Leo Sidran: Conversation Artist

AAJ: What happened after you moved to Brooklyn?

LS: When I moved to Brooklyn, I spent the first five or six years focused almost exclusively on writing music for TV. I did not make a solo record. I did not play gigs as a solo artist. I played in Ben's band when he toured and I produced his records, but other than that I wrote jingles, I produced singer-songwriters in New York and I became successful as a jingle writer. It was not my dream, but it was the first thing that I had done completely on the merits of my own talent and ability. The advertising world does not care who your father is at all, especially when it comes to composition. For me it was a way to acknowledge that I could be a professional musician in a competitive environment, that these people would take me seriously, and that I was good at it.

Once I had done that, I felt ready to make a record, to do my podcast, to be myself because I knew that I could survive, and even thrive as a musician, on my own.

AAJ: Conversely, do you feel that at some point you have been the one influencing your father, and that he was learning something from you the way you learned something from him before?

LS: I absolutely think so. I find it fascinating that there can be a countless number of relationships between us. Father to son, musician to musician, producer to artist, or traveling companion to traveling companion. There are so many dynamics that can play out between us. I am sure that I have influenced him enormously. I would be curious to know what he says, to what extent he sees it... He would probably say, for example, that I influenced him to continue performing when he was not interested in performing anymore. That was at an age when I was just old enough to start going on the road and so I wanted to keep touring. As a result, he has had more than two additional decades of touring in Europe and Japan and making these last records that are the result of us being on the road together because I wanted to tour. And I think he also feels that those are the records that he would not have made if it had not been for all those miles traveled and gigs played together, and I know he is proud of those records, as I am.

AAJ: The first single from your latest album is the song entitled There Was a Fire, a tune that shares the title with Ben Sidran's epic book about the Jewish contribution to American Popular music. Having that in mind while listening to it, made me think that I was witnessing an inter-generational jam session, or—better—an inter- generational call-and-response between you and your dad, riffing on the same themes and yet coming up with completely different outcomes. Am I reading too much into this? How intentionally related is your song to his book?

LS: I think a lot about intentionality. I know that! The title of both Ben's book and my song comes from an old 18th century legend that he learned about the Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, who needed to save his community in the Pale of Settlement. To do that he needs to go out into the woods, find a special place, light a special fire, and say a special blessing. He manages to do that and saves his community. A generation later, the community is in trouble again. There is a new rabbi. This guy goes out into the woods. He no longer knows where he should be lighting the fire, but he lights the fire anyways and he says the prayer. Once again, the community is saved. Next generation, same predicament. Yet another rabbi goes out into the woods. He does not even know the prayer anymore. But he lights the fire and that is enough. A generation later, a new rabbi goes into the woods, he does not know where and how to light the fire, he does not know the blessing to say. So, he thinks to himself "Well, maybe just the memory that there was a fire will be sufficient to save the community," and that is exactly what happens. So, it is a story about the importance of memory. It came as a breakthrough for my dad when he was drafting his book There Was a Fire and thinking about what had been motivating the Jews when they came to the United States. What did they bring with them? What memories, what narrative and type of storytelling did they bring with them?

I grew up in Madison, WI, in a small, close-knit, community of Reformed Jews. We would get together every year and celebrate the Jewish New Year, with my dad at the piano and our friend, the rabbi. This is what sparked the fire in my dad to eventually write the book, and also to record Life's a Lesson (Go Jazz) in the '90s. His arrangements of these old liturgical songs, and this kind of ongoing conversation around Jewishness and memory has been in my life for a long time, when I visited my parents in August of 2021 and my dad told me that these Jewish holiday services were not going to be resumed. When the community started discussing whether to bring them back after the pandemic they felt that the context was not there anymore. Many from my generation had moved away. Somehow those we stayed felt it did not make sense to restart the tradition. When I found that out, I said to my dad "We have to get together one more time. And film it. Because if we are never going to do it again, we need a document for those of us who grew up with this tradition." And so, we actually gathered in this building where we had always had the services, which is one of the oldest freestanding synagogues in the United States, from the 1800s. COVID was still raging so it was maybe ten of us who got together and we just filmed the services.

I wrote the song "There Was a Fire" to sing at the end of the filming. My dad told the story of the Baal Shem Tov, and then I sang it for the video. I did not see it as a song for me. I saw it as a song for that community. Something that my dad could sing. But then, when I came home, I reflected on it and thought "I am going to try to record this for myself" and I did, and it was the first thing I recorded for my new album.

Its sound and its narrative help the depth of its meaning come through. I hope people will be also able to feel a depth of intention beneath the song. Because even though a listener may not have any idea about the background to a song, bringing that kind intentionality into the production of a song it is bound to influence the outcome in some way.

What's Trending?

AAJ: The legend you just described seems to be about the importance of memory but also about how change is not going to lead us to self-destruction. After all each rabbi appeared to be less and less in touch with the original ritual, and yet every time they managed to save the community with a little bit of innovation. It sounds very similar to the age-old dialogue among generations with the elders lamenting how things used to be much better... but when those same elders were young their elders had identical complaints, which means that they were ill-founded, otherwise it would mean that humanity has been constantly regressing rather than progressing. From There Was a Fire to What's Trending?, the title of your new album, you seem to cover the whole gamut of our temporal dimension, and—at the same time—draw an arch covering at the very least the three generations of Sidrans at play, your Dad, you and your daughter, Sol.

LS: My 11 year old daughter comes to me all the time and she is constantly showing me something and asking "this is trending, right?"; "look, I want you to see what is trending." And so I wrote a song about it. It contains maybe the most Donald Fagen-esque lyrics I ever wrote, in the sense that it is narrated from the point of view of a character who believes that he knows everything that is trending: "I know everything, you know, just ask me." It is also very influenced by Dave Frishberg. It is kind of a 21st century "I Am hip."

The rest of the record is much closer to "There Was a Fire" in terms of its sensibilities.

As to the question that you raised, "wouldn't we be extinct by now if in fact things have been getting worse and worse?," I have to say that it is feeling pretty dark right now. It is hard not to be more pessimistic than ever before. Between Trump and COVID, I think I learned how to write happy stories, in spite of all of that. Like my dad always said, "it is our job to feel good in spite of conditions." That is what jazz musicians have always done. So, we were kind of prepared for this. After all, what are we meant to do when the world around us is falling apart but we are still trying to make our little personal artistic statements in the face of it. All I know how to do is keep writing songs and keep interviewing people. I do not know if that is the right thing to do given where we are right now. We just do what we know how to do, I guess.

Us and them

AAJ: You have spent time in Spain; you play in France all the time; you have toured all over the world. From this vantage point how do you see the interplay between how the USA has influenced the world through jazz, and how the rest of the world is influencing jazz from the US?

LS: One of the threads running across many of my podcast interviews explores this question. Particularly in the interviews with musicians who found the jazz language abroad and then came here and discovered how to contribute from outside of New York. Through these interviews I am de facto advocating for a vision of jazz that goes well beyond New York.

Perhaps it all started in college when I moved to Seville, Spain. I immediately wanted to find out where jazz was being played. It was a huge priority for me, much larger than I would have ever expected. I had been living in Seville for maybe three weeks desperately trying to find where jazz was being played. When I finally did, I went through a bit of a traumatic experience. I was wandering through the old city in Seville, and I got mugged because I had a map in my hands searching for the local jazz club and I must have looked like a complete tourist. This guy came up to me; he had a knife and told me to give him money. I had a 5,000 pesetas note in my sock and I had to bend over and pull it out because I was afraid that if I did not give it to him that I would be in trouble... I found my way to the jazz club and when I got in I told them I could not afford to pay anything because I just got mugged. They sat me down and treated me nicely and I listened to music. Jazz was truly my sanctuary. I guess it is a very jazz story: first I had to be brutalized, and then I was rewarded!

Living in Spain I realized that jazz gave me a way of communicating and connecting with the local community. We all loved this thing and it did not matter where we were from. That made me understand that Jazz is—literally—a mode of transportation and a form of communication. And that jazz is very expansive: jazz can accommodate a lot of things and a lot of personal experience, as Billy Taylor used to remind us. And it is really true. In the case of Spain, for instance, it could accommodate southern Spanish Andalusian flamenco elements. They had found their way of cooking with those ingredients.

When I got back to the States after living in Spain, I became very fixated on the idea of regionalism in the music. Being from the mid-west I started to think about Milwaukee versus Chicago, and Detroit versus Minneapolis, and all these scenes where they play the music a little bit differently. It just takes a handful of influential locals. You need someone who leads the conversation and there are dialects that emerge and develop. It got me thinking a lot about the importance of jazz in smaller communities.

That was the way I was thinking about the music and the language before I moved to New York. And in fact, I was quite cynical about New York at that point, because I thought that New York in some ways very provincial because it is so obsessed with itself. But the thing about New York is that everybody comes here, and so all of those people who learn to speak the language from Seville to Milwaukee find their way to New York, and they then pour their spice into The Stew.

AAJ: There is a paradox to the jazz scene in New York, and the USA in general: here we are at the epicenter of jazz. As you say, there are musicians coming from all over the world to New York for that very reason. But if you are a jazz fan and go to record stores, or listen to jazz on the radio, here you get much less in terms of diversity than if you live in Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Amsterdam or London, where you get exposed to jazz from the USA—because if you love jazz you have to—but also to local jazz and jazz from all the other countries. Here it is almost exclusively jazz from the US, or from foreign musicians who play in the States. Your sole bet to discover something from abroad are social media-algorithms, or your podcast since you have often interviewed foreign musicians. How do you explain that? Isn't it that in music "more is better"?

LS: Indeed, more is better, but—thinking back to my times in Madison, or Spain, or New York—what I value about smaller communities or sub-scenes is the direct and personal relationship with the musicians and their music. I agree with you that in New York the scenes are often very isolated because there is just so much of it that it is very difficult to keep track of all of it. And in these smaller communities, you are able to almost see everything, because it is smaller. When I was in Madison, I felt that I saw a wider variety of music because I would go see anything that was interesting as that was the only thing in town on that day—be it Tito Puente, The Roots or whatever—and I think it led to a more diverse, eclectic and expansive point of view. The same is true in a lot of these communities; you treasure each performance because it is more rare. In New York it is not like that, and I found it very difficult to adjust to when I moved here.

But there is another thing to it. New York is actually the community of the people who make the music and then they take it out into the world wherever they go. But it is still quite difficult for me to locate places to experience music and feel that you are part of a community. Maybe the city is so overwhelming that it is very hard to find a way to feel the way I like as I felt in so many smaller places when I travel and I think, oh, this is a community where the city or people who love the music are also involved in the process of organizing, experiencing the music, and also playing. At the end of the day, the truth about New York is that it is just all of it, it is all available here, but it takes people to make it, to create those kinds of conditions.

Jazz Journalism

AAJ: The next question is also rooted in this dichotomy between insider and outsider. Take any magazine which focuses on a given discipline, a medical journal or a law review for instance. The articles in those publications are written by people that practice that discipline. But if you turn to a jazz magazine, the vast majority of its content is written by non-musicians. Well-meaning jazz advocates, but, still, non-musicians. How does that feel to a musician? Do you see any advantages you have over other podcasters as a result of you being a musician talking about music? And, conversely, are there any advantages in approaching a topic from an outsider's point of view?

LS: I think that is an important question to ask. Let me start with the last aspect. There are definite advantages to not knowing "the thing" intimately and personally. And it is important that there should be people who are not "making the thing" but who are talking about it, because they are going to see it differently. In the case of interviews and podcasts, this keeps the humanity of the interviewee at the forefront, as it puts the focus on their personal experience rather than on the technical or granular aspects of what they are doing. At least that is the perspective I try to maintain in my podcast interviews, despite the fact that I am a musician and therefore I am familiar about the details of music-making, but I ask about them only occasionally so that what remains at the forefront remains "What is the experience of being you doing this thing"? At the same time, as a musician, I do have empathy for that experience.

As to your first question, about how does it feel to realize that so many of the people who write about music are not musicians or do not have that experience, I have to admit that I have an unresolved relationship with criticism. I do not know how I feel about it. I am not sure that I fully understand its value. I am not saying that it does not have value. Nor am I saying that it has been explained to me and I rejected the explanation. What I am saying is that I have not explored it enough to understand the function of arts criticism. Clearly it has been with us since the beginning, so there is a strong case to be made that there need to be outside arbiters, or people who are evaluating the work that is being made from a clear eyed perspective, not from within the trenches of where it is being made. Being outside may help to parse what is important and what is not, and also hold the artists accountable in some way. However, I do not fully understand it and I am not completely sure what the value of that is, perhaps because I am much more interested in celebrating things that I think are great, without turning into a cheerleader. I do know the experience of being out here trying to make serious work—work which people do because they feel they have to—and therefore I do not really understand why one should challenge what these people do.

A more optimistic and pleasant way of answering your question is by acknowledging that there are people who fall in love with jazz, are drawn to it at a certain point in their life, and it changes them. They have just as much of a relationship with this music as the people who make it. It is real to them too. In that sense jazz is once again inclusive. It is open to all who want to get involved, and that includes the people that listen to it and then write about it.

AAJ: How much of the interviewer should come out during the interview?

LS: This is a big question! While editing the early episodes I would just take myself out of them. I wanted to almost make a point of not making it about me but about whoever I talked to. A listener would learn a lot about me anyway, because of who I choose to talk to, the kind of questions I ask them, the way I present the episodes... However, I have come to realize that if I say something that is a little more revealing about myself then my guests are also more inclined to reveal something about themselves.

The question is very similar to musical questions that I have faced, and I still face: what it means to sound like yourself or do what you do, particularly in the jazz world; how do you develop your own sound and your identity and also speak a language that others understand?

I confronted these questions musically with my father, because I am living in the same kind of musical space that he lives in. He is more of a jazz musician than I am; I sing, and I play jazz-adjacent music, but we are comparable in terms of what we do. Similarly, I was doing interviews, just like he had been doing. He did some of the most iconic interviews of the '80s and '90s talking to Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach on NPR... When I started doing my conversations I found myself thinking about how much of my dad was in it, what he would have said in a certain situation... So I had to learn how to forget about that, or at least keep it in mind but not let it determine what I do. The same goes with regard to other interviewers, like Terry Gross on Fresh Air or Marc Maron, for instance. His WTFpodcast was probably the biggest influence on my wanting to start a podcast. Mark is very assertive in his interviews. For a long time I tried to figure whether I should be doing that or my kind of interviews, or some hybrid of the two? Like with music, over the course of a long time of doing, refining, developing, I started to find an identity.

AAJ: One of the main limitations of music journalism, and jazz journalism in particular, is the chasm that appears to exist between the depth of the art form and the shallowness of its coverage. The focus on "statistics and anecdotes" more than on "ideas and intentions," brings to mind sports coverage rather than artistic critique. As such, it can only attract the attention of the initiated. Your podcast on the other hand is looking at "music as a vantage-point or metaphor of life" and can therefore also appeal to those who have no idea about who you are interviewing... just like, say, a Ted Lasso can appeal also to people that are not into soccer. Is that a deliberate approach or it just comes out this way because that is what matters to you?

LS: I am fully aware of exactly what you are talking about, the statistical, or sports-like, aspect of jazz journalism, with all these incredible journalists who have a catalog of every album and every solo ever recorded, and they kind of obsess over that. I do not listen to music that way. I do not think about musicians and their careers in those terms.

Ultimately, I am not even sure that I am making a music podcast. I think I am making a podcast about people, and it just so happens that there are a lot of musicians in my life so those were the people I started interviewing and the next thing I knew was that I had a jazz podcast. But I could see a version of this where I am talking to cab drivers or the people next to me on an airplane. That Studs Terkel kind of journalism would be very interesting to do. You just go out in the world and talk to people. But that is not exactly what I am doing either. I do research the people I talk about. My biggest preparation for my conversations is to be in my headspace, to reflect on the person for a few days before I talk to them. I build up a general disposition towards them, rather than writing down set questions. The next question is always just a response to the last thing that was said. I do not know what I am going to ask because I do not know what they are going to say.

AAJ: If you look back at your podcast interviews and at your career as a musician, do you see common threads or recurring themes, some sort of a "Leo signature"?

LS: It is a very basic question, and yet it is a very difficult question to answer. As far as the music-signature is concerned, players probably do not necessarily recognize the thing that defines their "sound." I am sure that there is something there. But it is difficult for me to articulate it. In terms of recurring themes, self-discovery, transformation through music, finding your identity and your way through life, through your craft, is something that is very crucial for me. I am very interested in what happens in our life and what we do with it.

Let me answer this way: I do not know, but I am curious.

Comments