Wisconsin Public Television University Place Entrepreneurship in Society  Ben Sidran Jews, Music and the American Dream  October 5, 2011 UP633    cc >> 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 extend thanks to our partners in supporting this course: the UW 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 today's lecture. I'm quite pleased to introduce 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." That was a long time ago. It was back in 1971, and since then Ben is much more widely recognized internationally for a host of contributions to the recording industry, to the art of Jazz music, and to helping each of us better understand artistic legends. Ben has recorded 25 solo albums, including the Grammy nominated "Concert for Garcia Lorca," and has produced recordings for noted artists including Van Morrison, Diana Ross, Mose Allison and John Hendricks. 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 the landmark jazz series "Jazz Alive!" and as the host of VH-1 television's "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, Jeanan. I trust my microphone is on and you can all hear me. By definition, I think, if you're in the arts, you're an entrepreneur because these days the systems that were in place for years and years, some of 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. You get a second big snowball and put it on top of the first one. Do it again. 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 that you can execute, and you have to have more than a good idea because my experience is for every successful project that I've done, there are 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. So you have to multitask, you have to stay focused. Jeanan has asked me to talk a little bit about my book. The new book, "Jews, Music and the American Dream," is my fourth book. My first book was called "Black Talk." It was the sociology of black music in America. It was actually my PhD dissertation. 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 jazz fan, "Talking Jazz." It's a CD box set. 

It sells for $250 and inside are 24 CDs and a colorful booklet of some of my favorite interviews. I point that out, because that's a re-use. 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 owned the actual interviews. And so I was able, I had releases from all the artists who were on the show to repackage it. And so 20 years later those interviews, a conversation, for example, with Miles Davis that was done in 1986, at the time it was of interest. In 2006 when the box set came out, it was of great interest because Miles was gone. So part of what I've done all along is exactly this. 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. 

The third book was my memoir which is called "A Life in the 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 set up, the way the music industry is set up. And then this new book, "Jews, Music, and the America Dream," came from a course I taught here at the UW in 2003. I was the artist in residence. And the course, when you teach 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 20th century. And it was the cross-listed in 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 word. 

Of the course. I had to invent this course because I didn't just want to talk about Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Harold Arlen and fabulous Jewish composers. And I didn't just want to talk about Alfred Lion and the early record business Jews who started the independent record companies. And I didn't just want to talk about Carole King and Leiber and 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 executives like Clive Davis or Bob Krasnow or whatever. 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 and what I do believe is that what is Jewish can be summed up in a little anecdote about the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the United States from the country of France in the 1890s. 

It was supposed to celebrate two great friends and trade partners, France and the United States. They didn't have enough money, the statue was a gift but they didn't have enough money to build the pedestal that it was on, and they had to collect change from people for years, dimes and quarters, to build the pedestal to put the Statue of Liberty on. 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 there was this great influx of Jews from the Paleo settlement. Very poor, impoverished, and in some cases deeply mystical Jews who spoke no English who were 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 assumed that the United States has been about social justice. 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 tradition, and that, in fact, I think, is what the Jewish contribution to popular music in 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 '30s called "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" 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 popular music in America was part of the Jewish influence. 

And when I taught the course and 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 book was about. And I've spent the last five or six years writing it. I started out, I had all these notes, I taught the course, I knew a lot of details, but my first thought was my notes, I'll get them transcribed and that will be the book. And I had the notes transcribed and they were terrible because 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 much. The next step is I decided I had to decide on a very important thing. 

If I was going to talk about Jews, music, and the American dream, I was going to have to talk about Jewish music. What is Jewish music? There are no Jewish notes on a piano. 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-- Well, that's not good enough. It turns out you have to decide who is a Jew before you can decide what is Jewish music. And that's not easy either because today if you go to Israel, according to the law of return, traditionally, if your mother was Jewish, according to the law of return, you are Jewish and you can go to Israel and claim citizenship. Not anymore because the fundamentalists in Israel, just like the fundamentalists all over the world, in the United States, the fundamentalists in Iran, have taken control. And now it's not enough if your mother was a Jew because in my case I was raised in a conservative Jewish home but not an Orthodox home. 

And today the Rabbinate in 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 Judaism. So if anybody can convert, who is a Jew is a very interesting question, and what is Jewish music is perhaps an unanswerable question. The only way I could get around that was to surmise that there's an inner Jew in all of us. And what does that mean? So I tell you that because it meant that I had to do a lot of reading for three or four years. I read a lot of books on monotheism. I read a lot of books on social history. I went to the beginning and read all the way up through the 2500 years of the Jewish experience. So I had to read about the Diaspora, the Spanish experience, the experience in Russia, the experience in 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. So the process from 2003 to 2012, the book comes out, is "Jews, Music and the American Dream." I made this artifact and now I move on. But while I was making that artifact I also produced five CDs. I did dozens of tours in Europe and Japan and the United States. 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 down. 

You'd be surprised what an important thing that is. Write the idea down. It's not enough to make the phone call. I always tell my friends, they 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. 

When I was your age I here at the University Wisconsin. I was interested in philosophy. I was interested in literature, and I was totally in love with Jazz music. So I played at night in a little group and during the day I came to courses. And I found that in order to, oh, Jeanan mentioned that I eventually got a PhD. What happened was this: 1967 the summer of love, I was here in '63, in fact, when I was in a little college band with two musicians who went on to become famous. One was Steve Miller and one was 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. I want to be a professor. Well, I did. 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 recorded with Eric Clapton, I 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. This is not just an anecdote, this is pointed tale. 

And the point of the tale is, generally speaking your successes 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. When I couldn't get a job and I had something else over here, I immediately did what in the trade we refer to as a lateral arabesque and I said no, now I'm going to be a record producer. And I went to LA and determined that's what I was going to do. That's part of the Jazz training. The Jazz training is what you 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 constantly be aware of your failure not to find it. And if you do find it, it's not necessarily what you want. 

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 of. 

What an artistic entrepreneur does is put their stamp, their aesthetic, on the craziness around them using the grammar of whatever their idiom is, whether it's music, or writing, or film or theatre, it doesn't matter.  So briefly, to telescope the nature of my career, I did--  I had my website put up there just to show you the types of things I've done over the years to make it snow.  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? Well, what had happened was the night before we were at a party and there was a bit of celebrity singer there. She was famous at the time. I won't mention her name. It doesn't really matter. But she came up and introduced herself to my wife, and when she found out that my wife was not 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 committed to something inside myself as opposed to something outside myself. To me, this idea of entrepreneurship or defining your reality or inventing yourself is really a deeper question. It's a question about what do you want. What do you want? Everything that happens in the world today happens because somebody wanted that to happen more than somebody else didn't. Somebody made everything happen. What do you want? That's a big question because the simple answer when you go into see a financial planner is well I want a lot of money. Do you? Do you want a lot of money? Why do you want a lot of money? What are you going to do with? Well, I'm going to... People don't think about that. I just need money. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. 

At that moment when I said to 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 what you do and do what you love, chances are you're not 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. And if they knew how to do it again, believe me they'd 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, what you want, who you've become. There's an old expression, the gods we worship write their names on our faces. 

Be sure of that. And you will worship something, be sure of that as well. You might think that tributes are being paid inside in the dark recesses of your heart but it is not. Because that which determines what we think about and how we live our life determines who we are, our character. So what we are worshiping, we are becoming. So this idea of entrepreneurship in the arts, to me, is a search to discover who I am and what matters to me. It's not something they teach you at a university. It's something you, again, you stumble on when you're looking for something else. Why did I put this up? I don't know. Let's just look at some things, see what's up here. 

Here's a discography. The discography shows you some of the solo records that I've made. Here's the latest one, Dylan 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 that when I was out on the road and I played them for people, people liked them. So I followed that idea to its conclusion, and that particular CD is very successful in Europe right now. Timeline, let's go to the timeline and see what's going on. Here I am in 1963 at the University of Wisconsin. This is me in '73. 

This is me. Oh, I had a television show here in Madison in 1973. There was no late night television on, and I was teaching in the Comm Arts Department. I got my grad students to do a survey out on State Street about why there was no TV. I wound up with a TV show. Had to do all the commercials ourselves, had to do all the production, but because there was no late night television, anybody who came to town wanted to be on my television show. 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. 

You can see John is sitting there by the microphone. That's John and the that's the microphone. That's me, I'm playing the piano. And he sang it as I played it and the engineer, when it was over, said on the talk-back, hey, I recorded that, do you want to hear it? We said sure we'd love to hear it. John loved it. And I said John you can't use it on the record. I was his producer which technically put me in charge. I said you can't use it on the record, I'm making some mistakes. He said no, I've never sung it that well before, that has to go on the record. I said please we'll do it again. 

He said no, that's it. I said but the mistakes. He said Ben, don't you understand, sometimes the mistakes are the only part 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 that's how Jazz was invented, somebody goofed. There's Al Jarreau, a great singer from Milwaukee. Recording sessions. Oh, here's my radio show. In '85 I had a radio show called "Sidran on Record." It's an interesting entrepreneurial story as well. In '82 and '83 and '84, I was hired by National Public Radio in Washington, DC, to be the host of the Jazz series. 

Why did they hire me when I had no radio experience? The reason quite simply was because I played piano, I was a Jazz musician, and I had a PhD. They needed somebody who was a legitimate front for Jazz because Jazz has a lot of trouble being legitimate. So I said okay. And because I had a lot of experience with a microphone, I became the host. 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 of it. Even though people here at WHA 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. That was interesting. Van Morrison is a mysterious character. 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, years even, to make a record because they're trying to get it right. Why? Because they're all terribly insecure their going to get found out. 

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 freely. They can determine which way the 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 an artist in the first. That's when he was a boy in high school standing on the street corner singing with his friends. 

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. Okay, I'll sing the next one. That was it. Whatever happened in that room went on this record. It was very dramatic. I have a lot of respect for him and I'm also terrified that I'll have to work with him again. It's hard not to but it's really scary. Here's a copy of my memoir. 

Here's me and Shirley Manson. Shirley Manson was a singer from a group called Garbage. They were in Madison for a 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 from her career in pop music to jazz. So I said, well, look I've got 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. Is there anybody with the curiosity and the courage to raise their hand and ask one at this point? There's one. >> Hi, I'm Carly. I'm just curious about how you met Steve Miller and if you kind of foresaw how much of a hit Steve Miller Band would be. 

>> I met Steve Miller on Langdon Street. I was riding, I had a little Vespa motor scooter, I was 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. And I pulled over and they didn't have a piano player and 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 were playing. It was Texas blues. It was Jimmy Reed and T-Bone Walker. Real hard core great blues that I didn't know. I knew jazz blues, but not that kind of indigenous blues. 

So I was really drawn to it, and he and I became friends, and I wound up playing piano in this band. The band was called The Ardells. What did we know and when did we know it? This was before The Beatles records came out and the impact of The Beatles was that here were four, white, middle-class kids, writing their own songs. You can't imagine what a big deal that was back then. It wasn't done. Up until that time, commercial songs, hit songs, were written by professionals in New York in Tin Pan Alley in what became the Brill Building. So the impact of both Bob Dylan and The Beatles was incalculable, really. I don't know at what point Steve Miller understood that it was his future. I do know that I was in that 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 commercial records, Steve understood that what he did was commercial. He moved to Chicago. 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. And I had no sense that there was a career in the music business or that I could ever write a song or anybody would ever want to hear me. 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 fall down, literally. And that's what a pop career is a lot like. Put one foot in front of the other, don't fall down. Look behind you after 30 years, there's your career. 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 heard of. His name is Phil Woods. My next favorite would be another jazz musician named Johnny Griffin. These are American icons. See, jazz is a very special thing. Jazz came up out of the streets in the United States over the past hundred and some years. It was literally invented by people who had to invent themselves. They didn't do it for the money initially. 

And it's a mistake to say it was just black people or just Jewish people or just Irish people. It was American people. It really came out of the American experience and all the things went into it. 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 music and my heroes are still of that era. I find pop stars and the pop life really, really boring. Most pop stars are boring 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 what do they do? They drive their SUV to the mall 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. But that's being held out as, boy, if I could only be rich and famous like that. Tremendously boring. Petty. Nothing really going on there. Also, I'd like to point out, unsustainable. Trust me, in five years that way of life is going to be as far in the past as the '60s are today. 

We're headed into some very interesting and very difficult economic times. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur because, if we run out of questions I can explain to you why all the records I 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 explain a little bit of kind your records in Europe and kind of the successes you had over there versus in the States and why it is like that. >> Absolutely. Well, I've always been drawn to Europe because of the historical aspect. And in Europe, particularly for jazz musicians, first of all, jazz musicians in Europe 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 American. You go to France, most people are of French decent, Algerian decent too, but primarily French. You go to Japan, virtually everybody is Japanese. In America, who are we? We're everybody and that's our strength. The fact that it keeps refreshing itself, the American popular culture keeps getting refreshed. Right now the Hispanic influence is very important. We're being replenished, we're being replenished. So the Europeans sensed this 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. 

So about 30 years ago I started purposefully going and touring there, going there every year, 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 your CD or you're pitching something, 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. You're there. It's Tuesday night. People come to hear you. They have a drink. They have a cup of coffee. You're part of the life. You're not part of the merchandising. 

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. That's what you're doing. Here we're grabbing some food because, right? So to be a jazz musician, an American jazz musician in Europe is an entirely different animal, and once I got into that and I found out what it was and how to do it, I essentially stopped touring in the United States. I haven't really done a lot of touring here in decades. I play gigs. Somebody can hire me and I'll get on a plane with some musicians and fly somewhere and play the gig and come back. But I used to go out in the United States for 10 weeks with guys and we'd go from city to city and we'd wind up covering the country. I don't do that anymore. But in three weeks I am going to Europe, and I'll spend a week in London and a week in Paris and a couple weeks in Spain. 

It's totally different. And how long that can last, I don't know. But it's still the case. And I think it will be the case for some time because I think that is who they are and even though they're becoming more Americanized in terms of wanting that SUV and that mini-mansion and all that crap, they still have this history. >> Hi, my name is Hannah. I was just wondering since the very beginning of your career as a musician, what do you think the single most important lesson is that you've learned and what advice would you give to someone looking to do the same? >> The question is what's the single most important lesson I've learned as a musician. I know very clearly what that lesson is. I'm not exactly sure who specifically got it through to 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. I was so in awe of him. 

And after spending a little time with him I was asking some of the musicians who worked with him what Miles taught them. And they all said the same 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 only chance. Your best chance in life is to be yourself. That's your best shot. There's nobody like you. 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 that failure, as I said before, the way you recover from your perceived failure determines your style, determines who you are as an artist. So your best shot in every case is to understand that it's okay to be yourself. It's okay to like what you like, to go in the direction you're going in, and not only that, it's your best shot economically, artistically, that's your best shot. Really simple but very difficult. Yeah? >> Hey, Ben, I'm Brett. I'm a big fan of "Hoop Dreams." so I was just wondering, how did you go from recording in a studio all the time, like making albums, to making the soundtrack to two kids coming from Chicago to play basketball? >> "Hoop Dreams," the film was made by three filmmakers from Chicago and one of them, the director, photographer, Peter Gilbert, was an acquaintance of mine, a friend of mine. And before it became the film "Hoop Dreams," which by the way now, this is extraordinary, you know the Smithsonian has listed the hundred most important films of the 20th century, not only is "Hoop Dreams" on that list, "Hoop Dreams" is number one. I mean, "Citizen Kane" is number five or something. 

It's extraordinary how that happened. When I got involved with these guys, they didn't have enough money to make the film. They had gotten a little bit of money from Public Television and they were making a half-hour documentary called Higher Goals which was supposed to keep kids in school. And the idea was to show how many kids, particularly minority 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. And so they went to a playground, literally saw two kids shooting hoops, and decided to follow those two kids. That's what Hoop Dreams was. They followed them. They got involved. Years went by. They became so comfortable with the kids and their families that they were able to catch unbelievable footage. 

And they had all this footage and they needed some music just to make this little half-hour educational film that they had promised to make. And that's when Peter came to me. And they had no money. And I said, well, that's no problem. 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 stream of the kids shooting ball. And they're very different but they're totally related. So what I did was at home I tended to use solo instruments playing the compositions I wrote. 

Just very haunting because it mirrored the isolation. And when they're shooting ball I 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 sounds of basketball. I did maybe five times as much music as was required. And eventually they chose what they wanted and put it in the film. And that's how that happened. >> Hello. 

>> Hi. >> My name is Sarah. I'd like to say first I really appreciated your presentation today. I feel like a lot of our other 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. So my question is, as a designer, I have a really hard time putting a monetary value on my art, how do you reconcile kind of achieving your vision and reaching success with what you want to do artistically with finding financial success when a lot of the times it just isn't happening? >> 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. Again, put one foot in front of the other, don't fall down. You will be successful. You have to know that. So much of what comes through when you meet people is your confidence. And your confidence comes from knowing that. If you're good, you will do okay. People will want what you do. Getting paid is very difficult in the arts. Not just getting paid what 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 owed them still more money. 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, it's coming, don't worry. 

That's no. So you have to survive that. And there's no easy way and there's no straight answer or simple answer. But I think that the real thing that you're asking is when to fish or cut bait. And I say as long as what you're doing feels better than not doing it, then keep doing it. At some point if it's time to give up, you'll know. It just feels too bad to keep doing it. And that's no stigma. It's no stigma because the arts aren't holy or sacred. The arts are just hitting a tennis ball. 

It's physical. It's what you do, it's what you like to do. You can always have it in your life. >> I'm going to throw out a final question unless I see another hand. You mentioned Leo, your son, articulated his desire to become a musician pretty early in life. >> Yeah. >> And, of course, since then has become a renowned acclaimed artist, musician, and Academy Award winning, etc, what did you say to him when he told you he 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. And on the other hand, he was running through the streets of 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. I tried to teach him piano at one point. 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, if you have any alternative to being in the arts, take it. I didn't necessarily want him to be an accountant or a lawyer or anything, but I never, ever encouraged him to be a musician. 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. His first success came when he was 13 years old and I was 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 for a little bit. And he was 13 and we were on these buses and he had his own 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 fun time. And eventually, Steve wanted to make a record and he and Leo 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 my tombstone, "He wrote five songs for Steve Miller." I don't want that to be what people think of me. So he downplayed it. He didn't exploit it. I mean, 15 years old on a pop record, you could go to L.A. I could have exploited him. 

He could have been exploited. And we just sort of dealt with 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 a music major, the next thing he did is he decided that all he wanted to do is play music and that's all he did from that point on. He had a series of setbacks and a series of successes and they continue. >> Well, you clearly inspired Leo, and I know that you have inspired each of us today, Ben Sidran. Thank you so much for joining us today. >> My pleasure, Jeanan. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]