The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Pianist, 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 in…

As 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 heari…

Joe 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 mu…

John 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 sc…

John 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 ans…

Mary 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 …

I 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 wi…

Sociologist 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 …

Madison, 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 wa…

What 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 “skinn…

Talking 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 Whe…

Joe 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 …

"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…

Nate 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 gu…

Larry 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 …

Rapper, 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 …

Lorrie 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 Ca…

Four 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 wri…

To 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 abo…

Singer 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…