The Third Story with Leo Sidran

When 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 d…

Peter 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, …

Richard 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…

Chris 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…

David 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 …

Musician, 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…

No 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 int…

Just 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…

As 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 h…

Singer, 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 …

When 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 i…

Eli 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 loc…

If 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 Tim…

Anya 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 wi…

Sophie 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 sa…

Kassa 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 neigh…

Guitarist 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 c…

How 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…

Kenny 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…