The Third Story with Leo Sidran

In March 2020, just as the world was closing under the advancing cloud of Covid 19, I spoke to a handful of musician friends from around the world to hear how they were doing and to explore some of the pressing questions around the shutdown and the arts.

One year later, I check in with (almost) all of them to hear what the last year has been like for them, what were the challenges and opportunities of the first Covid year, and how they see the future.

Italian singer Gege Telesforo, saxophonist John Ellis, bassist Joe Dart (sort of), guitarist Adam Levy, trombonist Ryan Keberle, artist manager Andrew Leib, singer songwriter Victoria Canal, artist and advocate Ari Herstand, guitarist Lage Lund, mud trudging songwriter Joy Dragland and funk magician Charlie Hunter (in his way) all weigh in.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and following the podcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Before she became a journalist, writer, novelist, television show host, and the editor of Latin music coverage for Billboard magazine, Leila Cobo played the piano. She moved from her home in Colombia to New York to study classical piano at the Manhattan School of Music. Music was her mode of transportation.

Eventually she channeled her love of music and her understanding of Latin music and culture into writing, and today she's one of the most important advocates for Latin music in America. Her new book Decoding Despacito features 19 oral histories about some of the biggest and most significant latin hits of the last 50 years.

With two acclaimed novels, two top-selling biographies and a landmark Latin music industry guide, Leila is one of the world's foremost experts in Latin music, as well as a prolific published author and speaker and the VP of Latin content for Billboard, widely recognized as the Bible of music worldwide.

We spoke recently about the book, her personal journey, and the nuances of Latin music within the context of American popular culture.

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

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

Just hearing the name Boz Scaggs evokes a feeling. It's a hip, laid back, soulful, approachable feeling. It's a southern thing. But it's a San Francisco thing too. He is, as his most recent record proclaims, Out Of the Blues. But he's played his share of rock and roll, r&b, and even jazz too.

When Boz hit it big in the late 70s with his record Silk Degrees, he was already knee deep in the swamp, with a half-dozen solo records to his credit, and plenty of pavement behind him too. He says, "I woke up every day for 10 years with a list as long as my arm of things to take care of." Until the success of that album, despite recording for the biggest labels in the world, he never had a manager. But he was determined, and with each new record he climbed just a little further up the mountain, searching for the next thing.

In fact he always thought of himself as more of a searcher or a traveler than he did a musician. "Music was my ticket," he says. Maybe that's why he has been known to take extended hiatuses from recording and touring. For example, he spent most of the 80s staying home in San Francisco, and avoiding the intensity of the road. (Although he did supplement a little by opening a club called Slims in San Francisco, where he has lived since the 70s.)

Still, he concedes that much of his life has been spent chasing that feeling that can only be found on stage. He tells me, "It's the most wonderful sensation that there is. It's magic what we do. It's magic, what we feel. We are chosen, we get ahold of that live wire and we never want to let go."

Here, he is in turns philosophical, rhapsodic, nostalgic, and matter of fact about the 1960s, his solo career, success, ambition, rhythm sections, songwriting, performing, getting older, and what he's reading today.

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

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 judgement, 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 400 LBS 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.

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

When record producer Rick Beato posted a video on YouTube of his 8 year old son in a dizzying demonstration of perfect pitch, complex harmonic understanding and a general fluency with the building blocks of composition, he had no idea just how big an impact it would have on his life. Already in his 50s, Rick had decades of experience invested in his career in the record business. Five years later he is a full time YouTuber - his channel "Everything Music" has over 2 million subscribers - and has made nearly 800 videos, on subjects including Ear Training, Music Production, Improvisation, Scales and Modes, Film Scoring, Music Theory and Composition, Perfect Pitch, and Guitars. For curious musicians, music students, and music appreciators in the YouTube generation, Rick's channel is simply part of the furniture, something you probably have come across one way or another. But despite being a very public facing teacher and generator of ideas, there is not so much information about him. If you watch his videos then you know that he lives in Atlanta, but that he's from the Northeast. He went first to Ithaca college, then to the New England Conservatory, and then in his early 20s he actually taught at Ithaca College, at first his students were only a few years younger than him. If you watch the videos, then you know his kids a little bit, you know his friends, you know his interests, you know his life. Still, he walks a fine line between a kind of exhibitionism - which is a necessary evil of being a public figure - and the arms length of a teacher. We talked recently about his personal journey, how he organizes his time, what motivates him and what inspires him, teaching "high information" music to children, making a living on YouTube, staying fresh, and walking the line between telling the story and being the story. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.rickbeato.com

Billy Martin (also known as illy B) is many things. He's a visual artist, a filmmaker, a teacher, a builder, a composer, a record producer... But if you know his name, chances are it's from his band Medeski, Martin and Wood, a project he's had for 30 years now along with bassist Chris Wood and keyboardist John Medeski.

Billy refers to his artistic approach as playful and he is committed to the idea of play and experimentation in art. He is also totally serious about what he does, he's a serious thinker, and he takes enormous care with what he does and how he does it. He might be playing, but he's not messing around.

A lifelong student, his path has been somewhat self directed. He spent his formative musical years taking lessons at the Drummers Collective in New York, where he came in contact with a group of musicians who would shape his music and his career, and got what he calls "the inside stuff". Notably, he refers to drummer and composer Bob Moses as one of his primary mentors.

He made a documentary film 10 years ago with another one of his early teachers, Allen Herman. That movie, Life On Drums, is a series of discussions between Billy and Allen intercut with solo drum performances by both of them.

We spoke recently about how field recordings influenced him, the power of sincerity in music and in life, the importance of staying curious and being playful, what he calls the "world music view", how "when you're experimenting there is no such thing as perfection," the similarities between music and visual art, why Instagram is such a useful tool for self expression, and much more.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and following the podcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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.

Raised by a god-fearing mother and a Black Panther father in the mecca of progressive politics, singer, rapper and entrepreneur Rexx Life Raj's music perfectly articulates the beauty and struggle of being a young black adult in 2020.

His voice is soulful, buttery, sweet even. At the same time he's very real, very honest and confessional, unpacking all of the tragedies and successes of his own life and those around him.

He's sensitive in his approach musically and lyrically - his vibe is not aggressive even when the subject matter is uncomfortable. At the same time, he's a big guy. He played Division 1 football at Boise State before committing to music full time.

Raj is prolific and seems to be constantly making videos and releasing singles. One recent single from earlier this year was called Tesla in a Pandemic about he got a new car this year. He uses that image to meditate on the world around him, friends who have not been so lucky or successful, his youth and his parents.

His new EP California Poppy 2 came out recently. Incidentally that is also the name of his new line of Cannabis products. We talked just after it was released about growing up in Berkeley, discovering the world from the back of his parents' delivery van, managing success & guilt, diversification, finding the lane, building a brand, traveling around the world and giving back to his community.

Duncan Sheik's career has not followed a straight line. After studying semiotics at Brown University, he emerged in the mid 1990s as a pop singer songwriter with his hit "Barely Breathing", and quickly revealed himself to bend toward more literate adult oriented rock. He continued to make records and land himself on the charts but also began exploring composition for film and theater.

The success of 2006's Spring Awakening, a hit rock musical that featured Sheik's score (and which won the Tony for Best Original Score as well as a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album) planted him firmly in the world of Broadway. He has continued to write for theater, often collaborating with poet and playwright Steven Sater.

Over the years he has explored electronic music, folk music, and enjoyed covering songs by his favorite writers, many of whom were influential to him as a boy.

His new record Live at the Cafe Carlyle, a small format live concert was recorded in the pre pandemic playground of the upper east side, back when people gathered together unmasked and unconcerned to experience something collectively.

The record in many ways is an encapsulation of his career - it includes some of the most famous songs from his artist and composer lives, as well as some of his favorite songs by other songwriters.

We talked recently about his career, his songwriting, technology in music, how becoming a father has influenced his work, his life in Covid and what it means to release music in these strange and trying times, and what exactly is semiotics anyway.