Grammy-winning composer and NEA Jazz Master Maria Schneider on 30 years of the Maria Schneider Orchestra, her life and career, from her small-town Minnesota roots to her groundbreaking collaboration with David Bowie and her fight for artists’ rights. Here she talks about how her music channels the wonder, mystery, and tension of her life experience…

Just like we did after the 2016 and 2020 elections, I spoke with my dad Ben Sidran this week about the latest presidential election. True to form, it is a conversation that appears to be about one thing but is in fact about many things. What begins as a somber acknowledgement of the election results turns quickly to a sprawling discussion of everyt…

Andrew Bird has been on a quest for meaning in sound since childhood, starting with the violin at age four and earning a degree in violin performance from Northwestern University. His journey has taken him from classical and folk roots to the vibrant Chicago swing scene, to creative isolation in a barn in Western Illinois, and eventually to become …

Pianist Aaron Goldberg on 20 years of organizing jazz fundraisers for presidential campaigns (this year's was Jazz for Kamala), how he thinks about the potential of music to provoke personal transformation and political action, his own relationship with activism and progressive politics, concert curation, Israel and Gaza. www.leosidran.substack.com…

Family music artist Lucy Kalantari on the power of intention, why gardening is her favorite metaphor for living a creative life, staying curious, parenthood, her new record, and the Grammys. www.third-story.com https://leosidran.substack.com/ https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-storyBy Leo Sidran

Riley Mulherkar grew up in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest enclave that has been home to so many musical innovators over the years. He went to Garfield High School, a school that has fostered countless talents going all the way back to Quincy Jones who was himself a young trumpet player at the school in the 1940s. Riley was just eight years-old when…

Jesse Harris belongs to a generation of New York singer songwriters who came of age in the late nineties. He has made over 20 solo albums that walk the line between folk, jazz, pop, Brazilian and art rock. He’s also a much sought after co writer and collaborator who has written songs for and or with many others like Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot…

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 …

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. www.third-story.…

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 existe…

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 Af…

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 …

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 …

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 am…

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 s…

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 indi…

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 …

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 rele…

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 rangi…

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 a…

Born in Bali, Indonesia, Joey Alexander has been performing professionally since 2013 when he was invited by Wynton Marsalis to perform at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Gala. He was 10 years old. Alexander subsequently moved to the United States with his family and has been touring and recording ever since. Today he is 20 years old and releasing his s…

Bassist 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 …

Alan Lightman is a physicist, writer (of novels, essays, memoir and science texts), and social entrepreneur. For this unusual episode, his interview served as inspiration for an original song. Made in collaboration with the Podsongs podcast, this conversation covers his career at the intersection of science and humanities, mortality, success, the c…

Gregory "Hutch" Hutchinson is one of the most highly regarded and highly recorded jazz drummers on the planet. Part of what makes him so special is that he sits at the crossroads of the old school and the new school. He was mentored by old jazz masters like Red Rodney, Ray Brown and Betty Carter. He worked extensively with Joshua Redman and Roy Har…

John “J.R.” Robinson is one of the most recorded drummers in history (some say he is the most recorded drummer) . He is the drummer on 20 number-one pop songs by artists such as Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie and Steve Winwood, and has been the drummer on more than 100 Grammy-winning tracks. He was said to be Quincy Jones’ favorite…