268: Ten Years of The Third Story - with Will Lee and Amanda Sidran
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Release Date: 01/31/2024
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 JamesThe 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: säjeThe 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 SidranThe 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 HarroldThe 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 NoahThe 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 DiFrancoThe 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 williamsThe 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 MinThe 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 LawrenceThe 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_outlineTen 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. In fact, maybe more than anything else I’ve ever done professionally, it was the most natural decision I can ever remember making.
But the format was a bit of a mystery. Who was I supposed to be? An expert on music? A friend of my guests? I thought maybe we would perform together. Or maybe they would demonstrate something. Or maybe it would be a document of the local scene in New York - in the early episodes I asked my guests “where are you coming from today” and “where are you going after this”.
Actually, those are pretty good questions. Maybe I should go back to asking them again.
I spent a month futzing with my Will Lee interview, carefully editing each pause and “um”, working and reworking the introduction. I designed a crude logo based on a Google Earth image of my house in Park Slope, and built a website on Squarespace.
I posted the episode and sent an email to my friends to explain the new project. I wrote:
Since moving to New York nine years ago, I have tossed around the idea of conducting informal interviews with musicians in my studio when they come in to record. Over the years so many great players and singers have shared tremendous insights and history with me, and it seemed like such a missed opportunity not to record it. Of course, everything changes when the “red light” is on, so the question for me became how to maintain that same level of spontaneity and candor in a somewhat more formal setting.
Then I sat nervously with a pit in my stomach, not knowing what I had just done. Would anyone like it? Would anyone care? Was I any good at it?
Ten years and 268 episodes later, I continue to refine, to tweak and futz, to agonize and scramble to the finish line every time. As I write these words it is 12:30am, and I sit in my darkened studio - essentially an extension of my bedroom - with my wife, Amanda asleep just a few feet away, and our daughter asleep in the next room. That is to say that The Third Story has become an extension not only of my life, but of my entire household. Fortunately the initial nausea has passed but it has been replaced by a constant sense of urgency to get the next episode finished.
I have also developed a style, an unstructured but intentional approach to talking to people, in search of a narrative thread in each journey, an attempt to get somewhere together. Sometimes it’s more technical, sometimes it’s more esoteric, sometimes it’s personal. There is no real theme to the show, and there is no real dogma. If it’s interesting to me, the hope is that it will be interesting to others too.
The good news about an ongoing show like this one is that there’s always another episode to make, so you can never get too precious about any of them because there will be more. The bad news is the same as the good news: no matter how much time you spend on one episode, or how good it was, you still have to make another one, and you’re probably already behind schedule.
The project has become a way of moving through both space and time for me. It provides a kind of structure when I travel - nearly everywhere I have gone over the last decade, I have returned home with at least one interview.
Whether talking to Gabriela Quintero in Mexico, Jorge Drexler in Spain, Madeleine Peyroux in Paris, Butch Vig in Los Angeles, Howard Levy in Chicago, David Garibaldi in Oakland, David Maraniss in Madison, or Jack Stratton in Cleveland, the interviews have provided purpose to my movement through the world.
I have traveled specifically to cover jazz festivals like Copenhagen, Newport, Montreal and Umbria, and chronicled my own tours too.
I have used the platform to mark the passage of time and significant events along the way. From The 2016 and 2020 Elections to the Covid outbreak, from my 45th birthday to my father’s 80th, from the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris to memorializing lost friends like Tommy LiPuma, Clyde Stubblefield, Tim Luntzel or Richie Cole.
I have captured both first and final conversations with some remarkable people. I did the first long form interview with Jacob Collier in his house in London in 2014, and the last long form interview with Creed Taylor in his New York apartment 2015. Interviews with Peter Straub, Howard Becker, Clifford Irving, George Wein and Al Schmitt now live on as part of their legacies.
While The Third Story has never become what you might call “popular” it has become kind of a cult show. I continue to be astounded when I meet someone who knows the show. It happens more often than I expect, and I have made more than a few real meaningful friendships that way too.
When several years ago I was invited to publish my episodes on All About Jazz, I knew I was making credible content. When in 2022 I was asked to partner with WBGO Studios, it was an acknowledgement that I was on the right path, and when we won a Signal Award in 2023 I was further encouraged.
By the way, my logo was eventually redesigned by a real graphic designer, Michael Fusco-Straub (the same guy who turned me on to Marc Maron to begin with).
Last month, on another whim, I called Will Lee again to see if he would like to meet up for a reunion and to help me celebrate my tenth anniversary. When I first talked to Will for episode one, he was still performing nightly on The Late Show with David Letterman and we talked about his career as one of the most recorded bassists in history, his early education, playing on Letterman, his solo projects… the kind of general overview conversation that has come to loosely define what I do here. This time was more casual and more conversational. We sat on the couch in his Manhattan apartment and traded quips, and I managed to gently extract some new information from him.
Then I asked my wife, Amanda, to join me to help process this anniversary in more domestic terms: how does it look and feel to live with someone who is constantly in the process of mining another life story for content and making podcast episodes? What are the similarities between her career as a yoga teacher and mine as a… whatever I am? What do raising a child and producing a podcast have in common? It was extremely entertaining, as is usually the case when Amanda joins me on the show.
At the risk of getting too sentimental, I will simply say that making The Third Story is one of the great privileges and joys of my life, I am grateful to all of the extraordinary people who have shared their stories with me, and I am even more grateful to you for listening to it.
www.third-story.com
www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast
www.wbgo.org/studios
www.leosidran.substack.com