271: Shabaka
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Shabaka Hutchings grew up between the UK and Barbados. He started playing clarinet as a young boy in Barbados and eventually moved back to England to go to music school in the early 2000s. After college he began a period of working furiously on a kaleidoscopic range of projects and became an icon of the new sound of London jazz, which integrated African rhythms and modes, Caribbean and Middle eastern sounds and was largely danceable. Shabaka himself has never fully embraced the jazz label. While the music is highly improvised, and it owes much to the American jazz tradition,...
info_outline
270: Jose James
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Singer Jose James on his new record 1978, his professional and personal journey, the unique demands of being a jazz singer today, why he believes good art should be transformative, how he stays healthy, the creative challenges brought on by happiness and whether or not one needs to suffer in order to make good art. This episode is dedicated to the late saxophonist and vocoder master who passed away on March 30th at the age of 45. Casey, a brilliant and influential musician, spent much of his career at the crossroads of jazz and hip hop. I never knew him but I was always very aware...
info_outline
269: säje
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
säje, the vocal group made up of singers Sara Gazarek, Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage won their first Grammy on Sunday for their arrangement of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning”. They recorded it with one of the most admired musical minds today, Jacob Collier. And like much of what has happened with so far, that recording was both unintended and totally right, somewhere between the reward for the hard work of talented artists, and magic. The story plays like a dream. One day Jacob Collier stopped by the LA recording studio (Lucy’s Meat...
info_outline
268: Ten Years of The Third Story - with Will Lee and Amanda Sidran
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Ten years ago, on a bit of a whim, I invited bassist Will Lee to come over to my home studio in Brooklyn to do an interview with me for a new project I was starting: a podcast. A year or two earlier, my friend Michael Fusco-Straub had turned me on to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and I was totally hooked on the concept of casual long form interviews among peers. At the time Maron spoke almost exclusively to comics, and I thought there might be a space for something similar but focused on music. Although I didn’t have any real experience as a journalist or a broadcaster, I knew I could do it....
info_outline
267: Keyon Harrold
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Trumpeter/composer Keyon Harrold was born and raised in Ferguson, MO to a musical family. He is the son of pastors and one of 16 children. As a boy, a trumpet was placed in his hands, and the rest is history. He moved to New York to study at The New School in the 1990s and became part of a legendary generation of musicians associated with the neo soul movement, including Common, Bilal, Roy Hargrove, The Roots, and Robert Glasper. Harrold is a reliable and sought after player among big acts, and he’s worked with Jay-Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, Eminem, Maxwell, Mac Miller and Snoop...
info_outline
266: Lau Noah
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Singer-songwriter Lau Noah grew up in the small Catalan city of Reus. She left Spain for America a decade ago, at age 19 and never really looked back. She makes celestial, dreamy music evocative of another era, yet influenced by her own very modern story. Lau Noah is both a realist and a magical realist. She is an uncompromising and determined indie artist. She books her own shows, produces her own recordings, and advocates on her own behalf. She has a practical understanding of how to make compelling content, and how to communicate with her fans and her fellow artists. But she also...
info_outline
265: Ani DiFranco
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Ani DiFranco began recording and self-releasing her music as a 20 year old in Buffalo, New York in 1990. 34 years later she is widely considered to be a feminist icon. But in many ways she emerged iconic, fully formed and fearless. A facile lyricist with a biting honesty, she played guitar with a virtuosic, rhythmic style. And she was ahead of her time as an independent artist who owned all her own masters and controlled most of the major aspects of her career. She’s sometimes called the mother of the DIY movement. DiFranco has released all of her albums (over twenty) on her Righteous...
info_outline
264: brad allen williams
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
brad allen williams is not only a great guitar player but also a serious recording engineer, and someone who understands both the technical and emotional sides to record making. Known for his work with Jose James, Nate Smith and Brittany Howard, he released his album œconomy on Pete Min’s Colorfield label earlier this year. Like all Colorfield releases, œconomy was born from an improvisatory spirit that reflects the label’s mission. Artists show up to the recording sessions with nothing written. They create spontaneously in the studio and then edit, arrange, and develop...
info_outline
263: Pete Min
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Pete Min is a recording engineer, producer and label owner based in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. His label Colorfield Records features artful collaborative explorations with musicians in unlikely configurations. Pete’s studio Lucy’s Meat Market has become one of the most in demand spots for recording among a subset of musical artists with LA ties ranging from Ben Wendel and Larry Goldings to Andrew Bird and Feist. Min started Colorfield Records to pursue a less traditional approach to recording, one that he refers to as “sculpted chaos.” He says, “I want what’s in the...
info_outline
262: Clyde and Gracie Lawrence
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Siblings Clyde and Gracie Lawrence have been making music together since they were little kids. They say there was never a moment when it switched from something they did for fun to something they did professionally. It has been a long, steady climb for them. Along with the other members of their band, Lawrence, they have been diligently chipping away at a pop music career, growing more popular every year, making music that straddles the line between pop, R&B and soul, and doing it on their own terms. Here they talk about the overnight success that was a decade in the making, running...
info_outlineWhen Ari Herstand first came on the Third Story Podcast in 2016, he was still in the process of becoming. He struggled with the what he saw as a “duality” between being a musician / performing artist and a business person. Would success in one realm undermine success in the other? “I got to the point where I have accepted that I am equally both,” he tells me now.
“Success is very personal and nobody can really define success for you,” he says. And Ari has spent much of the last decade examining many of the biggest successes in the independent music business, analyzing them, and then teaching them, first through is blog Ari’s Take, and then in his book How To Make It In The New Music Business. The Second Edition was published in November of 2019. It remains at the top of the Amazon charts and has been widely adopted by music business schools worldwide.
In fact, because of the success of both the book and the blog, he eventually started Ari’s Take Academy, an online music business school that he hopes will eventually compete as an alternative to “the traditional brick and mortar music colleges.”
“Collectively we are smarter and more active than any other group or even professional marketing person out there,” he says of his Academy. “Because we have so many people working on this stuff and sharing their results with one another.”
Ari lives in Los Angeles, but was in New York recently developing the “1973 immersive experience” around his band, “Brassroots District” with some of the team that developed the critically acclaimed immersive show “Sleep No More”.
To start out the new year, this conversation covers a lot of ground around the state of the independent music business today. “How can a project be bigger than just the music. What is the story? What is the difference between transparency and authenticity. How does one play to the strengths and limitations of social media platforms? Is the internet a real community? Spotify. Instagram. Tik Tok. It’s all here.
There was no way I was going to let Ari off the hook without having him give me a little free advice about my own career and social media game. Last time we talked, he hooked up my website - he pimped my page. And this time I was ready with a specific ask: is it time after five years of doing this podcast - to create Instagram and Twitter accounts for the Third Story. Ari told me unquestionably that it was time. So starting today, you can follow the Third Story Podcast on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, all of them @thirdstorypod.
http://www.third-story.com/
http://patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast
https://ariherstand.com/
https://aristake.com/