The Third Story with Leo Sidran
294 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 124 ratingsTHE THIRD STORY features long-form interviews with creative people of all types, hosted by musician Leo Sidran. Their stories of discovery, loss, ambition, identity, risk, and reward are deeply moving and compelling for all of us as we embark on our own creative journeys.
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Episodes
140: ALA.NI
November 14, 2019 15:03 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBWhen 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 bl...
139: Camila Meza
October 30, 2019 14:08 - 1 hour - 41.3 MBSinger-songwriter-guitarist Camila Meza on growing up in Chile, the nature of translation, improvisation, self observation, bootleg videotapes, identity, cruise ship living, synesthesia and distortion. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.camilameza.com
138: Ryan Scott
October 16, 2019 03:01 - 1 hour - 39.7 MBThe 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 ...
136: Jeremy Dauber
October 01, 2019 15:31 - 1 hour - 35.1 MBWhen Adam Sandler first sang his “Hannukah Song” on SNL in 1994, even he was surprised by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response it received. He was singing something we all understood even if we didn’t know the details: The Jewish contribution to American comedy and entertainment is significant, undeniable, indelible. And the American contribution to global popular culture in the last century is equally palpable. So… what? One question to ask is, is the Jewish comedy of today related in...
135: Peter Himmelman
September 24, 2019 18:49 - 1 hour - 45.8 MBPeter 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 fu...
134: Richard J. Davidson
September 17, 2019 04:00 - 54 minutes - 31.2 MBRichard J. Davidson had an intuition early on that the mind was fundamental to human experience. As a child of the 60s he believed early on that “if we wanted to promote a different way of seeing the world, we needed to change our minds.” At the same time that he began to dabble in meditation and mind training, he also became a serious student and began a path that ultimately became his life’s work. He is the founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin...
133: Chris Potter
September 02, 2019 04:00 - 1 hour - 40.8 MBChris Potter is an incredibly influential saxophone player. Downbeat Magazine has called him “one of the most studied (and copied) saxophonists on the planet”. In this introspective and philosophical conversation he talks about art, the search for something new, what motivates him today, what he sees as his role, responsibility and contribution to the history of jazz. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.chrispottermusic.com/
132: David Maraniss
August 23, 2019 03:45 - 1 hour - 37.2 MBDavid 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 tim...
131: Ben Sidran
August 15, 2019 17:20 - 1 hour - 35.3 MBMusician, 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 se...
130: Richard Julian
August 08, 2019 04:00 - 1 hour - 41.7 MBNo 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...
129: Donald Fagen
July 30, 2019 04:41 - 1 hour - 47.5 MBJust 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 has 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, wh...
128: Joey Dosik
July 08, 2019 04:05 - 1 hour - 48.6 MBAs a younger man Joey Dosik thought he might make a contribution on the saxophone. He loved playing basketball and playing piano too, and he had a sweet, soulful singing voice. But if you asked him he probably would have told you that he was going to be a jazz sax player. That’s what took him out of LA and to the University of Michigan. Sometimes the stars align and the right people show up in the right place at just the right time. Later on we realize that something special was going on,...
127: Ben Thornewill
June 25, 2019 04:00 - 57 minutes - 39.7 MBSinger, songwriter and pianist Ben Thornewill started his band, Jukebox The Ghost, with two friends in 2003 when he was in college at George Washington University. “From day one we were just kind of making it up,” he says. He adds “It’s the same three members from the very beginning and everything is a series of great compromises.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He says, “It tends out to work out to something that defines who we are.” The power pop trio features piano, guitar, ...
Andre De Shields
June 10, 2019 20:55 - 1 hour - 49.6 MBWhen the 73 year old performer Andre De Shields accepted his Tony award last night for his role as Hermes in the hit Broadway show Hadestown, he began with these words: “Baltimore, Maryland are you in the house? I hope you’re watching at home because I am making good on my promise that I would come to New York and become someone you’d be proud to call your native son.” In this conversation, recorded in 2014, he tells the story in detail about growing up in Baltimore (he calls himself “luck...
126: Eli "Paperboy" Reed
June 06, 2019 18:37 - 1 hour - 51.9 MBEli 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 mu...
125: Melissa Clark
May 23, 2019 14:56 - 1 hour - 38.7 MBIf 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 honor...
124: Anya Marina
May 14, 2019 04:00 - 1 hour - 41.4 MBAnya 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 ra...
123: Sophie Auster
May 01, 2019 13:27 - 33 minutes - 19.1 MBSophie Auster grew up in a house of writers (her father is Paul Auster, and her mother is Siri Hustvedt, both acclaimed authors). For Sophie, the creative process always “was quite normal”. As she saw it, “artists are everywhere.” So it was somewhat inevitable that she began a creative career when she was a child, first as an actress, then as a singer and songwriter. Her latest record, Next Time took her to Sweden to work with producer Tore Johansson. Sophie describes the songwriting on t...
122: Kassa Overall
April 16, 2019 04:00 - 1 hour - 53 MBKassa 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 w...
121: Cory Wong
March 12, 2019 15:28 - 1 hour - 42.3 MBGuitarist 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 hal...
120: Jacques Schwarz-Bart
February 19, 2019 03:55 - 1 hour - 44.8 MBJacques 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 ...
119: Aaron Parks
February 05, 2019 01:48 - 1 hour - 40.4 MBHow does pianist Aaron Parks describe himself? “A bit odd. I play piano, write songs, and take pictures of doors with my phone.” Raised on a small island near Seattle, Washington, Aaron found himself hungry for more creative and intellectual stimulation than his immediate surroundings could offer. He enrolled in college at the age of 14, studying music, math and computer science. It wasn’t long before he dropped the math and computer stuff and focused on music; he moved to New York at age ...
118: Kenny Werner
January 18, 2019 18:11 - 1 hour - 53.2 MBKenny 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 youn...
117: Fred Hersch
January 04, 2019 16:27 - 1 hour - 43.5 MBPianist, 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...
116: Rick Margitza
December 21, 2018 15:55 - 58 minutes - 33.6 MBAs a boy in Detroit, Michigan, Rick Margitza’s mother asked him “do you want to hear a recording of your grandfather playing cello”? Then she put on the Charlie Parker with Strings album. After hearing Charlie Parker play, Rick knew that he wanted to be a jazz saxophone player. Margitza’s paternal grandfather, a Hungarian Gypsy violinist, taught him to play the violin at the age of four. His father also played violin with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (and recorded on classic Motown sessi...
115: Joe Dart
December 07, 2018 01:45 - 1 hour - 46.2 MBJoe 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 chang...
114: John Fields
November 12, 2018 15:26 - 1 hour - 68.6 MBJohn Fields was a normal kid growing up in a normal family in the Boston suburbs, in prime position to take over his father’s hosiery business. Instead, he moved to Minneapolis straight after high school to hang out with his uncle Steve Greenberg, whose hit “Funkytown” had been a huge international success. Fields quickly became his uncle’s right hand man, learning the ropes as an engineer, producer, and bass spanker. His band Greazy Meal was a mainstay on the Minneapolis scene in the 1990...
113: John Leventhal
October 16, 2018 11:31 - 51 minutes - 35.2 MBJohn Leventhal thinks his initial, preanalytical ideas are the good ones. John Leventhal realized that there “really is no daddy, there isn’t anybody who really has it all together, knows all the answers. You’re kind of in the wilderness. You have to take a chance to fail.” John Leventhal isn’t sure how to measure success. John Leventhal is a self invented guy. Despite his five Grammys, his critically and commercially successful work as musician, producer, songwriter, and recording enginee...
112: Mary Sweeney
September 30, 2018 20:50 - 1 hour - 57.5 MBMary 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!” ...
111: Nate Chinen
August 22, 2018 19:40 - 1 hour - 46.7 MBI first reached out to Nate Chinen to do an interview in 2015. At that time, I knew him as the jazz critic for the New York Times and a columnist for Jazz Times, and I also loved the book he wrote with George Wein Myself Among Others. (I interviewed George a few years ago as well.) In the intervening years, Nate left the New York Times, became the Director of Editorial Content at WBGO (one of the most important jazz radio stations in the country) and wrote the book Playing Changes: Jazz fo...
110: Howard S. Becker
August 07, 2018 04:00 - 1 hour - 35.3 MBSociologist and musician Howard S. Becker is 90 years old. While he is best known for his contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art and sociology of music (his book Oustiders from 1963 was one of the first and most influential books on deviance), he also spent many of his early years playing piano in taverns, saloons and even strip clubs. As a young man in Chicago, while attending the University of Chicago in the 1940s he also studied piano with the legendary jazz pianis...
109: Ben Wikler, Anat Shenker-Osorio, Dan Kaufman
July 16, 2018 04:00 - 1 hour - 40.6 MBMadison, 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 Madi...
108 - Lage Lund
July 06, 2018 16:52 - 1 hour - 41.9 MBWhat 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 an...
107: Brendan B. Brown
June 21, 2018 02:51 - 1 hour - 44.8 MBTalking 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 ...
106: Joe Goodkin
June 07, 2018 12:26 - 1 hour - 35 MBJoe Goodkin was a part time singer songwriter, part time paralegal with a penchant for classical Greece and a sensitive side. After years of playing in bands he realized that the big record contract was not coming anytime soon and taking a band on the road was economically impossible. But he knew there was a place for him as a musical storyteller. One day, he dusted off a project he had started when he was just out of college, a musical companion to Homer’s Odyssey, and started thinking abou...
105: Donovan Woods
May 31, 2018 00:31 - 1 hour - 47.6 MB"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...
104: Nate Wood
May 24, 2018 01:41 - 1 hour - 40.6 MBNate Wood is a drummer, bassist, guitarist, singer-songwriter, mixing and mastering engineer. Raised and educated in Los Angeles, he joined the band Kneebody in 2001 (along with former Third Story guest Ben Wendel). Eventually Nate moved to New York where he has been a fixture on the scene for years, working as both drummer and bassist for the likes of Donny McCaslin and Wayne Krantz. In fact, it was Nate’s love of the music Krantz was making that helped to motivate him to move east. N...
103: Larry Klein
May 14, 2018 02:35 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBLarry 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 m...
102: Dessa
April 19, 2018 03:18 - 1 hour - 47.8 MBRapper, singer, spoken word artist, writer, and science nerd Dessa is an open book. As a young girl in Minneapolis, she dreamed of being a writer, and in high school she submitted essays unsolicited to the New Yorker. She refused to speak the Spanish own heritage (she’s half Puerto Rican) and instead insisted on learning French. She was, in her own mind, headed for a literary life on the Upper East side of Manhattan. “The third martini and witty repartee” she says. Life seemed to have othe...
101: Lorrie Moore
April 12, 2018 04:00 - 1 hour - 35.9 MBLorrie Moore is the kind of writer that inspires real devotion from her readers. She’s best known as a writer of short stories, although she has also published novels and critical essays. See What Can Be Done, a collection of essays and reviews (many of which were originally published in the New York Review of Books) was published this month. Lorrie is also a beloved creative writing teacher. She spent 30 years at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Nashville to teach at Vanderbil...
100: My Wife
March 31, 2018 13:45 - 13 minutes - 9.28 MBFour 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...
99: Larry “Ratso” Sloman
March 21, 2018 01:37 - 1 hour - 49.2 MBTo call Larry “Ratso” Sloman a writer is not at all inaccurate - he is a writer. But he’s so much more. Sloman perfected the art of hanging out and he turned that art into a career. Here he talks about how studying sociology influenced his thinking and gave him a way to be inside the revolution and outside at the same time. Allen Ginsberg, The Fugs, Abbie Hoffman, Al Goldstein (Screw Magazine), Kinky Friedman, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Cale, Rolling Stone Magazine, Howard Stern, Anthony K...
98: Noa and Gil Dor
March 08, 2018 05:00 - 1 hour - 41.5 MBSinger Achinoam Nini (Noa) and guitarist Gil Dor on their nearly 30 year long creative partnership, how popular culture has developed in Israel, how they handle the responsibility of their success in such a politicized and charged atmosphere. Noa and Gil shared their unique and provocative viewpoint on Israel, describing the “war between the Jewish people and the State of Israel” and explaining in beautiful terms why “language is the ultimate instrument of equal opportunity.” Visit www.t...
97: Louis Cato
February 12, 2018 00:36 - 1 hour - 53.1 MBLouis Cato is living proof that some people are simply given a gift. Born in Lisbon, Portugal and raised mostly in North Carolina, Louis began playing drums at age 2. By the time he started high school he was a credible drummer, bassist, guitarist, trombone and tuba player. He found his way deeper and deeper into music despite the fact that, as he says, he was “raised in a bubble”. Louis didn’t hear secular music until he was almost 18 years old, but the music he learned in church, and the m...
95: Liberty Devitto
January 25, 2018 05:00 - 1 hour - 38 MBLiberty Devitto says he was lucky to be the right age when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. He learned to play drums by listening to Ringo Starr’s parts and playing along to records. Why the drums? “Because they didn’t make Prozac back then.” Still, Liberty says he “likes music better than drums”. Maybe that’s why he’s often called a song drummer. In the recording studio, he’s much more likely to be reading the lyrics than the sheet music. Devitto played with Billy Joel for ne...
95: Jon Madof
January 18, 2018 05:00 - 57 minutes - 33.1 MBGuitarist, bandleader, and label owner Jon Madof talks about how music and spirituality are related, what it means to create your own kind of authenticity, the difference between a job and a mission, and whether or not an artist’s work can be separated from their personal behavior. Jon’s band, Zion80 released their most recent album on Jon’s newly formed Chant Records label, which he launched in late 2017. What does it mean to create a record label in today’s musical universe? Visit Thir...
94: Nadia Ackerman
January 10, 2018 05:00 - 1 hour - 35.4 MBSinger, songwriter, and illustrator Nadia Ackerman’s journey started in Australia. But early on, she knew she was leaving, and she was pretty sure America was the destination. Although she was already a jazz singer by the age of 20, it wasn’t so much the scene in New York that called to her at first so much as it was the American TV shows she loved, like The Brady Bunch. But after spending a summer in New York, she knew there was no going home. What she didn’t realize is that she had broug...
93: Best of 2017 Vol. 2
December 31, 2017 04:12 - 1 hour - 51.6 MBIn this, the second of a two part Best of 2017 series, fragments of various episodes are strung together in order to tease out the big ideas, the underlying themes, and the tiny obsessions that have been propelling the podcast all year. Best of 2017 Part 1 looked at community and how community informs creative work. This second part looks at the more interior questions of process, identity and desire. And it explores the idea of the arts as political protest, and the potential disruptive p...
92: Best of 2017 Vol. 1
December 26, 2017 03:07 - 1 hour - 53.4 MBI think we can all agree that 2017 was an unusual year. It was intense, confusing, emotional. A little less than a year ago, as I decided to resume another “season” of episodes, I was determined to focus on community and on positivity through art and creative expression. At least, that’s what I told myself, and it’s also what I told you. In the introduction to the first episode of 2017, an interview with jazz club owner and musician Spike Wilner, I said “I want to look at the role of comm...
Bonus - 53 Remembering Clifford Irving
December 20, 2017 15:46 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBClifford Irving was a great writer, and a great character. Although he published 20 novels, he was probably best known for a hoax "autobiography" allegedly written as told to Irving by billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. By the time I met Clifford, he was a gentle old man. We talked during the winter of 2016 about his life, his career, and his general world view. Clifford passed away on December 19. This episode was originally posted in 2016. www.third-story.com