274: Ella Feingold
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Ella Rae Feingold is a guitar player, composer, orchestrator, educator and content creator. She has spent three decades devoted to the soulful side of the electric guitar, and has worked with an impressive list of artists, including Bruno Mars, Erykah Badu and Common, The Roots, Jay-Z, Janet Jackson, Alicia Keys, Jill Scott, Queen Latifah and many more. On her Instagram and TikTok she is a rhythm ambassador, focussing on the importance of groove, pocket and feel in her playing and demonstrating various techniques and traditions in rhythm guitar. Hearing Ella play and talk about music, it’s...
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273: Paula Cole
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Paula Cole on her early success, dreaming big, her life and career, the power of “the beginner’s mind”, the distinction between being an artist and an entertainer, the feeling of being pregnant with song, speaking for those who cannot speak, navigating a life in the music business, learning from young people, and her new album, Lo.
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272: Ben Sidran on Rainmaker
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
In a career spanning over fifty years and thirty five records, Ben Sidran has established himself as a philosopher poet. Equally celebrated for his precise, probing writing style as he is for his improvised spoken word jazz raps, he has carved out a truly unique space for himself. The Times of London aptly described Ben as “the world’s first existential jazz rapper,” and The Chicago Sun Times once referred to him as “a renaissance man cast adrift in the modern world.” He is one of a kind. And he is, of course, also my dad. There is no one else like Ben so it’s not...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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_outlineBassist and composer Todd Sickafoose shows up in a lot of places: on stage with singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco or drummer Allison Miller, behind the scenes as a record producer for artists like Noe Venable and Anais Mitchell, orchestrating the music for the Broadway musical Hadestown (which earned him both a Grammy for record production and a Tony for orchestration), and as a bandleader.
His new record Bear Proof is his first album of original music in nearly 15 years. He describes it as “62 minutes of music for eight musicians.” The sound is evocative, melodically rich, rhythmically intense, and features a unique instrumentation of violin, accordion, electric guitar, acoustic piano, clarinet, cornet, bass and drums.
Here he talks about his multifaceted career, Hadestown and the process of putting together a Broadway show, working with Ani DiFranco, Bear Proof, releasing music in today’s world, why bass players make good producers, and how a skin cancer diagnosis influenced his life personally and professionally.
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