The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Writer Jake Lamar talks about growing up in the Bronx, his lifelong love affair with writing, moving to France in the 90s, his career as a novelist, playwright, and cultural critic in Paris, and his new book Viper's Dream, a Jazz Noir crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between 1936 and 1961. After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years writing for Time magazine. He has lived in Paris since 1993 and teaches creative writing at Sciences Po. At age 30, he published a memoir, Bourgeois Blues, in which he evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the Lyndhurst Prize. In 1993, inspired by the American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement where he still resides. In 1996 he published The Last Integrationist, a novel of contemporary America, criticizing the pace of racial integration and the omnipresent television spectacle he sees as typical of the United States. He is the author of a memoir, seven novels, numerous essays, reviews and short stories, and a play.

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41 years ago this month, Bruce Springsteen released his sixth studio album, Nebraska. He recorded much of the album on one winter night, sitting on the edge of the bed in a rented house in New Jersey, playing acoustic guitar and singing, using a 4 track cassette recorder. The album would go on to have lasting influence, inspire other works of art including movies and books, and other records. And Springsteen would later muse that Nebraska may be his best album. Four decades later the story of Nebraska continues to be an object of fascination. Among those who obsessed over it was the musician and writer Warren Zanes. Zanes joined his brother Dan's band, The Del Fuegos, at age seventeen. The band toured with ZZ Top, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, INXS, and others during the time Warren was in the band, and also famously licensed one of their songs for a commercial which led to some serious criticism at the time. Warren then went on to build a career as an academic, a writer (including the best selling biography of Tom Petty, 2015's Petty) an educator (he teaches at New York University) a Grammy-nominated documentary producer, and a musical artist who has released multiple albums under his own name, most recently The Collected Warren Zanes. Throughout it all, he held on to his fascination with Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. He recently published the book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. Warren and I spoke recently about his own personal journey, his thoughts on stardom, work, The Beach Boys, family, addiction, songwriting, betrayal, college towns, fatherhood, Taylor Swift, working with machines, The Kinks, drummers, Booker T. and the M.G.s, Garth Brooks, artificial intelligence, Joseph Campbell, and of course, Nebraska.

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When Prateek Kuhad moved from India to New York to study economics, there would have been almost no predicting that he would soon become one of the most popular singer songwriters in India.

Prateek grew up in Jaipur listening to Indian pop and Bollywood music, along with a handful of international records that his mother had in the house by artists like Harry Belafonte and Cliff Richards. But it was his experience in America, listening to singer songwriters, Americana and new folk artists like Elliott Smith, Fleet Foxes and Laura Marling that influenced his style.

Today, Kuhad performs for tens of thousands in India, and his songs have tens of millions of streams - making him one of the most streamed domestic artists in India.

His song "cold/mess" was featured on an episode of Ted Lasso, and was also included on Barack Obama's favorite music of 2019 list, alongside Lizzo, Lil Nas X and Bruce Springsteen.

Kuhad's intimate heart-on-your-sleeve lyricism - in both English and Hindi - have come to define his style. He's a specialist in earnest, direct and sweet love songs. For example, he released a new single earlier this summer called "Hopelessly In Love" which accompanied a deluxe version of his 2022 album 'The Way That Lovers Do' with eight new bonus tracks.

And while he may be India's most popular singer-songwriter (according to GQ magazine), he has been spending more time in New York where, like so many international celebrities before him, he is able to hide in plain sight.

He took the subway out to Brooklyn earlier this summer to talk with me about his journey from economics grad student to superstar songwriter, the differences between writing in English and Hindi, the universality of romance music, and how no one was more surprised by his success than him.

For the fifth consecutive year I interview my father on his birthday. This year he's turning 80 and I surprise him with reflections and anecdotes by friends and colleagues from throughout his career, including Jeff Greenfield, Boz Scaggs, Jann Wenner, Michael Cuscuna, Phil Upchurch, Georgie Fame, Gil Goldstein, Janis Siegel, Jorge Drexler and many more!

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Singer, pianist and songwriter Laila Biali recently released Your Requests, built around a collection of songs from the Great American Songbook that were requested by her fans. After a string of projects of her original songs and more contemporary covers, the album was a departure for her. After spending years living in New York, Laila moved back to her native Canada to raise her son, along with her husband, drummer and producer Ben Wittman, who she met when the two were working with the singer-songwriter Paula Cole. Laila had established herself in New York as a reliable and sought after collaborator - she worked with Sting, Chris Botti and Suzanne Vega. After moving to Toronto she began focusing more on her solo career. It paid off. In 2019 she won a Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. And she hosts the popular radio show Saturday Night Jazz on CBC 2. Here she talks about her career, what it's like being married to her closest collaborator, motherhood, loyalty, leaving New York to return to her native Canada, leaning into limitations, and how the pandemic led her to renew her "vows to music."

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Conversations on community, artificial intelligence, identity, fan engagement, healthy living, life on the road and more, recorded at the 2023 Montreal International Jazz Festival. Featuring Michael League, Nate Smith, Carlos Homs, Julius Rodriguez, Benny Benack III, Emmet Cohen, Stacey Kent, and more.

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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.

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Multi instrumentalist singer-songwriter Theo Katzman (known for his work with the funk band Vulfpeck) bought a van from a teenager in California and drove across the country, settling in the woods of Michigan where he set up a studio, started a label, and got down to the business of writing a new record.

Along the way, he discovered the Wim Hof breathing and ice bathing techniques and came out with a transformed idea of "the self" and his own motivations, and decided that he wanted to make records with as few technological interventions as possible.

The result of this journey is his latest record Be The Wheel which he released recently on his 10 Good Songs label. Here he talks about the process of making that record, as well as thoughts on artificial intelligence, psilocybin, social media, touring, and honesty in songwriting.

For saxophonist Ben Wendel, the pandemic provided the space for him to develop his latest solo record, All One (Edition Records), a project that is both very solitary and very collaborative. It features a woodwind choir of saxophones and bassoons performed entirely by Ben, and then joined by special guests like singers Cecile McLorin Salvant and Jose James, guitarist Bill Frisell, and trumpeter Terence Blanchard.

Wendel is no stranger to experimentation or to collaboration. As a member of the genre bending group Kneebody, he has always had one foot in contemporary music. And previous solo projects were motivated by his desire to collaborate, like The Seasons which found him composing 12 original pieces dedicated to 12 musicians he admired and then performed with those musicians.

Wendel performed at the Village Vanguard in New York earlier this spring. He was joined by his longtime friend and musical partner, drummer Nate Wood, Harish Raghavan on bass, Gilad Hekselman & Nir Felder on guitar (they split the week between them) and Larry Goldings on piano.

We spoke that week about playing in that sacred space, his desire to connect and to belong, his ongoing negotiation with technology, and how his personal experience during the pandemic influenced his music. Plus, learning the ineffable wisdom of his elders in the music.

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Beth Nielsen Chapman is a songwriter's songwriter. She began writing before she had any idea that it could be a career; it was just something that came naturally to her. When she first started out, there was no way to possibly imagine just how important songs would become in her journey - both professionally and personally. Here she talks about that journey, which includes writing songs for Martina McBride, Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Crystal Gayle, Juice Newton, Bette Midler, and most famously co-writing Faith Hill's hit song "This Kiss". She has released sixteen albums as a solo artist as well. Along the way, she also talks about processing grief and loss through music (and making music through grief). We spoke only weeks after her second husband, Bob passed away. Her first husband, Ernest, died in 1994. She also tells the stories behind many of her hit songs, and lays out her philosophy of creativity and craft, including what it means to "write from the center of your truth," channeling humanity's "collective wisdom" and what it means to have "investment without attachment" in songwriting. Beth's most recent album, Crazy Town came out in 2022.

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