Photo: bensidran.com
Ben Sidran
Ben Sidran
This past fall, I interviewed Ben Sidran, composer, author, musician, “Talking Jazz” radio program award-winner and longtime Madison native. We discussed a singular aspect of his career in music, that being “Ben Sidran the Composer.”
He was quick to comment on the “composer” title. In his words, the songs “write themselves.” Fortunately for us, he was standing close by, taking down notes. And, what we have is stacks of paper, accumulating a bounty of lyrics that keep us thinking on our toes, and rhythms that keep us snapping our fingers.
Here’s what he had to say.
What were your earliest compositions?
I played around with writing songs when I was in high school, but nothing that really stuck. The first song that I wrote that got recorded, was a song called “Midnight Tango” that I wrote when we were recording a Steve Miller session.
“Midnight Tango”—were you in Buenos Aires or Spain when you wrote it?
No, it’s just the rhythm of the song, the premise of the song. There was a leading tone that didn’t move, didn’t change, and the chords changed underneath it. It was kind of a suspended feeling and the rhythm that I played underneath it sort of resembled a tango, or reminded me of a tango … The midnight part, it’s just a word, a haunted word, I suppose.
As a composer, who were your earlier influences, and influences along the way?
I never felt like I was a composer, the songs kind of write themselves based on a line or a rhyme or a title or something, an idea, and generally I’m sitting at the piano just playing through some chords when that line pops out and then I kind of back into a song. But, having said that, when I was in high school, I was very taken by Mose Allison and Jon Hendricks as lyricists, and then of course in college, Bob Dylan—and they’re not really classic songwriters. Bob Dylan was famous for saying that they killed off the professional songwriters, now everybody had to write songs.
Well, you’re obviously doing what works for you. You’ve been writing for how many years?
I’ve been writing for 60 years, and recording for 53 years, I guess.
Of your tunes which are you particularly pleased with?
There are a couple songs that came out well, one of them was called “Don’t Cry for No Hipster” and another one called “I Might be Wrong,” that came out really nicely. The lyrics to “Life’s a Lesson” which is based on a melody by jazz trombonist, Frank Rosolino—I like that a lot. There are a handful that I am proud of.
I couldn’t tell you how I did them, but I like ‘em!
Excerpt from “Life’s a Lesson,” recorded with Carole King
“Life’s a lesson. You can fail it. You can set your spirit free or jail it. But, setting it free is no guarantee it’s gonna fly when you sail it … and if you feel like you're in prison, and no one is coming to talk or to listen, take it easy, know that no one ever has it easy.”
(“Life’s A Lesson” recorded in 1994)
Excerpt from “Don’t Cry for No Hipster”
“No, don’t cry for no hipster. He knew what he signed up for… Let’s call it what it is. In a life like his, it’s usually wrongs that make it right.”
(“Don’t Cry for No Hipster,” recorded in 2012)
Excerpt from “I Might Be Wrong”
“Now, I might be wrong but it sure seems to me, the past ain’t what it was, the future ain’t what it used to be. Everywhere I go I hear people say ‘man, you should have been here yesterday … I could be wrong, but I think those days are gone. The past ain’t what it was, and the future won’t be here long.’”
(From “You’ve Got to Picture Him Happy” recorded in 2017)
Some songs might come to you more instantaneously and I would assume those are the more amazing ones, less effortful.
Well, that’s certainly true about “Life’s a Lesson,” that lyric came out whole. I guess it’s true, the good ones tend to just arrive.
Swing State is your latest recording. Perhaps a great homage to a many (or a few?) songwriters? What was the impetus to recording it? How did Swing State come about?
Well, the idea of doing a trio record without lyrics and just playing classic songs that I remembered from when I started out. I’m talking about songs that were not even new in the ‘50s.
The idea was because Leo, and Billy Peterson and myself always have a great rapport and great feeling anytime we sat down to play. It just felt great. It was a challenge that I put off, making an instrumental record.
Then finally a friend of mine, Tommy LiPuma was his name, he’s a record producer—I was at his house and we were talking, and he encouraged me. He said “you should make an instrumental record” because I have a touch on the piano that is very old school. I wasn’t trained academically, I learned to play piano kind of by ear more or less, and my technique is self-invented kind of in the way that musicians back in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s learned. Tommy’s feeling was that the sound I get on the piano is reminiscence of classical-jazz piano players. So anyway, those kinds of things can gel … and what came out, is what we call Swing State.
Swing State was recorded so beautifully, and at times the piano had a ragtime quality to it. Maybe it was the way you were playing?
You know, it’s this kind of haunted old Yamaha piano at the DNA Studio … it’s a really fun piano to play, and we kind of exploited that old sound by the way we mic’d it, and by the leakage in the room. The piano to the drums were set up close to one another, so that the sound of the drums was in the piano, and the sound of the piano was in the drums. And I wasn’t wearing headphones so the attack that I had on the piano was very natural in the room … but the main thing was the instrument that had a lot of miles on it, and so I think that history came out.
What’s next for you, writing or otherwise?
I’m preparing to do some more recording in the spring. I go to Europe once a year and play and I’ve got a bunch of musicians over there that I’m going to record with. I’m gathering material for that. I’ll probably write a one or two things and find a bunch of other songs to do … I’m trying to put together a songbook, actually I want to pick 50 of my favorite lyric sets…put together a book of the lyrics and the chord charts and little stories about the songs.
You have such a rich past and present. You’re deeply steeped in academics (teaching at UW-Madison, plus academic study in the U.S. and abroad), but also, you’re in small clubs—you’ve got a variety of resources, yet your sound—it’s your own. It’s unique.
Well, it’s self-invented obviously. Living in Madison was very helpful to me in a professional way, even though it could be seen as an obstacle, it never really was. I think that coming from Racine was an advantage as well. All of these thing’s kind of focused me back on what I really loved, and love to do and there weren’t that many distractions. I think I was fortunate that way.
I heard you say something to your son Leo (during his interview of you on his podcast “The Third Story”), about “moving closer toward simplicity,” getting more closely to the heartbeat of the music.
Yeah, isn’t that interesting that simplicity is so difficult? It really takes age and time to figure out what it’s about. It’s really, I guess natural, that when you’re on your way to becoming who you are going to be become, you’re kind of all over the place, and there’s an arc to the career, or an arc to the life, or an arc to everything, and as you have less time ahead than what’s behind you, you just naturally focus on the heartbeat, on the simplicity of what you’re doing, and I wish there was a way to hasten the process but I don’t think there is. I think you just need to wake up every day and try to discard those elements that are unnecessary. And you’d think it’d be easy to play, simply, but it’s just the opposite.
So much of what music simplicity is about, is getting out of your head, not relying on the knowledge part of it, but the heartbeat part of it, the natural body response to the moment, part of it. It’s a little sleight of hand I guess, the more you think about it, the farther you get from it, so you really have to rely on your hearing, more or less.
I know you’ve mentioned Art Blakey before. It seems he had the ability to be a wiseman with important expressions to follow in life, perhaps?
Yeah, Blakey was also known for his profound shortcuts, that you’re up there when you’re performing, you’re nude, that was a favorite line, how you play together, there are some musicians you’d like to work with, but they don’t fit… these are metaphors that were not necessarily unique to him, but he communicated them to his players, and he had a profound effect on everybody who went through his band … it was obviously an effective way of teaching.
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Talking to musicians about their influences, and how they developed their style and that sort of thing, they all pretty much say they don’t really don’t understand where style comes from, and that the fact of being around great players, is simply about being around great players—it’s not like they tell you any secrets, it’s just that you’re in the room, and you start by some kind of osmosis to take on some of the attitudes and perceptions that lead to developing style.
Anything more you’d like to add?
Well, as I said, unlike great song composers, and I don’t consider myself a great song composer at all, I consider myself somebody who approaches lyric-writing the same way I approach improvisation, I mean I try to improvise with words and have them make a point, that has some kind of musical foundation, so that it’s not for me a matter of poetry or rhymes it’s really more a matter of storytelling and narrative.
And I guess I’ll conclude with this one thought. I once asked Mose Allison if his songs were autobiographical, and he said to me, if I could live that life, I wouldn’t need to write those songs.
And I think that’s a pretty good way of summing it up.
