Results for "Leo Sidran"

Leo Sidran

I'm a multi instrumentalist musician, producer, arranger, composer, recording artist, and podcast host. I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, which is sometimes referred to as 70 square miles surrounded by reality. My father, Ben Sidran, another multifaceted music man, provided my early musical sustenance. My mother, a weaver and travel agent, provided texture and safe passage. I got my start writing songs professionally as a teenager when the Steve Miller Band recorded four of my songs for their 1993 Wide River album. My father was working with Miller at the time, which is how I made the connection, but even then, at the ripe old age of 15, I was interested in production

Shabaka: This Is The Moment To Make Patient Music

by Leo Sidran
April 19, 2024

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 ...

Jose James Makes Music For 'Party And Politics'

by Leo Sidran
April 10, 2024

Singer Jose James has been a consistent and insistent musical presence ever since he released his first album, The Dreamer in 2008 on British dj Gilles Peterson's newly formed Brownswood Recordings label. Since then he's made a dozen albums, recorded for iconic record labels like Impulse! and Blue Note, and eventually formed his own label Rainbow ...

Celebrating The Third Story at 10 with Will Lee and Amanda Sidran

by Leo Sidran
February 4, 2024

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 had turned me on to Marc Maron's WTF podcast, and I ...

Keyon Harrold: Having The Courage To Be Who You Are

by Leo Sidran
January 24, 2024

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 ...

Larry Goldings & John Sneider: Chinwag

by Leo Sidran
January 9, 2024

A 30 year long friendship between musicians is not necessary to make intimate, creative music together, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Chinwag, the first duo record by pianist Larry Goldings and trumpeter John Sneider, is just such a project; a debut three decades in the making. It might seem like a simple undertaking--a small format album ...

Ani DiFranco: I Love People Who Are Brave In Showing Themselves

by Leo Sidran
January 7, 2024

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 ...

Ludovico Granvassu's Garden of Jazzy Delights 2023

by Ludovico Granvassu
January 3, 2024

If it is true that, like The Police once put it, “when the world is going down you make the best of what's still around," then throughout 2023 jazz fans were better off than most other social groups. In a year in which everyday news brought ever more inconceivable disappointments, jazz musicians, labels, festivals and venues ...

Pete Min's Colorfield Records And Sculpted Chaos

by Leo Sidran
December 9, 2023

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 ...

Joey Alexander: I Just Happened To Start Early

by Leo Sidran
November 7, 2023

When Joey Alexander made his first appearance in the States nearly a decade ago, it seemed to send a kind of shockwave through the jazz world. He was 10 years old when Wynton Marsalis invited him to travel from his native Indonesia (he was born in Bali but moved to Jakarta to pursue his music) to ...