Jeanan Yasiri:
Entrepreneurship in Society is a course that's offered through the University of Wisconsin
School of Human Ecology.
I'm Jeanan Yasiri. As we begin today, I'd like to
supporting this course: the UW extend thanks to our partners in
Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering for their technical support, and
financial support that's
provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri.
They are committed to advancing academic education in entrepreneurship. Additionally, we'd like to thank
our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their University Place crew for taping
I'm quite pleased to introduce today's lecture.
our special guest today, Ben Sidran, gifted pianist, composer, producer, and Jazz
artistic legend.
If you look at Ben's website, it suggests that he might be best known in some circles for
having written Steve Miller's hit song "Space Cowboy."
then Ben is much more widely That was a long time ago. It was back in 1971, and since
recognized internationally for a host of contributions to the
of Jazz music, and to helping each of us better understand recording industry, to the art
including the Grammy nominated artistic legends. Ben has recorded 25 solo albums,
Van Morrison, Diana Ross, Mose Allison and John Hendricks. has produced recordings for noted artists including
He composed a soundtrack for the acclaimed film, "Hoop Dreams,"
and scored the documentary
"Vietnam: Long Time Coming," which won both Aspen Film Festival awards and an Emmy.
Ben is well-known among National
Public Radio audiences for a variety of programs, including
"Jazz Alive!" and as the host of VH-1 television's the landmark jazz series
"New Vision" series. He is an author and this spring
he'll actually be introducing his newest book,
"There was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream."
He holds a PhD in American
Studies from Sussex University, and, in addition to telling us about his new book, I asked Ben
to really come and share with us
the importance and the intersections that artistic endeavor and entrepreneurship
have. Please join me in welcoming Ben Sidran. [APPLAUSE]
Ben Sidran: Thank you,
By definition, I think, if Jeanan. I trust my microphone is on and you can all hear me.
for years and years, some of you're in the arts, you're an entrepreneur because these days the systems that were in place
them wildly unfair, many of them illegal, a lot of them corrupt, they're gone for better and for
worse.
So it's a very good time, actually, to talk about the arts and entrepreneurship.
People ask me what I do and how I do it, and I give them a
little metaphor. The metaphor is this: it's very
simple, it's the same as I way
you make a snowman. How do you make a snowman? You take a few flakes.
You put them together.
You roll it into some more snow and pretty soon you're working and you're working,
and you got a ball. You do it again.
of the first one. Do it again. You get a second big snowball and put it on top
You get a third one. You get a head.
You find some coal, the carrot
for the nose, the sticks for the arms, you made a snowman. That's what doing a project is
like. The only difference is, in the
arts first you have to make it snow.
By that I mean it's not enough
to have a good idea. You have to have a good idea
have to have more than a good idea because my experience is for every successful project that you can execute, and you
perhaps eight or nine that were not successful. But you don't know which ones are going to be successful, so
essentially you have to develop and parallel many things at the same time.
have to stay focused. Jeanan has asked me to talk a little bit about my book. SoThe new book, "Jews, Musicu
and the American Dream,"
is my fourth book. My first book was called
It was the sociology of black music in America. It was actually my PhD "Black Talk."
My second book was called "Talking Jazz." It was a series of interviews with great musicians.
And you can see up there on my
website there is now the ultimate gift for the ultimate
It's a CD box set. jazz fan, "Talking Jazz."
It sells for $250 and inside are 24 CDs and a colorful booklet of
I point that out, because that's a re-use. some of my favorite interviews.
That's entrepreneurship as well. They came from an original radio
series from the mid-'80s called "Sidran on Record," which I developed and my corporation
And so I was able, I had owned the actual interviews.
And so 20 years later those interviews, a conversation, for example, with Miles Davis that repackage it.
was of interest. was done in 1986, at the time it
So part of what I've done Inall along is exactly this.e out, it was of great interest because Miles was gone.
That's part of making it snow, building the snowman, and then
repurposing the snowman.
Finding another way to use the material that's been successful.
which is called "A Life in the The third book was my memoir
Music," and it tells a lot of the stories, I'd be happy to tell some of them to you today
if you want to hear them, about my experience in the music industry and the record business.
The way the record business is
Music, and the America Dream," set up, the way the music industry is set up. And then this new book, "Jews,
came from a course I taught here at the UW in 2003.
And the course, when you teach I was the artist in residence.
as part of the artist residency program here, you have to have a syllabus that's
cross-referenceable in two or three departments.
So my course was basically Irving Berlin
to the Beastie Boys.
I talked about the Jewish impact on American popular music in the
And it was the cross-listed in 20th century.
Jewish studies and history and communication arts. The book is a repurposing.
Repurposing?
Is that a good word? I don't even know if that is a
Of the course. word.
George Gershwin and Harold Arlen I had to invent this course because I didn't just want to talk about Irving Berlin and
and fabulous Jewish composers. And I didn't just want to talk
record business Jews who started about Alfred Lion and the early
the independent record companies.
about Carole King and Leiber and And I didn't just want to talk
Stoller and the Jews who wrote all the hit songs for Elvis Presley and everybody in the
'50s. And I didn't just want to talk
about Bob Dylan and Mike Bloomfield and the great artists
of conscience in the '60s.
And I didn't want to just talk about the '70s with the Jewish
Bob Krasnow or whatever. executives like Clive Davis or
And the '80s with the emergence of rap music, that came up through a producer named Rick
Rubin and other Jewish
entrepreneurs. I wanted to sketch what was Jewish about popular music in
the 20th century. In a nutshell, what I believed
in a little anecdote about the and what I do believe is that what is Jewish can be summed up
Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty was a gift
country of France in the 1890s. It was supposed to celebrate two to the United States from the
States. They didn't have enough money, great friends and trade partners, France and the United
the statue was a gift but they didn't have enough money to
build the pedestal that it was
pedestal to put the Statue of on, and Liberty on. collect And one of the fundraisers to raise money for the pedestal was
coordinated in part by a Jewish American girl name Emma Lazarus.
Her family had come in the 1850s with the first German Jewish
immigration into the United States. And at the time in the 1880s
Jews from the Paleo settlement. Very poor, impoverished, and in some cases deeply mystical Jews who spoke no English who weref
thrown out of eastern Europe and
landed on the shores of America, had nowhere to go, and they literally got to the piers in
New York with their baggage, and
if you can imagine yourself at your age because many of them were your age or younger,
getting up and walking into this
teeming society. Nobody understood what you were saying.
You didn't have a home. You didn't have money.
And they invented their lives. And Emma Lazarus, this young
girl at the time, wrote a poem
about this experience. That poem was eventually put on the Statue of Liberty.
The poem, "give me your tired,
your hungry, your poor, we welcome you," it turned the Statue of Liberty from an icon
of business to an icon of social
justice. And ever since then, we've
has been about social justice. assumed that the United States
Look at the great icon. Look at the story that we tell ourselves about democracy.
The theme of social justice has been pervasive in the Jewish
contribution to popular music in tradition, and that, in fact, I think, is what the Jewish
the 20th century is. If you look at the songs of Irving Berlin or George
Gershwin, who wrote "Porgy and
Bess," and a man named Abel Meeropol, who wrote a song called "Strange Fruit" about
lynchings in the south. A song by a man named Yip Harburg, who wrote a song in the
Spare a Dime?" '30s called "Brother, Can You
One of the first social conscious songs ever, similar to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?"
in the '60s.
All of this, this tradition of social justice being part of
part of the Jewish influence. And when I taught the course and popular music in America was
I came to this conclusion, I discovered there was no text
that actually told this whole story.
And, in fact, if that is a story it's easy to see how Bob Dylan
would tie into it but how does
Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys tie into it? How do the Beastie Boys tie into
it? I'll give you a little thing of what I believe. When you say you got to fight
for your right to party, what you're really talking about is
America is the only country in the world where the pursuit of
happiness is part of the
Constitution. What could that possibly mean? That it's an inalienable right.
So, anyway, that's what this
I started out, I had all these book was about. And I've spent the last five or six years writing it.
get them transcribed and that notes,will be the book.rse, I And I had the notes transcribed fand they were terrible becausel
they were just live conversations like this.
And this is more or less entertaining for the hour that
we're here but if you transcribed it, maybe not so
to decide on a very important thing. much. The next step is I decided I had
If I was going to talk about Jews, music, and the American
dream, I was going to have to talk about Jewish music.
piano. What is Jewish music? There are no Jewish notes on a
There are 88 notes. Anybody can play them. What is Jewish music?
Well, they have minor chords
everywhere. Well it's a simpatico with the blues and that's why blacks and
Jews in America have--
decide what is Jewish music. Well, that's not good enough. It turns out you have to decide who is a Jew before you can
And that's not easy either because today if you go to
return, traditionally, if your Israel, according to the law of
mother was Jewish, according to the law of return, you are Jewish and you can go to Israel
and claim citizenship.
over the world, in the United States, the fundamentalists in fundamentalists in Israel, just like the fundamentalists all
mother was a Jew because in my Iran, have taken control. And now it's not enough if your
case I was raised in a conservative Jewish home but not
And today the Rabbinate in an Orthodox home.
Israel has determined that you have to be from an Orthodox Jewish tradition.
So who is a Jew?
And anybody in this room who would like to can convert to
So if anybody can convert, who Judaism.
is a Jew is a very interesting question, and what is Jewish
question. The only way I could get around that was to surmise that there's music is perhaps an unanswerable
And what does that mean? an inner Jew in all of us.
I read a lot of books on So I tell you that because it meant that I had to do a lot of reading for three or four years.
I went to the beginning and read monotheism. I read a lot of books on social history.
Diaspora, the Spanish aexperience, the experience in0 yeaRussia, the experience ince. France, and then had to get to
the end where I had all this
information, an extraordinary amount of information. I had made it snow too much.
I was buried in a blizzard of information.
Where was the book inside this blizzard?
That took three years of going
through it and saying yes, that's interesting but it's not useful.
Yes, that's useful but it's not interesting.
is "Jews, Music and the American Dream." So the process from 2003 to 2012, the book comes out,
I made this artifact and now I move on.
But while I was making that artifact I also produced five CDs.
and Japan and the United States. I did dozens of tours in Europe
I taught here at the university again. My point being, it's not enough
to have a good idea.
Everybody has a good idea. It's not enough even to write it
You'd be surprised what an down.
important thing that is. Write the idea down.
phone call. I always tell my friends, they It's not enough to make the
say Ben how did you manage to do all these things?
I say, I made the phone call. Yes, we can all write down this great idea, but there's a phone call attached to every good
idea. The first phone call. You got to make it. You can't put it off.
And that phone call will lead you to the next phone call, to
the next phone call. So, this process, to me, is very
similar to what I started out doing when I was your age.
I was interested in philosophy. I was interested in literature, Whand I was totally in loveat the Uwith Jazz music.sin.
So I played at night in a little
oh, Jeanan mentioned that I groupeventually got a PhD. came What happened was this: 1967 the And I found that in order to,
'63, in fact, when I was in a little college band with two summer of love, I was here in
One was Steve Miller and one was musicians who went on to become famous.
Boz Scaggs. And we had a little group we played on Langdon Street and we
played around.
And by 1967 they had gone to San Francisco and found the summer of love and got record
contracts.
And they called me up and they said, Ben, you got to get out here, you can't believe what's
going on. And I said no, you know what, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to graduate school
in England, the University of Sussex, and make something of my life.
Well, I did. I want to be a professor.
I got a PhD but two things happened. In 1968, Steve and Boz came over
to London to make their first recording, and since I was there
I made the recording with them and I got involved in the London
recording scene.
And within months I had recorded with The Rolling Stones, I had
was in the record business. And the second thing that happened was in 1971 when I graduated with a PhD there were
no jobs in American studies programs. So here I was determined not to be a professional musician,
moving to Los Angeles to get in the record business.
And the point of the tale is, generally speaking your Tsuccesses come from how you, recover from what you perceive
as your failures. I perceived not getting a job teaching at a university as a failure.
That's what I set out to do.
trade we refer to as a lateral When I couldn't get a job and I had something else over here, I immediately did what in the
arabesque and I said no, now I'm going to be a record producer.
that's what I was going to do. And I went to LA and determined
stumble on is invariably better than what you're looking for. You have to recognize the opportunity when it comes up.
If you're out there looking for something, you're going to
And if you do find it, it's not necessarily what you want. constantly be aware of your failure not to find it.
But you have to look for something.
You have to go out there. You have to make the call.
But you have to stay open to the accidental.
It's part of quantum mechanics. Chaos is part of the universe.
You have to court chaos. You have to bring the chaos into
you.
You can't be in control. You can only be in the process
What an artistic entrepreneur does is put their stamp, their of.
whatever their idiom is, whether aesthetic, on the craziness around them using the grammar of
itSo briefly, to telescope them or theatre, it doesn't matter.
I had my website put up there just to show you the types of things I've done over the years natureto make it snow. did--
And at the heart of it really is
a very simple principle. Why am I in Madison, Wisconsin? That's the first question.
I mean, got out of here in the
'60s and went to London. And then from London I moved to Los Angeles, and I got a job
with Capitol Records which was
this tower that looked like a stack of records at Hollywood and Vine.
I'm in Madison because in 1972
I came home from work at Capitol Records in my new Porsche, pulled up to this house
in Hollywood Hills and went in
the door and my wife was angry. She said, "I hate it here. Who are these people?
Who are these guitar players
in their tight leather pants who think they're so special? They don't read books.
They don't go to movies.
Who are these people?" I said, whoa, what happened?
night before we were at a party and there was a bit of celebrity Well, what had happened was the
I won't mention her name. It doesn't really matter. But she came up and introduced She was famous at the time.
found out that my wife was not herself to my wife, and when she
in show business she just turned around and walked away. So that was a key moment for me.
I didn't know it at the time. I said, well, what do you want
to do? She said, I want to go back to
Madison for the summer. That was the summer of '72. We've been here ever since. Why is that such a key moment in
what I'm doing? Because it was the moment when I
outside myself. To me, this idea of centrepreneurship or defining myself as opposed to something
yourself is really a deeper question. It's a question about what do your reayou want.nventing
What do you want? Everything that happens in the
more than somebody else didn't. Somebody made everything happen. world today happens because somebody wanted that to happen
the simple answer when you go into see a financial planner is well I want a lot of money. That's a biDo you?ion because
Do you want a lot of money? Why do you want a lot of money? What are you going to do with?
People don't think about that. Well, I'm going to...
I just need money. Maybe you do, maybe you don't.
Judy, my wife, well what do you want, what I was saying without even thinking about it was it's not about money, it's not about
Capitol Records, it's about us. What do you want? What do I want? Let's do that.
And the reason that's important because if you don't really love
going to be successful. Most of the people I know who are successful, in pop music, for example, their hits, their
successes came when they were doing what was the simplest thing in the world for them.
again, believe me they'd do it And if they knew how to do it
every day. They don't. What happens in the creative
arts, from time to time you find
yourself so exhausted from jet lag or whatever else that you're too tired to get in
you're own way and you just do
something. Generally speaking, that's your best work.
Your best work comes from directly inside who you are,
There's an old expression, what you want, who you've become.
And you will worship something, the be sure of that as well.eir names on our faces. Be sure of that.
dark recesses of your heart but it is not. You might think that tributes are being paid inside in the
live our life determines who we are, our character. So what we are worshiping, we what we are becoming.nd how we
So this idea of entrepreneurship
It's not something they teach in theyou at a university.earch to discover who I am and what matters to me.
It's something you, again, you stumble on when you're looking
for something else. Why did I put this up?
see what's up here. Here's a discography. The discography shows you some Let's just look at some things,
made. Here's the latest one, Dylan of the solo records that I've
Different, tribute to Bob Dylan. That was interesting.
Interesting in part because why would I do a record of Bob Dylan? Bob Dylan has already done
Bob Dylan.
I did it because I found a new way to do his songs, and I found
and I played them for people, people liked them. that when I was out on the road
So I followed that idea to its conclusion, and that particular
CD is very successful in Europe right now.
on. Here I am in 1963 at the Timeline, let's go to the timeline and see what's going
University of Wisconsin. This is me in '73.
This is me. Oh, I had a television show here
television on, and I was in Madison in 1973. There was no late night
survey out on State Street about teaching in the Comm Arts Department. I got my grad students to do a
why there was no TV. I wound up with a TV show.
ourselves, had to do all the Had to do all the commercials
to be on my television show. production, but because there was no late night television, anybody who came to town wanted
And here's Jane Fonda on my television show. Here's me with John Hendricks
in 1975.
He's teaching me a song called Old Folks, which I didn't know. We're sitting at the piano and
the engineer in the control room
while he was teaching it to me recorded it.
there by the microphone. You can see John is sitting
That's John and the that's the microphone. That's me, I'm playing the
piano.
hey, I recorded that, do you And he sang it as I played it and the engineer, when it was over, said on the talk-back,
want to hear it? We said sure we'd love to hear
John loved it. it.
And I said John you can't use it on the record.
technically put me in charge. I said you can't use it on the I was his producer which
He said no, I've never sung it record, I'm making some mistakes.
that well before, that has to go on the record.
He said no, that's it. I said please we'll do it again.
I said but the mistakes. He said Ben, don't you
mistakes are the only part understand, sometimes the
that's Jazz. And he's not the only great musician who's told me that
over the years. Art Blakey once said to me
There's Al Jarreau, a great singer from Milwaukee. that's how Jazz was invented, somebody goofed.
In '85 I had a radio show called Recording sessions. Oh, here's my radio show.
In '82 and '83 and '84, I was hired by National Public Radio It's an interesting entrepreneurial story as well.
in Washington, DC, to be the host of the Jazz series.
Why did they hire me when I had no radio experience?
Jazz musician, and I had a PhD. They needed somebody who was The reason quite simply was because I played piano, I was a
trouble being legitimate. So I said okay. aAnd because I had a lot of because Jazz has a lot of
I became the host. experience with a microphone,
That show eventually crashed and burned, and I was encouraged to start my own show, which I did
from right in Madison from Vilas
Hall, where I went around the country and interviewed famous jazz musicians and we got
distribution on National Public Radio, we had some 300 stations,
and it went on for five or six years.
It stopped because I was just worn out. I had to raise the money for all
Even though people here at WHA of it.
said that they would help and they said they tried, every cent that came in either came from
Washington or it came from me knocking on doors at Rayovac and
various corporations and it just wore me out.
But that series of interviews turned into that Talking Jazz box that was up there before. Other photos, other things.
That was me.
Oh, man. That was me in Japan in 1992. Here's a record I made with
Van Morrison, a tribute to Mose Allison.
character. That was interesting. Van Morrison is a mysterious
He's a real artist in the sense that he's completely spontaneous.
Most pop stars, rock musicians, take months to make a record. Literally, literally months,
because they're trying to get it years even, to make a record
right. Why?
insecure their going to get found out. Because they're all terribly
They're all terrified that somebody is going to find out
that they're not as good as they
think they are, they're not worth the money their getting. So they're all, by and large pop
artists tend to be very insecure. And the way they deal with that is they cause a lot of confusion
around them.
So wherever you see a pop star, you're going to see a lot of chaos.
Why?
Because in the midst of that chaos they can move around
They can determine which way the freely.
chaos is going to go. Van Morrison is and isn't like that.
There's a lot of chaos around him but not because he's
insecure that way. There's chaos around him because
he wants to get back to the original impulse that made him
school standing on the street corner singing with his friends. an artist in the first. That's when he was a boy in high
And he doesn't know quite how to do that so he's constantly
searching.
An example is when we made this record we were in the studio, he has a studio in England that we
went to, and he'd say, Ben, you sing this song. We played it, I sang it.
That was it. Okay, I'll sing the next one.
Whatever happened in that room went on this record.
I have a lot of respect for him and I'm also terrified that I'll It was very dramatic.
have to work with him again. It's hard not to but it's really
scary.
a group called Garbage. HThey were in Madison for a Here's me and Shirley Manson. Shirley Manson was a singer from
while. Shirley's a pop star.
A big pop celebrity.
But Shirley is very smart, very smart woman. And like every smart musician,
she wants to do jazz. But she didn't know how to get
So I said, well, look I've got from her career in pop music to jazz.
this gig at the Civic Center, come down and sing some jazz songs with me.
And she did and she loved it and
she decided to make a jazz record but she never managed to do that.
It's a lot harder than it seems to do what you want.
Well, I guess that's enough of this.
I guess those are essentially my
remarks, prepared as they were. They kind of sketch a little bit about who I am, the kind of
world that I've walked through, and the kind of mentality I've
taken with me. I have lots of examples and
stories about how the business
actually works. I'll resort to them if you don't have questions you want
answered. I would much rather answer your questions.
curiosity and the courage to Is there anybody with the
Hi, I'm Carly. raise their hand and ask one at this point? There's one.
I'm just curious about how you met Steve Miller and if you kind
Steve Miller Band would be. >> I met Steve Miller on Langdon of foresaw how much of a hit
Vespa motor scooter, I was Street. I was riding, I had a little
riding from my apartment, which was up on Henry Street, to the Union and there was this band,
this blues band set up on the corner of where The Pyle Center now is. It used to be a little smaller
building. And it was just a band and they sounded great.
didn't have a piano player and And I pulled over and they
it was Steve and Boz and some other guys and I went up to them afterward and said, hey, you
sound good. I'd never heard the music they
It was Jimmy Reed and T-Bone were playing. It was Texas blues.
I knew jazz blues, but not that kind of indigenous blues. So I was really drawn to it, and I didn't know.
wound up playing piano in this he and I became friends, and I
band. The band was called The Ardells. What did we know and when did we
know it?
were four, white, middle-class This was before The Beatles records came out and the impact of The Beatles was that here
kids, writing their own songs. You can't imagine what a big
It wasn't done. Up until that time, commercial deal that was back then.
songs, hit songs, were written by professionals in New York in
Tin Pan Alley in what became the
incalculable, really. I don't know at what point Steve So the impact of both Bob Dylan and The Beatles was
I do know that I was in that Miller understood that it was his future.
band and here was Steve and here was Boz and they sang so well together.
And there was a third musician, a guitar player named Denny Berg
who played as well as they did and sang as well as they did and
wound up going into the advertising business and not
becoming a celebrity but had all the goods to become as big a
star as those two guys. But Steve, by 1966, when there
was a band called The Paul Butterfield Blues Band out of
Chicago was starting to make
He moved to Chicago. commercial records, Steve understood that what he did was commercial.
Didn't pan out. He moved to San Francisco. Positioned himself.
He is an excellent musician and a good singer.
The main thing that Steve has, besides a lot of talent, is an
enormous ego and an enormous
desire to succeed. Watching him, it was clear that you have to want that more than
anything else in the world in order to get that.
That kind of celebrity comes from something deep inside, and
Steve had that. I knew we were good.
I had no idea how to judge it on what scale you could judge it.
Now, in retrospect, clearly, we were very good, but at the time we were sophomores at the University of Wisconsin.
That's literally what we were.
write a song or anybody would And ever want to hear me.here I must say that having a career in the popular music business
was then, it's probably not anymore, a lot like running a marathon. In my youth I ran marathons, and
I found out the way to run a
marathon is to put one foot in front of the other and don't
And that's what a pop career is a lot like. Put one foot in front of the fall down, literally.
Look behind you after 30 years, there's your career. other, don't fall down.
Another? >> Hi, I'm Drew.
Hi, Drew. >> You said you worked with Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Steve Miller.
I was wondering who your
favorite musician was that you worked with in your career? >> Well, I'm a jazz fan and so
my favorite musician would be somebody you probably have never
My next favorite would be another jazz musician named Johnny Griffin. These are American icons.
See, jazz is a very special thing.
past hundred and some years. Jazz came up out of the streets in the United States over the
It was literally invented by people who had to invent
They didn't do it for the money initially. themselves.
And it's a mistake to say it was just black people or just Jewish
people or just Irish people.
things went into it. It was American people. It really came out of the American experience and all the
And for those of us who fell in love with jazz in the '50s and '60s when jazz was at its peak,
it was a religion, clearly. It was spiritual music. So I became involved in that
that era. I find pop stars and the pop music and my heroes are still of
people. The life, you might see it on television, I mean, look at the Kardashians, for example.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, seriously. They live in this huge house and
They drive their SUV to the mall what do they do?
to buy a bunch of crap. That's their life. Is that the life you want?
I don't think so. I don't know anybody who really wants that life.
boy, if I could only be rich and But that's being held out as,
famous like that. Tremendously boring. Petty.
Nothing really going on there.
Also, I'd like to point out, unsustainable.
of life is going to be as far in Trust me, in five years that way
economic times. theIt's a great time to be any. We're headed into some very interesting and very difficult
to you why all the records I entrepreneur because, if we run out of questions I can explain
made never paid me a thing but ever since I started paying for my own records I'm making a lot
more money and why being an entrepreneur is the best choice and right now it's the best time.
But anyway, to answer your
question. >> Thanks. >> Sure.
Hi, my name is Natalie. I was wondering if you could
kind of the successes you had over there versus in the States kindand why it is like that. of kind your records in Europe and
Well, I've always been drawn to Europe because of the historical >> Absolutely.
jazz musicians, first of all, jazz musicians in Europe aspect. And in Europe, particularly for
represent the exotic part of America.
It's one of the things that we
invented and they don't know how we invented it. They can play it now but the
thing about America that's so interesting is everybody is an
are of French decent, Algerian American. You go to France, most people
everybody is Japanese. decent too, but primarily French. You go to Japan, virtually
In America, who are we? We're everybody and that's our strength.
The fact that it keeps
Right now the Hispanic influence refreshing itself, the American popular culture keeps getting refreshed.
is very important. We're being replenished, we're
So the Europeans sensed this being replenished.
about American jazz musicians. So the first thing is if you're an American jazz musician and
you spend time in their countries, they like that.
there, going there every year, So about 30 years ago I started purposefully going and touring
going back, going back. And after about the fifth year I started really digging in and I
would play in these clubs with
French musicians, German musicians, Spanish musicians, and developing a reputation.
And unlike in the United States where if you show up to perform you're basically there to sell
something, you're pitching your CD or you're pitching
something, in Europe, when you play a gig, you're not pitching anything, you're there as part
of the living culture.
They have a drink. You're there. It's Tuesday night. People come to hear you.
They have a cup of coffee. You're part of the life.
merchandising. You're not part of the
It's an extraordinary thing to realize that a three-hour lunch in Spain is not just about
lunch.
It's not because you're hungry for three hours.
Here we're grabbing some food because, right? So to be a jazz musician, an That's what you're doing.
is an entirely different animal, American jazz musician in Europe
and once I got into that and I found out what it was and how to
touring in the United States. I haven't really done a lot of do it, I essentially stopped
touring here in decades. I play gigs.
Somebody can hire me and I'll get on a plane with some
But I used to go out in the United States for 10 weeks with mguys and we'd go from city tod city and we'd wind up covering
the country.
I don't do that anymore. But in three weeks I am going to
London and a week in Paris and a Europe, and I'll spend a week in
couple weeks in Spain. It's totally different. And how long that can last, I
don't know. But it's still the case.
that is who they are and even though they're becoming more And I think it will be the case for some time because I think
Americanized in terms of wanting that SUV and that mini-mansion
and all that crap, they still have this history.
very beginning of your career as >> Hi, my name is Hannah. I was just wondering since the
a musician, what do you think the single most important lesson is that you've learned and what
advice would you give to someone
I've learned as a musician. I know very clearly what that >> The quelesson is.hat's the single most important lesson
specifically got it through to I'm not exactly sure who
me because so many musicians, one way or another, told it to me but I didn't hear it until I
finally heard it. I might have been Miles Davis.
with him I was asking some of the musicians who worked with him what Miles taught them. AndAnd they all said the sameime
thing: I don't know, man. It's just when you're around him
he lets you know it's okay to be yourself.
I think that's the most important lesson. Not only is it okay but it's
Your best chance in life is to your only chance.
be yourself. That's your best shot.
There's nobody who has your sense of aesthetics, taste, whatever. And if you're going to be an
artist and express something, your first problem is to figure out how to listen to that voice in your head.
There's a lot of chatter up there that's irrelevant that's
coming from the TV, that's coming from other people's
opinions, not only that but if
you grew up as a fan in one of the arts, inside you want to be as good as whoever that is who
you love. And so you try and, of course,
you fail because you can't be as good as the person you love.
But the way you recover from
your style, determines who you that failure, as I said before, the way you recover from your perceived failure determines
to be yourself. It's okay to like what you like, So your best shot in every case is to understand that it's okay
it's your best shot economically, artistically, to gthat's your best shot.'re going in, and not only that,
difficult. Really simple but very
so I was just wondering, Yeah? >> Hey, Ben, I'm Brett. I'm a big fan of "Hoop Dreams."
to making the soundtrack how did you go from recording in a studio all the time, like making albums,
to two kids coming from Chicago to play basketball?
made by three filmmakers from Chicago and one of them, the >> "Hoop Dreams," the film was
mine, a friend of mine. And before it became the film "Hoop Dreams," which by the way Ginow, this is extraordinary,of
you know the Smithsonian
has listed the hundred most important films
is "Hoop Dreams" on that list, of the 20th century, not only
"Hoop Dreams" is number one. I mean, "Citizen Kane"
It's extraordinary how that happened. When I got involved with these is number five or something.
money to make the film. They had gotten a little bit of money from Public Television and guys, they didn't have enough
documentary called Higher Goals which was supposed to keep kids in school. they were making a half-hour
many kids, particularly minority And the idea was to show how
kids, dream of going into professional sports to get themselves out of the situation
they're in and how that's not good enough because the chances of you making it are very small.
playground, literally saw two kids shooting hoops, and decided And so they went to a
They followed them. They got involved. to follow those two kids. That's what Hoop Dreams was.
Years went by. They became so comfortable with
the kids and their families that
and they needed some music just to make this little half-hour educational film that they had And they had all this footage
And that's when Peter came to me. And they had no money. promised to make.
problem. And I said, well, that's no
I'll be glad to make some music for you. Let me see it.
And when I saw it, what I thought is, well, there are two streams here. There's the stream of these kids
and the film at home and their
family life and their personal life, and then there's the
ball. And they're very different but stream of the kids shooting
they're totally related. So what I did was at home I
tended to use solo instruments
playing the compositions I wrote.
mirrored the isolation. And when they're shooting ball I Just very haunting because it
had gone into, I went to Paisley Park in Minneapolis when Prince
was still there I and knew all
these guys up there, and I got these rappers and these characters, this was a long time
ago so it was easier to get to
them, and for the kick drum instead of a base drum, I used the sound of a basketball on a
wooden floor. And for the hi-hat cymbal instead of a hi-hat cymbal, I used the sound of a ball going
through a net, the swish. I used the squeak of tennis shoes on the court. I used all these sounds.
I put them in a computer and I
made the rhythm of these songs that they rapped over out of the
I did maybe five times as much sounds of basketball.
music as was required. And eventually they chose what
film. And that's how that happened. >> Hello. they wanted >> Hi.t it in the
My name is Sarah. I'd like to say first I really
I feel like a lot of our other appreciated your presentation today.
presenters were really money driven and talking about how to pinch pennies, and so I really
appreciated when you said that
entrepreneurship and the arts is really a search for who you are.
designer, I have a really hard So my question is, as a
time putting a monetary value on my art, how do you reconcile
and reaching success with what kind of achieving your vision
you want to do artistically with finding financial success when a
happening? lot of the times it just isn't
>> That's a very good question and very difficult to answer. You're basically asking how do
you value your time and your
work. How do you put value on it and how do you try to approximate
that. First of all, you have to give
it away. Everybody gives it away at
first, there's just no
alternative. But you have to give it away in the right way.
If you're good at what you do,
You will be successful. yYou have to know that. Again, put one foot in front of the other, don't fall down.
confidence. And your confidence comes from So much of what comes through when you meet people is your
okay. People will want what you do. Getting paid is very difficult If you're good, you will do
Not just getting paid what in the arts.
you're worth but literally getting paid. I can tell you stories, for
example, of contracts that I've signed with major companies, not
only was I not paid, but after a period of years I got accounting
statements said that I owed them
even more money. And every record that I sold I
And I hole got deeper and deeper. My son currently lives in New York and does commercial music.
And he's finding the same thing is true today.
It's very difficult to get the money.
Yes, we'll pay you $10,000. There's an expression that we used to say out in Los Angeles. It was called
the Hollywood slow no.
The Hollywood slow no is yeah, sure, absolutely, you'll get it,
That's no. it's coming, don't worry.
So you have to survive that. And there's no easy way and there's no straight answer or
simple answer.
And I say as long as what you're But I think that the real thing that you're asking is when to fish or cut bait.
give up, you'll know. It just feels too bad to keep doing it, doing it. doing it. At sAnd that's no stigma.e to
It's no stigma because the arts aren't holy or sacred.
It's physical. The arts are just hitting a tennis ball.
life. It>> I'm going to throw out aou final question unless I see You can another hand.t in your
You mentioned Leo, your son,
articulated his desire to become a musician pretty early in life.
And, of course, since then >> Yeah.
say to him when he told you he has become a renowned acclaimed artist, musician, and Academy Award winning, etc, what did you
wanted to follow this career path? >> Well, he never actually said
that. And it was very interesting watching him grow into who he became because, keep in mind
this is a kid who was raised in recording studios.
He was raised on planes and in trains.
And he was raised here in Madison, Wisconsin. So on the one hand, he was just this kid who got on the bus in
Madison or road his skateboard
to school. He was just a regular kid.
running through the streets of And on the other hand, he was
Tokyo at six years old and eating octopus. And his problem was that he
always wanted to be just a
regular kid so he could never tell his friends here in Madison about his other life.
It wasn't that he ever wanted to
leave this life. So that was his orientation.
one point. I tried to teach him piano at
That's the main thing that I do is play piano. And every time I sat down with
him to show him something he'd say, "I know that. I know that already." Obviously, I wasn't going to be
able to teach him anything. So I chose not to teach him.
I chose to be his father instead of insisting that I be his
teacher.
And frankly, my feeling was, and I guess to be honest still is,
being in the arts, take it. I didn't necessarily want him to if you have any alternative to
encouraged him to be a musician. be an accountant or a lawyer or anything, but I never, ever
To me that would be a mistake. And yet he found his way there. He would go up to friends of
mine when we were out on the
road and ask them how to play. And he got successful.
was 13 years old and I was His first success came when he
touring with Steve Miller. In the summers he plays these big, they're called sheds,
these outside places. And every summer we would go out
these buses and he had his own for a little bit. And he was 13 and we were on
little bed on the bus and everybody would, hey, Leo, come on.
And the sound man would show him
how to mix the sound and Miller would show him how to play guitar and he would just run
around all summer long learning all these things and having this
make a record and he and Leo fun time. And eventually, Steve wanted to
wrote all these songs together. And Leo, at 15, had five songs on a Steve Miller record.
And he said to me at that point I just don't want it to say on
I don't want that to be what people think of me. my tombstone, "He wrote five songs for Steve Miller."
So he downplayed it. He didn't exploit it.
I mean, 15 years old on a pop record, you could go to L.A.
And we just sort of dealt with I could have exploited him. He could have been exploited.
that like it's not that important. And one thing led to another and
when he graduated from the
University of Wisconsin as a history and a Spanish major, not
did is he decided that all he wanted to do is play music and a music major, the next thing he
He had a series of setbacks and a series of successes and they that's all he did from that point on.
Leo, and I know that you have inspired each of us today, continue. >> Well, you clearly inspired
today. Ben Sidran. Thank you so much for joining us
>> My pleasure, Jeanan. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]