The Third Story with Leo Sidran

For the fourth year in a row, I talked to my dad, musician/producer/journalist/philosopher Ben Sidran in honor of his birthday. This time he's turning 79 and we consider the sociological implications of mowing the lawn, Donald Fagen's solo recordings, the significance of the 1960s in popular culture today, Pharoah Sanders album Pharoah's First, interviews he conducted in the 1980s with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, the myth of Sisyphus, and his most recent album Swing State.

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For John Medeski, music has always been about healing. "Music just kind of sucked me up," he says. "For me having music was a great way to deal with the hard things in life.

"Best known as one-third of the avant-garde jazz / funk trio Medeski, Martin & Wood (aka MMW), Medeski began playing piano as a kid, growing up in Florida. By high school, he was sitting in with the likes of Jaco Pastorius and Mark Murphy.

He lived in Boston for college, and then in New York in his 20s. But Medeski was always drawn to nature. "I learn a lot by being around things humans couldn't create," he says. "Like trees and mountains. I just don't think humans are that clever or that important."

Despite his love of the natural world, John is an innovative electronic (or at least electric) musician. He twists and squeezes the sound of his keyboards — distorting, filtering and processing the instruments to find unusual and sometimes otherworldly textures. Maybe that's why he lists NASA's recording of a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster as one of his favorite recent musical discoveries.

Medeski is a highly collaborative musician: in addition to MMW, he has been a part of numerous musical collectives including The Word, Mad Skillet, Hudson, Saint Disruption, and multiple John Zorn projects.

We spoke recently about the healing power of music; what attracted him to music as a boy; his creative and professional development; and the moment in 1996 when MMW discovered their jam band audience.

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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 harddrives. 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 featured the song "Dance While You Shoot" that was featured in an Apple commercial. The more organic live versions of the songs were meant as a kind of creative exercise during 2020 when touring came to a halt, but I really loved them, and as Noga explains it, so did a lot of her fans.

We talked in the summer of 2020 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.

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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.

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Although the conditions that created jazz are distinctly American, without Europe it seems clear that it might not survive. Every summer hundreds of the greatest practitioners of the music and hundreds of thousands of fans gather across Europe at the major festivals to come together and celebrate it.

These gatherings provide a much needed opportunity for what the musicians refer to as "the hang". Producer Matt Pierson explained it this way: "It is an American music and we love our homeland but in reality if you ignore the borders, the base of most jazz adjacent music is in Europe… You get to do a lot of hanging."

I spent a day at Umbria, hanging and exploring. Conversations with Matt Pierson, artistic consultant Enzo Capua, drummer Terence Higgens, saxophonist Dave Koz, and singer Kurt Elling help to illuminate the situation.

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After a two-year slowdown due to COVID, the Montreal International Jazz Festival came back this year. I had been there a couple times, in and out, as a musician. I went this year to cover the festival's full return for WBGO and The Third Story.

When you're a musician at a festival like MJF, the job is actually pretty clear. You get to the gig, play the gig, pack up and go to the next gig. But what does a member of the press do in this situation? I was given a credential badge to wear with the word JOURNALISTE written on it and an assignment to "find the story."

Pretty quickly, a narrative started to reveal itself. Or rather, several narratives, all classics. The story of the young versus the old. The story about the past versus the present. And ultimately, the story of today's community of musicians, what's on their mind as they travel this Silk Road of Rhythm which is the summer jazz festival circuit —from Montreal to Marciac, from North Sea to Umbria and beyond.

Conversations with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Bill Charlap, Scott Colley, Aaron Goldberg, Samara Joy, Allison Miller, Gregory Porter, and various concert-goers, festival organizers and locals all helped to fill in the story.

Self-expression, politics, social media, technology, and conservationism were all part of the fabric, but the common thread between all of them was one of empathy and communion.

"This Music," as so many of the musicians call it, represents human potential. And humans are complicated beings. But at our core, we are social beings and that is reflected in this Montreal Jazz Festival experience.

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When Julian Lage plays guitar, it's hard not to get swept up in it. His relationship with the instrument is natural and contagious. Maybe that's because it's been with him for most of his life. When he was just 8 years old, Julian was the subject of an Academy Award nominated documentary film called Jules at Eight. Before he entered his teens, he had already performed with Carlos Santana and jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton. While still in highschool he was a faculty member of the Stanford Jazz Workshop.

Lage plays like someone in love. Despite his productive personal relationship with singer-songwriter Margret Glaspy - who produced his forthcoming album on Blue Note View with a Room - perhaps the deepest love affair of his life may in fact be with the guitar itself.

In this conversation from last year, we talked about his 2021 release Squint, which Glaspy produced with Armand Hirsch - his first on Blue Note, which he recorded with drummer Dave King and bassist Jorge Roeder. He told me how he traversed those murky waters of youthful exceptionalism and came out on the other side - with more sensitivity, to the music, to his audience, and to himself. During the course of the conversation, Julian also described the connection between the artist and the audience and how he thinks about notes as having the weight of speech. "I want it to feel like I'm talking to you when I play."

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Singer Stacey Kent says she tends to be attracted to the "feeling of unrest," and she thinks that her fans like to feel it too. Over the course of a 30 year career that has produced over 20 albums (including including the Grammy-nominated Breakfast On The Morning Tram), Stacey has mined that feeling again and again in different ways.

Maybe she understands how to express the complicated emotions around identity, romance, displacement and longing because she has lived them so fully herself. Raised in New Jersey, Stacey moved to England for graduate school. Almost immediately she met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson and the two set out together to build a life both personal and professional.

As Stacey describes it, meeting Jim was a major inflection point in her life and it's clear that the relationship between the two is at the center of the story. Eventually, they befriended the Japanese born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, which has led to an ongoing creative partnership between Tomlinson and Ishiguro who compose original songs for Stacey's repertoire.

In this conversation, recorded on location at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London we talk about why she's a fatalist, escaping from New Jersey and from the bounds of category, crossing borders (in many senses), and her latest release Songs From Other Places.

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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.

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Ryan Lerman has a few tricks up his sleeve. Best known as the cofounder of Scary Pockets, a dynamic funk band from LA who came to prominence on YouTube, Ryan is also an accomplished singer songwriter, bassist, arranger and producer.

His early work with Michael Bublé, John Legend, Vanessa Carlton and Ben Folds prepared him for a career as a session player, and his early solo records showcased his plain spoken, plaintive and soulful connection to the human condition.

Lerman met his Scary Pockets cofounder Jack Conte when the two were still in high school in Marin County, California. It's a relationship that has informed and influenced him musically and professionally since then. He says that they "tend to be systems level thinkers" who "focus on the process instead of the outcome."

That kind of process oriented approach has paid off: Scary Pockets and Lerman are extremely productive: they have released at least one new video each week since 2017, racked up millions of views and a loyal audience of funk enthusiasts around the world. They've recorded hundreds of songs featuring a continuously rotating line up of quality musicians and singers.

Collaborators have included many former guests of this podcast including Jacob Collier, Louis Cato, Louis Cole, Tyler Duncan, Joey Dosik, Larry Goldings, Caleb Hawley, Cory Henry, Theo Katzman, Lawrence, Adam Levy, Monica Martin, Jake Sherman, Antwaun Stanley, Jack Stratton, and Cory Wong.

Here he talks about his happy place ("in the middle of business thinking and artistry"), what he learned about leadership by working as a sideman, how tried to become a lawyer but ended up playing funk music instead, and what minor nine chords have to do with any of it.

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