The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer has been described by The New York Times as a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway." He has been praised by Pitchfork as "one of the best in the world at what he does," by the Los Angeles Weekly as "a boundless and deeply important young star," and by Minnesota Public Radio as "an American treasure."

He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German "Echo" awards, and was voted Downbeat Magazine's Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade.

But beyond all that praise, he is at his core simply a seeker of genuine connection and community. Here he talks about growing up in Rochester, NY as one of a small handful of first generation Indian Americans (his parents immigrated), how he developed his musical identity alongside an academic career as a scientist (he did his undergraduate work in math and physics at Yale and holds a PHD from UC Berkeley in the cognitive science of music), creating work for an uncertain future, how to make music matter, and his most recent recordings.

He released Love In Exile - a collaborative album with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily - last month on Verve Records.

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To say Christian McBride is prolific is both obvious and an understatement. The list of his projects is too long to fit neatly into any one container - he's a musician, an educator, a composer, an artistic director, and a broadcaster. He's an ambassador, a personality, an icon. And of course, he is a bass player.

One gets the sense that his days are simply fuller than most people's days. He always seems to be coming from some other event, or heading out to another gig. Honestly it's hard not to run into Christian McBride if you're engaging with this music on any level.

At 50 years old, he has appeared on more than 300 recordings as a sideman, has made nearly 20 as a leader, and is an eight-time Grammy Award winner. There's nothing trivial about his career. But as he picks up his bass to play, there is an almost mischievous gleam in his eye - a childlike excitement, and a clear sense of joy. He loves to play and it's infectious - it's hard not to feel good watching him do it.

Here he talks about his band New Jawn and their most recent release Prime, as well as his project The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons, which was released on vinyl recently, what makes a great music city, leading by example, what it means to live the life you believe in, and why he went "kicking and screaming" into playing the acoustic bass as a boy.

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Accepting her Grammy award for Best New Artist last month, Samara Joy looked out at a sea of faces that she had grown up admiring and said, "I've been watching y'all on TV for so long…I'm born and raised in the Bronx."

It was almost as though she was reminding herself of just how far she had come, and just how quickly. That was a big moment for the 23 year old singer who was just a year and a half out of college. As she delivered her speech, the camera cut to Lizzo and Adelle, each with a hint of a tear in their eyes.

It was also a big moment for jazz at the Grammys and by extension in the larger popular consciousness (Samara was only the second jazz singer to win the award - Esperanza Spalding was the first). Samara also took home the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album that night for her record Linger Awhile.

In many ways, Samara Joy's extremely rapid rise is like a fairy tale. On the other hand, it's a reminder that sometimes artists arrive just at the right time and meet their moment head on. In this case, it seems that the world was waiting for Samara Joy.

What is like for the 23 year old to manage so much success so quickly? What must she be feeling right now?

Today Samara Joy will tell us in her own words about where she came from, how she got here, and where she thinks she might be going next. And - she does it all while sitting on the curb in the parking lot behind her hotel in Palm Springs, California, where we caught up last month, just a couple weeks after her Grammy success.

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This week on the Third Story Podcast I'm turning the tables on myself and sharing the stories and the creative process behind my new record What's Trending. Featuring excerpts of past episodes with artists who collaborated on the record and inspired the songs, including Boz Scaggs, Louis Cato, Janis Siegel, Michael Leonhart, Peter Coyote and more.

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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.

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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."

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Will Page was working for the UK Government Economic Service in the income tax division, and moonlighting as a music writer for Straight No Chaser magazine when his life changed almost overnight. Pretty soon he was living in London, and helping to shape the new music business and the economics of music streaming.

Page eventually went on to work at Spotify where he was the chief economist. Will's work is regularly featured in Billboard, The Economist and the Financial Times. His book Tarzan Economics was published in paperback this month, and retitled Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of disruption. Here he discusses "how music responds to suppression," the need to "press pause on nostalgia," what qualifies as "content," and the idea that "the internet can scale just about everything but one thing it can't scale is intimacy. [And jazz] is an intimate form."

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Rachael & Vilray are a perfect example of the idea that sometimes what that once seemed old fashioned can actually resonate as new again. Their new record I Love A Love Song! comes out this week.

Rachael Price is best known as the singer in the band Lake Street Dive. She and Vilray met at college two decades ago. But it would take them years before they discovered their mutual love of the American songbook standards from the 1930s and 40s, and decided to create a project to showcase Vilray's special gift of channeling classic songwriters in his original music.

We spoke recently about how this project came about, how they approach making original work in the mold of a musical tradition that is nearly a hundred years old,the art and craft of classic songwriting and getting the words right.

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A collection of Art of the Story pieces for WBGO News by Leo Sidran / The Third Story Podcast from 2022, including coverage of the Montreal and Umbria jazz festivals (featuring Dave King, Julian Lage, Samara Joy, Matt Pierson, Terence Higgins, Gregory Porter, Kurt Elling, Dave Koz and more) as well as short profiles on Lau Noah, Michael Thurber, Tomasz Stanko, Tyshawn Sorey, Jesse Harris, Jorge Drexler, Christian McBride and Larry Goldings.

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Every year, The Third Story collects more interviews and conversations than we are able to publish as full episodes, and 2022 was certainly no exception. Finally, we have found a solution: THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY, 2022 HOLIDAY EDITION. Conversations with saxophonist Bill McHenry, keyboard player/producer Didi Gutman, pianist Jon Dryden, pianist Dan Tepfer, trumpet player/graphic designer Jamie Breiwick, and pianist Randy Ingram with singer Aubrey Johnson, collected around the world this year.

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