories can be perceived as political, and what it means to make music with your heart instead of your head.

She started out as a jazz singer, performing and recording her original songs with a piano trio. Those recordings are long gone, lost in a pile of defective hard drives. But anyway, she decided that her original concept was too intellectual and that it was time to make something more intuitive. Encouraged by her musical (and personal) partner Ori Rousso, she wanted to make something that wasn’t so uncool.

So she began producing tracks that straddle hip hop, pop. electronic, inspired by Bjork, Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus. Her first record, Off The Radar, came out in 2017 and included the song “Dance While You Shoot” that was featured in an Apple Music commercial. She toured in the states and Europe, and was positioned for a big year in 2020 as she prepared to release her new record. The more organic live versions of the songs were meant as a kind of creative exercise, but I really loved them, and as Noga explains it, so did a lot of her fans.

If you haven’t seen the video “VIEWS (Feat. Rousso) - [Live] Kids Against The Machine Vol. 1” by Noga Erez, it’s something you should absolutely do as soon as possible.

Noga’s latest single, “You So Done” came out last week. We talked a few days before it was released about her career, starting as a jazz singer-songwriter and then transitioning to what she describes as “the music in my heart”, but also the curious relationship between Israel and the United States from the point of view of a contemporary Israeli pop act, what it means to be a political artist, whether or not music itself can really make a difference politically today, what it means to be “the offspring of limitation” and if the phrase “I don’t pop with that” actually exists or not. Also, an extensive tutorial on how to pronounce her name.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.nogaerez.com

170: Ben Sidran

14 augusti 2020 | 41 min

169: Eric Krasno

11 augusti 2020 | 91 min

Eric Krasno is in a lot more places than one might realize. Known for his work with the bands Soulive and Lettuce, he also works with all kinds of groups as a player - including the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Phil Lesh and Friends, Oteil Burbridge and Friends...it’s a lot of friends. Maybe that’s because he has one foot in the jam band world: the universe of extended grooves, risky riffing and close contact with a community of fans.

What surprised me about Eric is how much stuff he actually does - he’s part frontman, limelight guy, and part behind the scenes guy. For example, he also has another foot in the world of songwriting and production, and particularly in that space where soul and hip hop meet. He has produced and written songs for Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Talib Kweli, Nigel Hall, The London Souls, Marcus King, 50 Cent, and Lawrence.

He also makes records as a solo artist. His most recent release Telescope came out last year, accompanied by a series of animated videos that hold together as a global narrative about the lives of a group of people who live in the same building in New York.

Telescope would also turn out to be a kind of farewell love letter to New York, where Krasno was based and where he made so much of his statement for over 20 years. In late 2019 he moved to LA, settled down, and started his next act. Although he planned to focus on production, he still had over 100 gigs scheduled this year. Then the hammer of history fell, and he found himself locked down in LA.

In Covidtimes, he’s been doing his own podcast called Eric Krasno Plus One.

We zoomed in recently to talk about what he’s doing during these strange and trying times, his experience as a podcaster, producer, and provider of deep and soulful grooves. Along the way we talked about the development of Soulive, Lettuce, Velour Recordings, the values and expectations of jam and jam band audiences, “the boom bap with interesting chord changes”, learning how to do less and better, and how many times one man can say the word “nugget” in an hourlong interview.

168: Jochen Rueckert

31 juli 2020 | 103 min

167: Rudresh Mahanthappa

30 juni 2020 | 66 min

Rudresh Mahanthappa has the kind of biography that suggests he might be an intimidating and serious person to talk to. He’s the Director of Jazz at Princeton University where he teaches improvisation and directs small groups. He has been listed frequently in the Critics' Poll of Down Beat magazine. He studied music in India and brought that exploration into his own style of hybridized jazz (done in part for a Guggenheim Fellowship), an experience that he describes “as a way of getting to know what it means to be Indian American, it was a way of defining where I am as a person and it’s almost like the music was a byproduct.”

Mahanthappa started playing alto saxophone as a young boy, first drawn to the more contemporary sounds of David Sandborn, Grover Washington, Jr, Bob Mintzer and Michael Brecker. In fact, here he reminisces about hearing saxophone players in popular songs on the radio (Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd) when he was growing up. Eventually he heard a Charlie Parker record, which reoriented his playing. Later, he integrated his Carnatic concept as well. All three of those streams - the early influence of newer players, the bebop influence from Bird, and the Indian influence - are still evident in his approach.

Rudresh has released more than 15 records as a solo recording artist, and another 30 albums as a sideman or collaborator. His new record, Hero Trio features bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Rudy Royston in a piano-less saxophone trio that leaves plenty of space for the unit to move together. While many of his projects have relied on original material, this record is made of interpretations, and he cast a wide net, recording material by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, June Carter Cash, Keith Jarrett, Ornette Coleman and others.

So yes, he’s serious about what he does, what he thinks about and what he plays. But he’s also funny, and fun to talk to. Here we talk about his early development, the journey through music schools, cruise ships and merengue bands that ultimately led him to New York, exploring one’s personal identity through music, teaching jazz in a non conservatory environment, Sesame Street, and why “just because you’re improvising doesn’t mean you’re playing jazz”.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

166: Lawrence

21 juni 2020 | 97 min

165: Louise Goffin

13 juni 2020 | 83 min

164: Jason Moran

5 juni 2020 | 79 min

163: Orlando le Fleming

20 maj 2020 | 91 min

Orlando le Fleming is the kind of bass player who possesses that mysterious element, that sound, that groove, that thing that you want to hook up with. Maybe that’s why some of the finest drummers in jazz have chosen Orlando to play in their groups - he logged serious miles playing with Jeff “Tain” Watts, Ari Hoenig, and Antonio Sanchez - three of the most influential drummers alive. And an early recording project with Jimmy Cobb helped to position Orlando as a bass player to know about.

He’s also a bass player that singers like to work with. He played with Jane Monheit for years, and spent much of the last few years on the road with Leslie Odom, Jr. (who is known for playing the role of Aaron Burr in Hamilton).

Orlando co-leads a drummerless group called Owl Trio with saxophonist Will Vinson and guitarist Lage Lund, and his solo project Romantic Funk features his groovy fusiony funky tunes played by a collection of New York jazzheads.

Orlando has taken his years of experience and strategies for getting it together and written a new book called Get It Together: Time and Sound Priorities for the Jazz Bass Player.

Despite his exotic name, Orlando explains that he is really just a “slow Englishman”. However, he does have a rather exciting secret in his past: before becoming a jazz bass player he was a professional cricketer in England.

We had this conversation in early January of this year. In our talk we look at his career in general terms, talk a lot about playing the bass, the role and function of the bass in ensemble playing, ideas about composition and groove. But what we really settle into is a conversation about New York.

In retrospect, the conversation is a kind of time capsule. It’s a look at the jazz experience in New York just before disaster struck. From where we’re sitting right now, it’s hard to imagine how and when the city will open up again, what that will mean, and if jazz clubs will ever recover as they were before. Seen through that lens, today’s episode is a window into a world that we can still remember but that we know is lost.

Here Orlando considers how to get a sound on the bass, why he puts “rhythm before notes”, what were the advantages to starting his career in England, when to leave New York, who were his mentors, the “jazz struggle” and why “groove comes from culture.”

162: Remembering Richie Cole

12 maj 2020 | 71 min

161: Becca Stevens

4 maj 2020 | 71 min

160: Josh Norek

28 april 2020 | 25 min

159: Ron Sexsmith

23 april 2020 | 58 min

158: Curtis Stigers

17 april 2020 | 65 min

157: The Covid Chronicles, Vol. 4

7 april 2020 | 50 min

156: The Covid Chronicles, Vol. 3

24 mars 2020 | 20 min

155: The Covid Chronicles, Vol. 2

19 mars 2020 | 87 min

154: The Covid Chronicles, Vol. 1

14 mars 2020 | 92 min

153: Michael League

6 mars 2020 | 77 min

Michael League is learning how to sleep. A friend sent him a book called Why We Sleep and reading it “rang a lot of bells”. Until recently, he says, “the majority of my rationale for not sleeping was about guilt. Saying it out loud I realize how ridiculous it is.”

Then again, he’s responsible for a lot of creative output, and he feels “a lot of pressure”. Michael is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. He is the founder and leader of the band Snarky Puppy, and the international music ensemble Bokanté. He’s also an owner and founder of the record label GroundUP Music.

Snarky Puppy has collaborated with a massive collection of international artists, helped to popularize a new wave of interest in both instrumental music, and in the visual aspect of record making, and represents a version of independent success and popularity in the new music business that most emerging artists covet. They have won 3 Grammys, and have toured constantly since their start as students at the University of North Texas in 2003.

As Michael tells it, the band spent over a decade in uncomfortable circumstances and near obscurity playing often for audiences that were smaller than the the band itself. Tour after tour, record after record, Snarky Puppy started a ball rolling and kept rolling it, gaining momentum, relocating from Texas to New York, and building towards what from today’s vantage point looks like the inevitable global success that they have become, but what at the time being probably looked a lot like magical thinking.

League says he thinks of himself primarily as a student. And talking to him it’s clear that he is constantly absorbing and synthesizing new information. He’s thirsty for more - to know more, to do more. He seems, to me, to be unrelenting, non stop, and full on.

This conversation is a long time coming. Here he talks about Snarky Puppy, the advantages to the American musical perspective (“we are light on our feet”), why “to create something authentic isn’t really possible to me”, how playing wedding and steak house gigs in Texas taught him about “humility and strengthening the muscles of versatility”, the importance of making everything as fun as possible on the road, why he sees himself primarily as a student, getting good sleep, and moving to Spain.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://groundupmusic.net/

152: Bob Power

23 februari 2020 | 67 min

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/

151: Victoria Canal

16 februari 2020 | 73 min

150: Kat Edmonson

7 februari 2020 | 72 min

149: Mark Hervey

2 februari 2020 | 83 min

148: Mark Guiliana

23 januari 2020 | 51 min

147: Gilles Peterson & Kassa Overall

21 januari 2020 | 71 min

146: Steven Bernstein, Peter Apfelbaum, Will Bernard

16 januari 2020 | 58 min

145: Caleb Hawley

10 januari 2020 | 75 min

144: Ari Herstand

2 januari 2020 | 74 min

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/

143: Glyn Johns

25 december 2019 | 78 min

142: boice

19 december 2019 | 77 min

141: Zev Feldman

10 december 2019 | 48 min

137: Woody Goss

28 november 2019 | 63 min

140: ALA.NI

14 november 2019 | 75 min

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/

139: Camila Meza

30 oktober 2019 | 72 min

138: Ryan Scott

16 oktober 2019 | 69 min

The world is full of talented people you’ve never heard of, and it’s quite possible that Ryan Scott is one of them. Around New York, if you know about Ryan Scott, then you know. “Ryan Scott?” Enough said. Funky? Oh yes. Soulful? Unquestionably. Prepared to surrender himself totally to the music and the moment at all times? Affirmative.

But if you don’t know, it can be difficult to catch up. Ryan Scott doesn’t make it too easy to find him. He claims it’s not intentional. “You just have to know the right people,” he tells me. Indeed.

Ryan spent years waiting for someone to throw him a bone before ultimately deciding that “there was no bone.” He worked as a sideman, session cat, songwriter for hire, wedding singer, “jazzy jazz jazz” player, and probably plenty more things that he still won’t mention. Eventually he decided to start saying no to the rent work and start saying yes to the muse. The good news is that he made a killer solo record, the bad news is that the rent might be late this month.

He released his latest project, A Freak Grows In Brooklyn earlier this year. He wrote, performed and recorded the project alone, almost entirely on an 8 track multitrack cassette recorder. He wanted to make an art project, a calling card, and a personal statement. He did all that, but he also made something very, very good. But, really, extremely good.

He says he spent years becoming a jazz musician so he could be free. Then he spent more years freeing himself from being a jazz musician.

I like Ryan Scott and I think you should too.

Here he talks about growing up the only child of a stock broker in northern California (“one of the least bluesy things”), crossing the “jazzy line”, “keeping things open”, moving to New York right out of high school and falling in with a crowd of itinerant musicians who taught him how to “roll cigarettes and drink beer”, and what it’s like inside his head.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.ryanscottguitar.com

136: Jeremy Dauber

1 oktober 2019 | 61 min

135: Peter Himmelman

24 september 2019 | 80 min

Peter Himmelman had momentum. Before he had a decades long career, videos on MTV (back when there were videos on MTV), Grammy and Emmy nominations, Parents Choice Awards, critical acclaim, a family, TV and movie scores… before any of that, he had momentum. Peter came out swinging, with something prove and something to offer. He was motivated in part by what he describes here as a “reigning sense of isolation”.

He grew up in a Minneapolis suburb and came of age in the 70’s at a time when funk and punk were both beginning to flourish and “children were still allowed to be feral”. By the time he graduated from high school, there was no question to him or his family that he was going to be some kind of a musician. He started hanging out in the predominantly black North Side area of Minneapolis, tagging along with soul singer Alexander O’Neal, and doing his best imitation of blues musician Luther Allison. He tells me “maybe learning is not really possible without modeling - through that modeling you gain some mastery, and if you have courage to continue you might find something original.”

Peter started playing music with a group of friends in high school, some of whom he still plays with today. He convinced them not to go to college and instead to focus on their band Sussman Lawrence, a new wave band with an absurdist lyrical bent. He developed an outrageous stage persona that, as one former band mate described, “made Mick Jagger look like Pat Boone.” He was drawn to the stage, compelled to create, and naturally comfortable in the spotlight.

When his father died, Peter was only in his early 20s. That loss reoriented his life and his work. He became more observant in his Judaism, he got married (he and his wife, Maria Dylan - daughter of Bob Dylan - have been married for over 30 years), he started writing more emotionally honest songs. Today, some 40 years later, Peter Tells me his is “letting go of the need for the love of strangers.”

In our conversation, Peter tells me about finding “beauty in tragedy”, confronting “the harsh architecture of now”, and unpacks questions of ergonomics, economics, loss, discovery, desire, faith, fearlessness, impermanence, songwriting, real estate, college tuition, doing meaningful work, and performing naked… from the sacred to the profane, it’s all here.

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.peterhimmelman.com

134: Richard J. Davidson

17 september 2019 | 55 min

133: Chris Potter

2 september 2019 | 71 min

132: David Maraniss

23 augusti 2019 | 65 min

David Maraniss has a motto: go there. What he means is that when he’s researching one of his books, whether it’s a biography of a person or the history of a place and time, he believes that in order to fully understand the story, he has to go to the physical location. Not, like, just for a weekend. He really goes there. He moves in.

But there’s another meaning behind the phrase “go there”. He moves in, not only to the space, but also to the nuance, subtlety, complexity of a life, of a time, of the history, sociology, feeling of his subject. He gets totally obsessed. He says he can’t write a book about something if he’s not obsessed with it.

Fortunately, throughout his career, he has managed to get obsessed with plenty. He’s written many celebrated biographies including books about Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Vince Lombardi, and Roberto Clemente, and books about social, political and cultural importance (like Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World and They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America 1967 among others). Often his books appear on best seller lists.

David has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper.

His new book A Good American Family is both a continuation and a departure for him. It tells the story of his own family and is framed around an event that happened in 1952 when David’s father was called before HUAC (The House Un-American Activities Committee) and outed as a Communist during the Red Scare.

Those who were called to testify and didn’t cooperate by naming other Communists were blacklisted, and that’s exactly what happened to his father.

But the book also examines much larger issues around that event, including the ongoing question of what it means to be and who is American, the influence of extreme ideologies in the 20th century, and the ways in which mental health and personal tragedy are handled in families.

We talked about his general process & approach, the techniques he uses, and the values that inform his work. For example, he says at one point that he believes that “all creative arts are in some sense dependent on magic”. We also considered the role of the press in America, traditionally and how it’s being tested in today’s political climate.

Like much of David’s work, this episode is both timely and timeless. Who informed his values as a journalist? What does it mean to be a nonfiction story teller? Where does he feel most at home? When is it time to go swimming? Why is the lost art of letter writing so important to historians? Can we really ever really know what someone else is thinking? It’s all here.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

131: Ben Sidran

15 augusti 2019 | 62 min

Musician, singer, writer, producer, philosopher... Ben Sidran is a hard person to define. He belongs in multiple categories, or none at all. He says that his main focus throughout a career that began 50 years ago has been to document what he saw, felt, and heard, by way of various “idioms” (including performances, interviews, essays, recordings, etc.). That’s why he sees himself primarily as a journalist. Or at least, he sees what he does as a form of journalism.

I’ve been engaged in a series of conversations - one long conversation really - with Ben Sidran since before I could really talk. We often pick up where we left off days, weeks or even years earlier, on any number of topics. So to conduct a formal interview with him is almost impossible for me. There’s simply too much history between us, because I know him so well, because we’ve been over it a hundred times before, because he’s my dad.

We’re more comfortable co-hosting, discussing, debating, having more open ended conversations. In fact, he has even co-hosted some episodes of this podcast with me (Welcome To Copenhagen, Newport Jazz, The Election, What It Felt Like In Paris, and Remembering Tommy LiPuma). And we’ve worked together on musical projects since I was a boy. I’m proud to have produced his most recent records, toured and performed with him for over 20 years. We always just called it jamming. “Let’s jam,” we’d say.

On the occasion of his 76th birthday I decided to try for a more classic kind of long form interview. I wanted to know, how does it feel to be 76? Does it live up to his expectations? How has the world changed for him? How has he changed in the world? Of course, the conversation takes plenty of turns and twists, but we somehow managed to stay on task and the episode is a lot of fun.

Here he talks about falling in love with bebop as a young boy, counter culture in the 1960s, jazz as a form of journalism, how to get paid like a musician, his proudest moments, writing a misunderstood rock and roll anthem, getting to Carnegie hall, facing fears, and what he learned from his heroes (including Phil Woods, Art Blakey, and Mose Allison).

As a special birthday gift gift to him, I wrote this song and published the video this week as well. It's a song about continuity, about memory, about desire, about family. I think it’s the most personal song I have ever written.

https://youtu.be/FMwZ8zUgFy4

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bensidran.com www.leosidran.com

130: Richard Julian

8 augusti 2019 | 73 min

No matter what Richard Julian is doing, he “just wants it to be awesome”. As a songwriter, he says he was arrogant before he probably deserved to be, and in fact that it “took years to get beaten into the submission of humility.” That may be so, but along the way he wrote some pretty fantastic songs. His album Slow New York (2006) helped to put him on the map and place him squarely in the center of the musical scene from which Norah Jones had emerged a few years earlier. In fact he and Jones still have a country band together, The Little Willies.

But, as he tells it, he was already 15 years into a music career by then, a veritable veteran of the New York songwriter scene, a practiced in the art of “making something out of nothing, taking blood from a stone”, which is how he describes songwriting.

So maybe it was just a matter of time before Julian decided he needed to step away from the city he sang about so often, and disappear into the Bywater in New Orleans. Pretty soon he was writing songs like “Die in Nola” about his newly adopted town, and how he had no plans to leave. But leave he did, heading back to New York. He landed in the Bed Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn, bought a building (he says, “I’m the only guy who ever bought a building with no money”) with his friend Arthur Kell, and opened Bar Lunatico, a music venue, bar and restaurant.

In this textured, rollicking, mezcal fueled conversation recorded on a hot summer night in Brooklyn, Richard tells the story of how “a blue collar boy from Delaware” came to be one of the most celebrated songwriters of his generation in New York, watched some of his friends get famous and others get lost, and end up negotiating the ever shifting Brooklyn demographics as a club owner in Bed Stuy.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

www.third-story.com

https://www.barlunatico.com/

129: Donald Fagen

30 juli 2019 | 83 min

128: Joey Dosik

8 juli 2019 | 71 min

127: Ben Thornewill

25 juni 2019 | 58 min

Andre De Shields

10 juni 2019 | 87 min

126: Eli "Paperboy" Reed

6 juni 2019 | 91 min

Eli Reed took a trip. It started in a Boston suburb with a cheap suit and a paperboy cap. He took his suit, cap and guitar to Clarksdale, Mississippi. He stayed there just long enough to become a local musician. They called him “Paperboy” because of the cap. Then he headed up to Chicago and pretended to study sociology at the University of Chicago. While he was pretending to study, what he was really doing was looking for old records to play on his radio show, and becoming the minister of music at a church on the south side. After a while, he went back to Boston. Then he turned 21.

What was it like to be a Jewish suburban kid living in the deep south, playing in black church in Chicago, singing soul music? Eli tells me “The juke joints and the black church are the most accepting and welcoming places I’ve ever been. They loved having me there because I wanted to be there and I loved them.”

In his early 20s. Eli “Paperboy” Reed started making records that sounded like they could be from another era. He wrote soul music, sang with a sweet and powerful voice, and performed with a frenzied energy. He found an audience and had success, especially in Europe, and started to ride the “album cycle” life of writing, recording, touring, rinsing and repeating. His stylized, soulful songs were licensed (a lot) for use in TV and film, and he was on the way up.

Eli “Paperboy” Reed says that “authenticity is a trap.” But he also says, “If you’re not thinking critically about your work you’re not doing it right. And be adamant about what you like and don’t like.” And he clearly walks the talk. Eli is incredibly thoughtful and has clearly considered the choices and the work that he’s made. “Stand behind your choices,” he says. “Be present with it. Be interested.”

Before he was 30, he had become a record industry veteran, signed and dropped by both Capitol and Warner Bros., without a recording contract and and wondering what to do next and where to turn. In this episode, he tells the story of where he turned.

Along the way, he talks about surviving in the record business, standing behind your choices, grappling with ambition, whether or not an artist’s career fully belongs to them, and reaching the age where you’re not new anymore.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

125: Melissa Clark

23 maj 2019 | 68 min

If Melissa Clark is in your life already, then she needs little introduction. Maybe you have one of the 40+ cookbooks that she has authored. Maybe you’ve made one of the recipes from her New York Times column “A Good Appetite”, watched one of her cooking videos online, seen her on the Today Show, as a guest judge on Iron Chef America, or heard her as a guest host on The Splendid Table radio show. If you’re one of these people, then you may already consider Melissa Clark to be a kind of honorary member of your family already, someone who helps you decide what to eat (and when), how to prepare it, and why you should feel good about it..because you can do it.

Or maybe, like me, you don’t really cook very much. Maybe, like me, you only recently discovered the creativity, assurance and enthusiasm of Melissa Clark when your wife went to India for three weeks and left you in charge of feeding yourself and your child. Maybe you had a small breakthrough while watching Melissa demonstrate one of her recipes in an online video and it helped you understand that cooking is a true act of creation.

After having such a breakthrough maybe you, like me, started to think about how cooking is like making music. Rhythm & balance, tradition & innovation, style & concept, practice & intuition, intention, improvisation… it’s all there. A recipe is a kind of composition, and a meal is a kind of concert. And maybe, just maybe, in that small moment of catharsis, you reached out to Melissa Clark for an interview to explore this idea.

Whichever kind of person you are, Melissa Clark is there for you.

She started out hoping to be a writer of “early modern female focussed romance novels” but discovered that all of her best images were about food. She says, “Every story, every color, every simile was about food.” As she tells it, Melissa had the good fortune of starting out as a writer on the internet before anyone was actually reading on the internet. “There were no food writers when I started out. No one was talking about the experience of cooking.”

We got together to talk about managing the commercial realities of writing and marketing recipes (“I feel like I am constantly walking on that line”), making friends with your ingredients (“the anchovy is my bad boyfriend”), dealing with anxiety (“my way of coping with it is to be very very busy”), falling in love with your teachers, what makes food a way that we can change the social structure of the world, why deadlines are lifelines, how much of her personal experiences to reveal in her writing, and when to walk away from the cookie dough.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

124: Anya Marina

14 maj 2019 | 72 min

Anya Marina was the hottest DJ on the hottest radio station in San Diego. She had a natural, direct and conversational way of talking on the mic that made her a perfect fit for FM radio, she was a witty improviser, and she was fearless in the face of celebrity. Plus from an early age, she loved comedy and had even considered a career in comedic acting.

She could see her life laid out ahead of her. The only problem was, it wasn’t the life she wanted. So she walked away from her career in radio for the career she knew she needed: music, what else? She started releasing her songs independently before signing with Chop Shop, a label that specialized in finding high profile syncs for their artists in an era before “sync” was a word people in the business really thought about.

Her music, intelligent, infectious and hooky songwriting delivered with delicious restraint, found its way to popular TV shows and movies including Grey’s Anatomy, Twilight: New Moon, and Gossip Girl.

She moved. From San Diego to LA. Then she moved again. From LA to Portland. Then she moved again. From Portland to New York. She was busy, in writing sessions, pitching songs for her publisher, developing her career as both a singer and a co-writer.

She continued to release music. (I co-wrote and produced a song on her 2016 release Paper Plane). She could see her life laid out ahead of her. Again. And she thought: now’s the time to bring it all together.

Maybe she didn’t think that. How could I know what she thought? But whatever was going on in her head, she created a web series (Anya Marina: Indie-Pendent Woman) in which she stars as a singer songwriter in New York named Anya Marina. The series, a mockumentary style sendup of a self absorbed pop singer, gave Anya the chance to bring all her original loves together, music, acting, improvisational performance, and keeping company with the odd celeb.

So, is this the life Anya imagined for herself?

We got together recently to talk about how her Russian mother never taught her how to say the word “water” correctly, why she’s committed to “experiencing something together with my audience,” what makes her a good storyteller, and that “when a thought becomes an obsession, that’s when you know you’ll make a change”.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

123: Sophie Auster

1 maj 2019 | 33 min

122: Kassa Overall

16 april 2019 | 93 min

Kassa Overall will tell you, “I love being the first thing of a thing. It’s one of my favorite things.”

Kassa will also tell you that grew up in the cut. Between two kinds of music. Between two neighborhoods, in Seattle, that were “actually divided and separated”. He related more to the black neighborhood that he lived in, but he went to school mostly with white kids. “Looking back on it now I realize we’re all from the same stuff” but at the time it felt like he was in the middle of two worlds.

In fact, Kassa Overall will tell you a lot of things. That’s because Kassa Overall is a lot of things. Drummer. Rapper. Producer. Taker of cold showers.

As a drummer, he says “I had the old cat thing. Even though I was a young cat, I had something on drums that none of the other young cats had.” That’s how early on he caught the attention and found work performing with a formidable list of artists, including Christian McBride, Donald Byrd, Vijay Iyer, Wallace Roney, Ravi Coltrane, Gary Bartz, and many more. He also spent several years as a key member of pianist Geri Allen's Timeline band and works regularly with trumpeter Theo Croker's ensemble.

As a rapper and producer, Overall has collaborated with Brooklyn-based hip-hop outfit Das Racist, is a member of the duo Kool & Kass with former Das Racist member Kool A.D., and has DJ’ed with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's house band, Jon Batiste & Stay Human.

And apparently Kassa is in the midst of a Wim Hof cycle of breathing and showering in cold water. That’s not really as important as the rest of the biographical story, but it does give you a sense that the guy is working on it at all times.

Overall kept his hip hop / electronic identity separate from his jazz-self for a long time, thinking that it would be a stretch to bring all of those influences into one project. “I limited myself,” he says. But ultimately he relented and made his latest solo album Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, a startlingly cohesive array of compositions and production styles representing Kassa's diverse skillset.

In our conversation he talks about the intersection of jazz and hip-hop, the importance of getting “comfortable with being bored so you can get better at your instrument”, the relationship between great drumming and the sounds of nature, how growing up far away from the “scene” gave him a strong sense of personal identity, and what it takes to be a “cat who is going for it”.

Along the way, he discusses the influence of many of his collaborators and teachers including Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Arto Lindsay, Roy Hargrove, Billy Hart, and Elvin Jones.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

121: Cory Wong

12 mars 2019 | 74 min

Guitarist Cory Wong wants you to know that “smooth-jazz” is not a dirty word. At least not as he sees it. That’s why he started referring to himself as the “millennial smooth jazz ambassador”.

Cory comes from Minneapolis and got his start working with many of the great Minneapolis funk musicians who worked with Prince; they showed him the ways of the funk. It’s a deep and very special legacy. Cory is an infectious performer, with incredible energy and positivity on stage.

One night a half dozen years ago, some young musicians from Michigan were on tour in Minneapolis and had a night off. Somebody told them to go check out a band called Doctor Mambo’s Combo (Cory happened to be subbing for the regular guitar player that night).

Something special happened that night. Maybe it was a full moon. Maybe it was destiny. Maybe it was beshert. By the time the concert was over, Cory had connected with a group of people who would have a big impact on his life and career: Jack Stratton, Theo Katzman, Joe Dart & Joey Dosik of Vulfpeck.

Today Cory is best known for his work with the band Vulfpeck. Their YouTube videos have made them into funk-celebrities, and now they sell out all over the world. It’s a completely independent, gorilla style operation, which is why it’s so extraordinary that in just a few short years Vulfpeck has built up enough of a following to be able to play for larger and larger audiences. (Later this year, for example, they’ll play Madison Square Garden in New York.)

In our conversation we tell the story of what happened when Cory met Vulf, how the first encounter went, and subsequently how Cory’s life and career were impacted. Cory explains how his concept of “letting rhythm be take the lead” developed after he connected with Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck.

We also get severely sidetracked talking about saxophonist Dave Koz, legendary Minneapolis drummer Michael Bland and bassist Sonny Thompson, Los Angeles phenomenon Louis Cole, mandolin master Chris Thile, playing with the Fearless Flyers.

Cory’s own solo project has grown recently as well. He has released a series of records and videos, and tours regularly with his band of Minneapolis groove assassins. In late January he played a sold out show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York.

The next night, we had this conversation, in which he talks about coming up in Minneapolis, playing with Vulfpeck, disrupting smooth jazz, commanding the grid, letting “rhythm take the lead”, the YouTube effect, the power of a good story, and Thai massage.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

120: Jacques Schwarz-Bart

19 februari 2019 | 65 min

Jacques Schwarz-Bart says that he never fit neatly into any one category. He says, “I knew early on in my life that I could not go down a regular path. It would be hard for other human beings to totally accept me the way I am.” From the very start, Jacques’ life was unusual. Born in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to a pair of writers (his mother the Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart and his father, the French-Jewish writer and intellectual André Schwarz-Bart.) The family traveled widely, living in Senegal, Switzerland, and Goyave, Guadeloupe. Young Jacques was an excellent student, and he was thought to be destined for greatness. In his universe, that meant a life in politics and, after studying at the prestigious Parisian school of Government, Sciences Po, he began a career as a Senator’s assistant in Paris. He was an inspiration: young, successful and smart - a beacon of hope and a shining representative of his multi cultural background in France. So when he walked away from all that at age 27, moved to Boston and pursued a career in jazz saxophone at the Berklee College of Music, it was not a surprise to him that his family and friends thought he had literally lost his mind. People started to talk, and to invent all kinds of reasons to explain the choice. He says, “I admired them for finding a rational reason for my decision. Nobody could come to terms with the fact that I loved something and I just decided to pursue it despite that fact that I was new and not very good at it.” It’s true, he was new. He had only picked up a saxophone for the first time a few years earlier. But as he tells it, there was an instant connection between the young Schwarz-Bart and the and horn. He was off and running. Much like everything else in his life, Jacques musical path has not followed a straight line. His work with Roy Hargrove led him to the world of neo soul, where he worked as a session player with the likes of D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Eric Benet, and Meshell N’degeocello. But it was stints with Danilo Perez, Ari Hoenig, Bob Moses, and Giovanni Hidalgo that informed his search for authentic, coherent music that built bridges between his cultural and musical worlds. A series of exploratory projects ensued, including the Gwoka Jazz Project (exploring the music of Guadeloupe); Jazz Racine Haiti (bringing together Haitian Voodoo music and jazz); and most recently Hazzan, featuring his original arrangements of Jewish liturgical music. We got together on a cold January afternoon following his performance at the Winter Jazz Festival in New York to talk about identity, authenticity, and how “the artist is first and foremost someone who has the guts to be himself”. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

119: Aaron Parks

5 februari 2019 | 71 min

118: Kenny Werner

18 januari 2019 | 77 min

Kenny Werner might try to talk you out of becoming a jazz musician. “Please don’t become a jazz musician just because you think you should. That’s like saying you think you should become a typewriter salesman. Nobody needs you. I would do everything I could to talk them out of it and if they couldn’t be talked out of it then I would say go for it. It’s got to be a thing of extreme love because it doesn’t make any sense otherwise.”

For Kenny, playing piano always came easily. Even as a young boy growing up on Long Island, he was an exceptional musician, first recording on television at the age of 11. Although he studied classical piano as a child, he enjoyed playing anything he heard on the radio.

He has dedicated his life to playing jazz. Over his extensive career, he’s worked with an exhaustive list of the greats, including long lasting creative relationships with Joe Lovano, Toots Thielemans, Betty Buckley and the Mel Lewis orchestra. Quincy Jones has said of Kenny, “Perfection, 360 degrees of soul and science in one human being. My kind of musician.” As Kenny says it, a driving force in his work is to make “a music conscious of its spiritual intent and essence.”

But despite all his natural talent for playing from a young age, the rest of the world was a bit of a mystery and a struggle. He didn’t like to do too much work. He didn’t like to exert too much effort, and he really didn’t like to practice the things that didn’t come easily to him. He liked to watch TV. (In fact, he told me, he still likes to watch TV.) However, he had a natural gift for explaining the kinds of hangups and challenges that many musicians and music students deal with in their own development, and through years of work on himself and as a teacher of others, he devised a technique to overcome those hangups. He says now that maybe this came easily to him precisely because he didn’t worry too much about what people thought of him as a teacher - he was still caught up in being a jazz musician.

In 1996 Kenny wrote Effortless Mastery, Liberating The Master Musician Within. The book influenced generations of jazz musicians and continues to be a seminal text in contemporary jazz and creative education. Werner has since created videos, lectured world-wide and authored many articles on how musicians, artists or even business people can allow their “master creator” within to lift their performance to its highest level, showing us how to be spontaneous, fearless, joyful and disciplined in our work and in our life.

Kenny says that since the book was published, he constantly hears people who tell him how the book changed their lives (myself included). Nonetheless, it took him years to come to terms with his path as an educator, and to accept the accolades, and feel good when he received praise for his book and the subsequent journey on which it led him. “Today I get a bigger kick from helping people with whatever wisdom I have than I do from playing. I finally accepted I have a wisdom that can really be useful. As musicians we’re not used to doing something that’s useful.”

We met in a midtown New York hotel in December to talk about his life and career, the Effortless Mastery phenomenon, coming to terms with his own wisdom, and his newest record The Space, a solo piano project informed by Werner’s own teachings.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

117: Fred Hersch

4 januari 2019 | 63 min

Pianist, composer, educator and recording artist Fred Hersch has been proclaimed “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade” by Vanity Fair, “an elegant force of musical invention” by The L.A. Times, and “a living legend” by The New Yorker.

He tells me, “I’m 63. I’ve been playing 2, 5 and 1 for 45 years. I don’t know many people that can go to work after 45 years and say that they’re really looking forward to it. As long as I can keep my physical skills intact, I’m gonna keep going until I can’t go anymore.”

Keeping his physical skills intact has been a more challenging proposition for Fred than for most. He has been HIV positive since the 1980’s, and at times just staying alive has been a struggle. Nonetheless, his creative output is exhaustive. With more than three-dozen albums to his credit as a leader or co-leader, multiple collaborations with many of the finest jazz musicians in the world, Hersch consistently receives lavish critical praise and numerous international awards for each highly anticipated new release.

In Fred’s case, the intersectionality of life and work has been constant. For example, a decade ago he slipped into a pneumonia related coma for 2 months. When he emerged, after recuperating, he created “My Coma Dreams”, a long form song cycle presented in music, words and video projections about the strangeness of coma-state perceptions versus real events.

A documentary film, The Ballad of Fred Hersch (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fredhersch) was made about that experience, and his memoir Good Things Happen Slowly was published in 2017. In the book, he describes the kind of double life he led as a gay jazz musician before coming out in the early 1990s and taking control of his own personal narrative. So it’s fair to say that both his work and his life have been well documented.

Ostensibly what brought us together was the latest document, the album Trio 97 @ the Village Vanguard, a previously unreleased live recording from the Village Vanguard made over 20 years ago. The record documents his first tenure as a band leader in the legendary New York jazz club that has become his home base (for more than two decades he has performed there for packed houses three times a year and has recorded some of his most acclaimed albums on its historic stage). In fact, he’s playing there this very weekend!

However we could easily have talked at any time because there’s always a “next project” with Fred . Even as we discussed Trio 97, he was eager to tell me about yet another record he made at the Vanguard in October, a duo recording with Esperanza Spalding, and an upcoming recording in Germany with Vince Mendoza. The week we spoke (last month), his 2018 release Fred Hersch Trio Live In Europe was nominated for a Grammy (his 13th nomination).

We met on a crisp December afternoon in the Soho apartment that has been his home for four decades and talked about how the scene has changed over the years (“people drink less now”), learning to be gracious (“the audience needs to have their experience independent of how you feel about it”), jazz education (“You can spend $200,000 on a jazz performance degree and not make that much money in the next 10 years”), songwriting (“I try to write tunes”), self reflection (““If I want to be the person I can be, I can’t worry about what people think”) and much more.

As he says, “Having a lot of information is like having a big vocabulary. That doesn’t mean you know how to tell a story. I’ve always been interested in story telling.”

Listen to hear what he means and hear Fred tell his story.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

116: Rick Margitza

21 december 2018 | 59 min

115: Joe Dart

7 december 2018 | 81 min

Joe Dart was on his way to Boston. He had enrolled in the Berklee College of music - a somewhat inevitable step for the young, very talented bass player from rural Michigan who loved funk and soul music. Although he had already been performing regularly in and around his home of Harbor Spriannngs, Michigan, he knew he would have to get out of town to achieve his goal of being a touring and recording bass player. But he didn’t go. Something kept him in Michigan and at the last minute he changed his plans and decided to move to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan instead.

Any guesses what that one thing might have been?

You’re probably right.

Anyway, it didn’t take him long to meet the musicians who would change his life and trajectory. Within weeks of moving to Ann Arbor, a jam session with Jack Stratton reoriented both of them. Along with Theo Katzman, Woody Goss, and a continually expanding collection of regular players (including Cory Wong, Antwaun Stanley and Joey Dosik) and special guests (like drummers James Gadson, Bernard Purdie, Michael Bland, and Louis Cole) Joe Dart became both the backbone and the bottom end of Vulfpeck. Through their youtube videos, Vulfpeck has become the subject of enormous fanaticism and enthusiasm for a new generation of funk loving hipsters. And Joe Dart has inspired a special kind of fervor from fans, fed in part by the band’s own Jack Stratton who seems committed to making sure Joe Dart becomes a household name among the internet connected backbeat illuminati.

Joe and I got together last month in an Airbnb in Paris to talk about how “the way you groove has power”, why the magic of Vulfpeck is in the freshness of the music, what it means to “play every note like my life depends on it”, if his vigorous head bobbing influences his groove, and where he learned to play bass “like a drummer”.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

114: John Fields

12 november 2018 | 120 min

113: John Leventhal

16 oktober 2018 | 51 min

112: Mary Sweeney

30 september 2018 | 84 min

Mary Sweeney needs some air. “There has to be a flow of fast and slow, and a pause to allow the listener or the spectator to digest and to project their own thoughts.” She thinks I should leave more space in my podcasts, to let it breathe. She tells me this as we sit in the screened in porch behind her summer house in Madison, Wisconsin. As she tells me this, cicadas chirp loudly, as if to underscore her point: “Today’s episode will not be edited! You will not remove us from this moment!”

Mary Sweeney should know. She spent much of her career as a film editor, producer and writer collaborating with David Lynch. Beginning in 1985 with Blue Velvet, and continuing through the 2006 film Inland Empire, her editing credits include Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks (1991), Industrial Symphony (1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), On the Air (1992), Hotel Room(1993), Lost Highway (1996), The Straight Story (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Baraboo (2009). The relationship with Lynch was productive, fruitful, and nuanced (the two were partners in work and in life for much of that time) and they have a son together.

She is currently working as a consulting producer and writer on Matthew Weiner’s series for Amazon, The Romanoffs, and is the Dino and Martha De Laurentiis Endowed Professor of film at USC, where she teaches Graduate Screenwriting Thesis and “Dreams, The Brain and Storytelling.”

Before we had this conversation, Mary cheekily emailed me a list of topics that she would be happy to discuss. They included editing, producing, screenwriting, parenting, Paris, Cairo, pie baking, and the Catholic Church. Guess what we talked about? All of it.

And we also talked at length about living and working in an intensely creative partnership with David Lynch for all those years (both personally and professionally), collaborating with one of the most innovative voices in film, and what’s so great about coming from a big family. Visit the Patreon Page for an extra 20 minutes of juicy conversation that didn’t make it into this edit.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

111: Nate Chinen

22 augusti 2018 | 82 min

110: Howard S. Becker

7 augusti 2018 | 62 min

109: Ben Wikler, Anat Shenker-Osorio, Dan Kaufman

16 juli 2018 | 71 min

Madison, Wisconsin in the 1960s was one of the most radicalized university campuses in the country. It was a center for the kind of counter culture that has come to feel like a cliché today. There was plenty of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, sure. But there was also political activism, civil rights, environmentalism.

Because of the University of Wisconsin, thousands of young people move through Madison and take the values of the city with them when they leave.

Earlier this summer, The Madison Reunion brought over one thousand people with ties to Madison in the 60s back together for three days of meetings, discussions and panels, held at the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Union. The event was billed as “a party with a purpose” and had the feeling of both a nostalgic walk down memory lane and a reignition for a generation of activists who were referred to by journalist Jeff Greenfield as “the long ago young”.

Although I wasn’t in Madison in the 1960s, it is fair to say that I’m a byproduct of that time. My parents met there in the mid 60s and I grew up in Madison in the shadow of the revolution, part of a generation that was raised to feel that we had just missed something major.

So at the Madison Reunion, I moderated a panel of three other Madison natives, all of whom left Madison after high school, to talk about the impact of the city, the values and the Madison-state-of-mind on their lives, careers and overall point of view. Ben Wikler (Washington director of MoveOn.Org), Anat Shenker-Osorio (writer, researcher and communications specialist) and Dan Kaufman (musician and journalist) joined me in conversation.

While the panel began with a simple overview of what it meant to come up in the 80s and 90s in Madison, it quickly moved into more contemporary questions of working with the media today and what the legacy of the 60s might be in a modern context.

By the end of the conversation, I was slightly overwhelmed by how much work there is to do in order to stay ahead of (or just in touch with) the way political and cultural messaging is manipulated today. But I was also highly encouraged and inspired just hearing the three panelists talk. As long as Ben, Anat and Dan are out here fighting the good fight, making sure the right messages are being communicated, and telling the important stories, there is hope.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

108 - Lage Lund

6 juli 2018 | 73 min

What is there to say about guitarist Lage Lund that hasn’t already been said? Not much. And plenty.

Lage has been a fixture on the New York jazz scene since moving here in the early 2000s as a “skinny kid from Norway with dreads”. The dreads are long gone, and there is very little about him today to indicate that he grew up in a small Norwegian city (Skien) where he had to take a three hour train ride to Oslo to buy the latest jazz albums, and that before he was one of the most creative and virtuosic guitarists of his generation, he was a frustrated skateboarder with no place to skate “vert”.

A regular in the “Rising star – Guitar” category in the Downbeat Critic’s Poll, he has been hailed by Pat Metheny as a favorite young guitarist, and is “all music and all soul” according to Russell Malone - one of the judges who awarded Lund top prize in the 2005 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Of Lund, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel once said, "Of the younger cats, Lage is THE one. He's a wonderful player. Scary actually!"

Acclaimed as one of the finest guitarists in jazz, Lund has performed and recorded with artists like Ron Carter, Mulgrew Miller, Wynton Marsalis, Maria Schneider, Carmen Lundy, David Sanchez, Seamus Blake and many others.

He is currently preparing three new projects: “Lage Lund Lonely Band” The upcoming release “Party Of One” has Lund covering all parts in each aspect of the process: writing, arranging, performing, recording, producing as well as directing music videos; a new Criss Cross release of all original material, written for and developed by his longstanding quartet consisting of Sullivan Fortner, Matt Brewer & Tyshawn Sorey. And a duo album with pianist Bryn Roberts.

Lage came over recently to talk about who influenced him, where he’s looking when he plays, when he discovered that guitar doesn’t suck, how musicians communicate, what happened to swing, and why jazz musicians drink natural wine.

This Episode also features an extensive introduction by my guest co-host for the week, singer/ songwriter Joy Dragland. Joy also happens to be married to Lage.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

107: Brendan B. Brown

21 juni 2018 | 78 min

Talking to Brendan B. Brown about his life and music is like talking to a dozen guys at once. There’s the singer-songwriter - the guy who wrote the hit song “Teenage Dirtbag” and created the band Wheatus nearly 2 decades ago, and who has been riding that wave ever since. This is the guy who writes brilliant, provocative, genre bending pop songs, and who tours stadiums in the UK and Australia.

There’s the kid who grew up in a “lobster town in decline” on long island in the 80s and was sent to an all boys high school an hour away because his parents panicked after a satanic murder took place in the woods behind his house. This is the guy who ultimately ended up moving into the extra house on his parents property, building a work-live space and staying there well into adulthood.

There’s the gear geek - the one who wants to know about each microphone, guitar amp, drum head and compressor used on all the records he loves. This is the guy who remembers every piece of equipment he ever bought and can explain why he cares deeply for the kind of equipment that most people would find little value in.

There’s the punk from the east village - the guy who spent the 90s at the Mercury Lounge and the Luna Lounge, attacking New York city with a raw, DIY “anti” attitude that he continues to carry with him to this day.

There’s the music fan. (This is the episode in which more specific examples of music have been given than any other on the Third Story before.)

At the core, Brendan is a natural, self taught, self invented, homebody who seems to be firing on all cylinders at all times. He is intensely curious and passionate about what he does, what he thinks, what he thinks he does, and what he does about what he thinks.

I recently met with Brendan in his studio on Long Island - the same one where he has recorded almost all of his albums, and which happens to be on the property where he grew up. Here he talks about the power and responsibility of writing a hit song, what it’s like to have your dreams come true, and how to recover when they don't.

The episode features an introductory conversation with my old friend and musical collaborator Joy Dragland.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

106: Joe Goodkin

7 juni 2018 | 61 min

105: Donovan Woods

31 maj 2018 | 69 min

"If you're not sad you're not paying very much attention."

Donovan Woods has a talent for writing songs that feel like “real life”: Funny and sad at the same time, plain spoken and poetic in the same breath, nostalgic and hopeful at once. As he says, "Two opposing ideas can be true at the same time."

So it’s no surprise that he named his latest album Both Ways.

He says that when he thinks about it, there’s just “so much sadness”. He says that he loves to watch an audience turn to mush, to make them feel comfortable and then slowly deliver the tragic sense of life. He says he does it by using “tricks of language” that feel familiar and colloquial. He says he developed his confessional style of songwriting, which is generally considered to be country or folk, by listening to hip hop as a kid growing up in Sarnia, Ontario.

There’s a lot about Donovan Woods that makes him an outsider to the Nashville singer songwriter circles in which he often travels, but there’s plenty that puts him right at home there. Particularly, a devotion to highly personal, narrative writing.

Despite all the tragedy, I think he’s also one of the funniest writers around. Listening to his music, one is constantly toggling between tears of laughter and tears of sadness. At least I am. And talking to Donovan Woods is similar. He’s very a pleasant guy, easy going, down to earth and funny. Sad funny, sure. Bitter funny. Excruciating funny. But funny all the same.

Although his songs are custom made to be performed by him (“people say I sound like I’m singing right in their ear”) they have also been recorded by stars like Tim McGraw and Charles Kelley (of Lady Antebellum).

Donovan came to the Third Story headquarters recently during a run of shows and promotion for his new album. Here he talks about writing songs that feel like real life, the big scam of success (“by the time you get the thing you always wanted, you feel like you deserve it”), how to make it in Nashville, and why Wisconsin is the state most like Canada.

This episode features an introduction by me in conversation with my wife, Amanda.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon!

104: Nate Wood

24 maj 2018 | 71 min

103: Larry Klein

14 maj 2018 | 82 min

Larry Klein started out as a musician’s musician before becoming a producer’s producer. At a young age he was playing bass with his heroes in the jazz world, including a long and creative stint with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The way he explains it, Klein became more drawn to the world of songs, singers and popular music, and put off by the jazz insiders’ insistence on what was and what wasn’t “the real s*#t”. As a session player he worked on some of the most classic LA record dates of the 80s and 90s (for the likes of Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, Don Henley, Bob Dylan, Cher and Joni Mitchell) and seemed positioned for a life as a hired gun sideman.

But while married to his first wife, Joni Mitchell, Larry began producing records. Over the last 30 years he has become one of the most sophisticated, musical and thoughtful producers around, producing records for Mitchell, Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot, Herbie Hancock, Luciana Souza (who he is married to now) and many, many more. Klein has won Grammys for his work on Mitchell's Turbulent Indigo and Both Sides Now; and Hancock's River: The Joni Letters.

I've been a huge admirer of his for a long time. I love how he manages to make timeless records that also feel contemporary. It’s a kind of magic trick that anyone who has ever tried to make confident, approachable music in the studio will recognize as much easier said than done.

I recently spent a morning with Larry at his home studio in Los Angeles. Considering how great his records sound, it should have come as no big surprise to me that underneath it all he’s still just a huge music fan. Here he talks about the art and craft of record production, what is and isn’t the real s*%t, why he often works with female artists, and the importance of good coffee. This one was a long time coming for me and I’m delighted to share it.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon!

102: Dessa

19 april 2018 | 70 min

101: Lorrie Moore

12 april 2018 | 63 min

100: My Wife

31 mars 2018 | 14 min

Four years and 100 episodes later, I’m still going. What a trip. This week, I take a moment to reflect with one of the most surprising and flattering guest hosts I’ve ever had: my wife, Amanda.

I write this in from pitch black hotel room in Palm Springs. Last night on the plane I made a list of all my guests so far (hopefully I haven’t overlooked anyone too serious), and organized them into category. The categories are a bit one dimensional, especially considering that my focus is often on the kinds of people who defy category. How does one place an incredible musician who is also an incredible composer, and a visionary producer? By what name do we call a polymath singer, arranger and multi instrumentalist? What about an actor turned Zen Buddhist priest turned blues musician? Or a bebop piano player who also runs two clubs?

So please forgive me if you disagree with where I’ve placed your favorite saxophone player or engineer. Overall when I look at this list, I think my taste is generally pretty clear. I’ve been so fortunate to talk with people who make things I love, some of whom have influenced me, some who I call friends, some who are both.

Moving forward what do I hope for? More. Much more. The rest of 2018 is shaping up to be an eclectic and very exciting batch of new conversations with musicians, writers, producers, and thinkers. And I look forward to continuing to push the edges of the format whenever I can.

But in the spirit of celebration, today is about looking back. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Singers and songwriters: Nadia Ackerman Jonatha Brooke Alex Cuba Jorge Drexler Duchess Kurt Elling Falu Alan Hampton Jesse Harris Michael Hearst Jascha Hoffman Greg Holden Theo Katzman Jo Lawry Adam Levy Madeleine Peyroux Morgan James Janis Siegel Becca Stevens Sachal Vasandani Pat MAcDonald Noa Leah Siegel Adam Schatz / Landlady

Bass players: Alexis Cuadrado Adam Dorn Matt Geraghty Peter Giron Jeff Hamann Will Lee Billy Peterson Paul Peterson Michael Thurber

Drummers: Louis Cato Liberty Devitto Steve Gadd David Garibaldi Dave King Bill Stewart

Guitarists: Doug Wamble Steve Khan Charlie Hunter Jon Madof Gabriela Quintero

Keyboard Players: Jon Batiste George Colligan Mark Davis Larry Goldings Monte Moir Ricky Peterson

Various: Settling the Underscore - on music in advertising Should I move to Nashville What is music therapy

Arrangers: Jacob Collier Gil Goldstein Rob Mounsey

Producers: Michael Leonhart Tommy LiPuma Matt Pierson Jack Stratton Creed Taylor Butch Vig

Engineers: James Farber Ryan Hewitt Al Schmitt

Music Presenters: Michael Dorf Dave Jemilo George Wein Spike Wilner

Other Instrumentalists: John Ellis Tatum Greenblatt Ryan Keberle Ze Luis Howard Levy Bob Rockwell John Scrapper Sneider Ben Wendel Irv Williams

Entrepreneurs and technologists: Ryan Gruss Peter Koechley Benji Rogers Ralph Simon Gabriel Stulman

Writers, actors, directors, literary people: Peter Coyote Andre DeShields Michael Feldman Laura Garcia Lorca Ari Herstand Clifford Irving Daniel Levitin Ratso Sloman Emma Straub Peter Straub Marc Webb

With Ben Sidran: The election of 2016 The Mobtown Tour Remembering Tommy LiPuma Newport Jazz festival 2015 Welcome to Copenhagen What happened in Paris

www.third-story.com

99: Larry “Ratso” Sloman

21 mars 2018 | 72 min

98: Noa and Gil Dor

8 mars 2018 | 73 min

97: Louis Cato

12 februari 2018 | 77 min

95: Liberty Devitto

25 januari 2018 | 66 min

95: Jon Madof

18 januari 2018 | 58 min

94: Nadia Ackerman

10 januari 2018 | 62 min

93: Best of 2017 Vol. 2

31 december 2017 | 90 min

92: Best of 2017 Vol. 1

26 december 2017 | 78 min

Bonus - 53 Remembering Clifford Irving

20 december 2017 | 81 min

91: Laura García Lorca

13 december 2017 | 61 min

90: Americans in Paris

7 december 2017 | 77 min

89: Ralph Simon

30 november 2017 | 47 min

88: Leah Siegel

21 november 2017 | 80 min

87: Theo Katzman

15 november 2017 | 92 min

86: Jack Stratton (Vulfpeck)

8 november 2017 | 68 min

85: Settling the Underscore Vol. 4

1 november 2017 | 28 min

84: Settling the Underscore Vol. 3

24 oktober 2017 | 86 min

83 Bonus - Alex Weinstein

20 oktober 2017 | 42 min

83: Settling the Underscore Vol.2_ls_rev1b

17 oktober 2017 | 72 min

82: Settling the Underscore - Vol. 1

10 oktober 2017 | 71 min

81: Jonatha Brooke

3 oktober 2017 | 66 min

80: Mob Town Tour Vol. 4 - Art is what happened

26 september 2017 | 43 min

79: Mob Town Tour Vol. 3 - Is jazz still regional

19 september 2017 | 50 min

78: Mob Town Tour Vol. 2

12 september 2017 | 60 min

77: Mobtown tour vol. 1 - The search for meaning

5 september 2017 | 58 min

76: Morgan James

9 juni 2017 | 72 min

75: Peter Straub

23 maj 2017 | 88 min

74: Ryan Keberle (trombonist)

4 maj 2017 | 64 min

73: David Garibaldi

21 april 2017 | 67 min

72: George Colligan

9 april 2017 | 63 min

71: Ryan Gruss (drummer, entrepreneur)

30 mars 2017 | 56 min

70: Ryan Hewitt (engineer, mixer, producer)

23 mars 2017 | 62 min

69: Remembering Tommy LiPuma

16 mars 2017 | 31 min

68: What is music therapy?

2 mars 2017 | 62 min

67: Alexis Cuadrado (bassist, composer, educator)

16 februari 2017 | 72 min

66: Adam Schatz (musician, presenter)

9 februari 2017 | 57 min

65: Duchess Trio

2 februari 2017 | 61 min

64: Benji Rogers

26 januari 2017 | 64 min

63: Ben Wendel

19 januari 2017 | 65 min

62: Michael Dorf

13 januari 2017 | 54 min

Episode 61: Spike Wilner

5 januari 2017 | 78 min

60: The election (Ben and Leo Sidran)

10 november 2016 | 12 min

59: Kurt Elling

6 november 2016 | 61 min

58: Ari Herstand - musician, songwriter, actor, writer

12 oktober 2016 | 74 min

57 - Michael Feldman

23 september 2016 | 73 min

55: Pat mAcdonald

26 augusti 2016 | 70 min

55: Al Schmitt (Full Episode)

11 augusti 2016 | 74 min

54: Adam Levy

14 juli 2016 | 77 min

53: Clifford Irving

3 juni 2016 | 78 min

52: Larry Goldings

19 maj 2016 | 83 min

Bonus Mini: Should I Move To Nashville?

12 maj 2016 | 10 min

51: On Prince (Paul Peterson, Ricky Peterson, Monte Moir)

5 maj 2016 | 70 min

50th Episode Special: Leo Sidran (podcast host, musician)

19 april 2016 | 85 min

Ep. 49: Marc Webb (Director)

1 april 2016 | 84 min

48: Gabriela Quintero (Rodrigo y Gabriela)

17 mars 2016 | 64 min

Butch Vig: Record Producer on working w/ Nirvana, Garbage, and the art of communication

25 februari 2016 | 67 min

Ep. 46: How to Get Nominated for a Grammy

11 februari 2016 | 63 min

Ep. 45 Jorge Drexler - Uruguayan songwriter on process, identity and empathy

28 januari 2016 | 62 min

44: Dave King "Commitment is an incredible thing"

14 januari 2016 | 71 min

Paris

19 november 2015 | 32 min

42: Becca Stevens "I'm an emotional perfectionist"

22 oktober 2015 | 73 min

41: Creed Taylor, Record producer at the crossroad of history and good taste

8 oktober 2015 | 56 min

40: Howard Levy, Harmonica Player on How Rhythm, Melody, & Light are all the same thing

24 september 2015 | 75 min

39: Musicians behind Late Show with Stephen Colbert

9 september 2015 | 68 min

38: Addicted To Living In the Present Moment - The Trade Winds project

27 augusti 2015 | 60 min

37: Inspiration Comes from Life at the Newport Jazz Festival

13 augusti 2015 | 46 min

36: George Wein at 90 - Looking forward to the future

30 juli 2015 | 59 min

35: Welcome to Copenhagen

16 juli 2015 | 61 min

34: He started the website that you can't stop reading. Meet Peter Koechley.

2 juli 2015 | 61 min

33: Tommy LiPuma with Al Schmitt, Steve Gadd, Larry Goldings, Jacob Collier and Dean Parks

18 juni 2015 | 60 min

32: Sachal "I have a power to make my words count"

3 juni 2015 | 61 min

31: Peter Coyote, "Every other role but your authentic self has already been taken"

21 maj 2015 | 56 min

30: Guitarist Charlie Hunter on D'Angelo, limitation, and finding your voice

6 maj 2015 | 64 min

29: Gabriel Stulman, NYC Restaurateur, on Building Successful Businesses and Allowing for Failure

23 april 2015 | 57 min

Episode 14 Redux: Greg Holden

16 april 2015 | 51 min

Episode 28: Madeleine Peyroux

9 april 2015 | 83 min

Episode 27: Alan Hampton

26 mars 2015 | 63 min

Episode 26: Falu

5 mars 2015 | 62 min

Episode 25: Alex Cuba

19 februari 2015 | 73 min

Episode 24: Bill Stewart

5 februari 2015 | 63 min

Episode 23: Doug Wamble

22 januari 2015 | 63 min

Episode 22: Jascha Hoffman

8 januari 2015 | 63 min

Episode 21: Steve Khan

29 december 2014 | 88 min

Guitarist Steve Khan was born and raised in Los Angeles in a house of songs. His father, lyricist and songwriter Sammy Cahn, made countless contributions to the American songbook. As a young boy, Steve was surrounded by his father’s friends and collaborators; Dean Martin was a regular at the house. But as he describes it, his father’s world was not particularly attractive to him, and he felt a real distance between himself and his father’s world.

Coming of age in LA in the 60’s, Steve was drawn to music for somewhat more social reasons. His friends played in garage bands, and he wanted a piece of the action. His first instrument was the drums, while still in high school he ended up playing in a surf rock band called the Chantays, who had a hit called Pipeline. Oddly enough, it was the guys in the Chantays who turned Khan onto jazz, the music that truly inspired him.

At 19, Steve made the switch to guitar. In 1970 he relocated from the West Coast to New York. He quickly became an integral part of the studio recording and fusion scenes – in the 1970s he recorded on dozens of records, many of them important statements for artists ranging from the Brecker Brothers to Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins to Freddie Hubbard, Ashford and Simpson to Blood Sweat and Tears, Chaka Khan to Steely Dan. During the period when he was most active on the scene, Steve started recording as a solo artist for major labels. He has recorded over 25 albums as a soloist.

One particular project, called Eyewitness, was clearly a watershed moment for him. It featured Khan, bassist Anthony Jackson, drummer Steve Jordan and percussionist Manolo Badrena. This project seems to have opened a door for him creatively, and since the early 80s he has pursued his love of Latin music.

When I started this podcast, sometimes people would ask me what I’m interested in talking about. I would sometimes answer that I’m looking for the intersection between personal experience and art – where life meets craft. Of course, that’s not always what happens in these conversations, and it’s certainly not any kind of mandate. But it does feel appropriate to wrap up the first year of these conversations with Steve Khan, because not only is he a great storyteller full of anecdotes, but he also is deeply aware of how his life and his music overlap.

www.stevekhan.com

This was a long conversation and for the first time, I’m including some pieces that didn’t make the final cut available here. So if you’re interested and would like to hear more, specifically about some of the technical aspects of Steve’s playing, there’s another 20 minutes of the conversation available below.

Stream it here or download it from the iTunes Music Store.

Episode 20: Jacob Collier

5 december 2014 | 97 min

Episode 19: Gil Goldstein

13 november 2014 | 83 min

Episode 18: Jon Batiste

29 oktober 2014 | 78 min

Episode 17: Adam Dorn (Third Story vs. Compared to What Conversation)

14 oktober 2014 | 89 min

Episode 16: Janis Siegel

6 oktober 2014 | 67 min

Episode 15: John Ellis

18 september 2014 | 80 min

Episode 14: Greg Holden

4 september 2014 | 50 min

Episode 13: Michael Hearst

17 juli 2014 | 68 min

Episode 12: André De Shields

3 juli 2014 | 90 min

Episode 11: James Farber

19 juni 2014 | 71 min

10: Emma Straub, Author

5 juni 2014 | 78 min

9: Rob Mounsey, arrange and composer

22 maj 2014 | 78 min

8: Jesse Harris, singer, songwriter, guitar player

7 maj 2014 | 57 min

7: Tatum Greenblatt, jazz trumpet player

24 april 2014 | 51 min

6: Jo Lawry, singer songwriter

10 april 2014 | 68 min

5: Matt Pierson, record producer

27 mars 2014 | 70 min

4: Michael Thurber, bassist, CDZA founder, composer

13 mars 2014 | 74 min

3: Daniel Levitin, Author of "This Is Your Brain On Music"

27 februari 2014 | 49 min

2: Michael Leonhart, trumpeter, producer, composer, arranger

13 februari 2014 | 69 min

1: Late Show Bassist Will Lee

28 januari 2014 | 78 min

The Third Story with Leo Sidran

THE THIRD STORY features long-form interviews with creative people of all types, hosted by musician Leo Sidran.

Om podden

Avsnitt

280: Ben Sidran | The Election

279: Andrew Bird

278: Aaron Goldberg

277: Lucy Kalantari

276: Riley Mulherkar

275: Jesse Harris

274: Ella Feingold

273: Paula Cole

272: Ben Sidran on Rainmaker

271: Shabaka

270: Jose James

269: säje

268: Ten Years of The Third Story - with Will Lee and Amanda Sidran

267: Keyon Harrold

266: Lau Noah

265: Ani DiFranco

264: brad allen williams

263: Pete Min

262: Clyde and Gracie Lawrence

261: Joey Alexander

260: Todd Sickafoose

259: Alan Lightman

258: Gregory Hutchinson

257: John "J.R." Robinson

256: Jake Lamar

255: Warren Zanes

254: Prateek Kuhad

253: Ben Sidran at 80

252: Laila Biali

251: Scenes from the Montreal Jazz Festival 2023

250: Brandee Younger

249: Theo Katzman

248: Ben Wendel

247: Beth Nielsen Chapman

246: Vijay Iyer

245: Christian McBride

244: Samara Joy

243: What's Trending

242: Braxton Cook

241: Andy Narell

240: Will Page (Tarzan Economics)

239: Rachael & Vilray

238: Best of The Third Story on The Art of the Story, 2022

237: The Ones That Got Away (2022 Holiday Edition)

Larry Goldings Revisited

235: Antonio Sanchez

234: Ibrahim Maalouf

Jorge Drexler

233: Tyshawn Sorey

232: Daniel Lanois

Remembering Peter Straub

231: Cyrille Aimée

Creed Taylor from 2015

Louis Cato from 2018

230: Ben Sidran at 79

229: John Medeski

Noga Erez from 2020

228: Emmet Cohen

227: Umbria Jazz

226: Montreal Jazz Festival

Julian Lage from 2021

225: Stacey Kent

Donald Fagen from 2019

224: Ryan Lerman

Lionel Loueke (WBGO Studios Preview)

Eric Harland (WBGO Studios Preview)

223: Matthew Stevens

Bob Power (WBGO Studios Preview)

Jason Moran (WBGO Studios Preview)

222: Walter Smith III

Jon Batiste (WBGO Studios Preview)

221: Michelle Willis

220: Nate Craig

219: Lauren Henderson

218: Jake Sherman

217: Melissa Aldana