The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Amir ElSaffar has spent much of his life in search of the ecstatic moments that help connect to something bigger. In his case, he does this through his relationship with music and culture. 

Trying to…

Sometimes when a child of a musician shows an interest or an aptitude in playing music themselves, it’s called “the curse”. Sometimes the curse is revealed in mysterious ways, and the cursed child mi…

Before Tyler Duncan was a Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist producer/composer with credits including Carly Rae Jepsen, Vulfpeck, Lake Street Dive, Theo Katzman, Scary Pockets and Antwaun Stanley…

Advice from friends and family ranging in age from 10 to 93 about how to stay young, what makes a meaningful life, ambition, desire, fear, success and music. 

With 

Sol Sidran, age 10Zelta Sils, age …

30 years ago Martin Sexton made a record called In The Journey. It wasn’t so much a record as it was a glorified demo tape that he sold while busking on the streets of Boston. He had moved there from…

Mike Errico’s new book Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter is about songwriting, and the life of the songwriter. 

Errico teaches songwriting at NYU, Yale and Wesleyan.…

Madison McFerrin says she’s “Shedding the narrative about what it means to be an artist in the music industry.” In fact, she says she’s had to learn to shed a lot of things. Like her “identity”. 

She…

In this bonus episode, actor, author, poet, director, screenwriter, narrator of films, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote talks about Buddhism, the "JewBu" phenomenon, the distinction between suffe…

Monica Martin was 18 years old, driving in the car with her friend Matt and singing along with the radio. She had always enjoyed “hamming it up” and singing along to music, but she had no intention o…

Drummer, composer and bandleader Nate Smith is known and celebrated in many circles.  In recent years his drumming has become as influential as it has been ubiquitous. Transcription books of his play…

Family musicians Dan and Claudia Zanes had just moved to Baltimore from Brooklyn when Covid came on. In an effort to be useful, creative, and connected, they decided to record a video of a new song e…

George Wein opened his first jazz club, Storyville, in the early 1950s when he was a young man. He then created the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. The festival became an icon among music festivals an…

Joe Alterman is a southern guy with a sunny disposition. He came from Atlanta, and despite having put in years in New York, he never managed to shake off the southern charm. 

Joe is a piano player wh…

By the time Antwaun Stanley entered the University of Michigan in the late aughts, he was already 15 years into what could be considered to be a successful singing career. He was signed as a contempo…

For the third year in a row, I talked to my dad, musician/producer/journalist/philosopher Ben Sidran in honor of his birthday. This time he’s turning 78, and we consider the “buddhist roots of jazz”,…

Jon Lampley knows how to “get in where you fit in.” He’s been doing it since he was a boy in an Ohio suburb, spending his week as “the only black kid at school” and his Sundays at Apostolic church in…

If you’ve ever seen or heard Michael Bland play drums, you probably didn’t forget it. He was legendary practically from the moment he started playing professionally as a teenager in Minneapolis. Mayb…

Philip Lassiter spent his early years in Mobile, Alabama. He was the son of a white pentecostal preacher. “They clapped on one and three in my father’s church,” he says. Moving to Peoria, Illinois as…