Jazz/rock artist Ben Sidran has moved from performing with the Steve Miller Band to setting Jewish prayers to a swinging beat
Ben Sidran sits behind a table at the back of a posh Santa Monica bookstore signing copies of his last book, "Talking Jazz: An Illustrated Oral History." It contains the transcripts of 50 conversations with jazz giants like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Herbie Hancock, originally broadcast on "Sidran on Record," the National Public Radio (NPR) program he hosted from 1985 to 1990.
Yet many of the people who show up to meet Sidran don't seem terribly interested in the book. What they really want to know is where they can get a copy of "Life's a Lesson," Sidran's independently produced album in which he successfully fuses contemporary American jazz with Jewish liturgical
music.
"I've looked everywhere for the damned thing," a bearded man in his late 30s says to Sidran. "Who do I have to kill for one?"
Sidran can't offer a quick fix. The rush for "Life's a Lesson" had begun a few months earlier after a broadcast of NPR's Weekend Edition show featuring Sidran and cuts from the album. He brought a stack of CDs to the signing, and they sold out in 15 minutes. But with no national distributor, they are hard to find in shops, and are largely being sold through mail order.
Sidran is a man of 50 who looks like he might be your dentist. Happily married with teenage kids, he lives in the burbs of Madison, Wisconsin. The only giveaway of his background in music is the staccato manner in which he speaks of his passion for jazz. But there is nothing about him that suggests he is the same fellow who has jammed on keyboards with rock legends like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, and who earned his own footnote in pop history by writing the memorably goofy lyrics for the Steve Miller Band's late 60s hit, "Space Cowboy" (I'm a space cowboy/I bet you weren't ready for that/I'm a space cowboy/I'm sure you know where it's at). The song, he'll tell you, was about Miller, not him.
"I still like Space Cowboy,'" he says, "but long after it's been forgotten, I think people will still be listening to Life's a Lesson.'"
Ben Sidran was born in Chicago to firstgeneration Americans of Russian stock and raised in the small Illinois city of Racine. There were only 500 Jewish families, in a Catholic and Lutheran population of 100,000; he and his sister were the only Jews at his high school.
"I experienced some significant antiSemitism around the same period I discovered jazz, roughly from 1956 to 1958," he recalls. "I had assumed being Jewish was something we did on Saturdays. When I was maybe 11, though, my best friend asked me why I killed Christ, and whether it was true we drank the blood of Christian babies during Passover."
With jazz in place of Judaism as his "spiritual center," Sidran attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied history, hoping to teach college.
The university was a counterculture hotbed during the 60s, and he fell in with a jazzloving crowd of largely Jewish exNew Yorkers. He drifted into rock, and played in a band that included future rock stars Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs.
Upon graduation, he left for England, for doctoral work in American studies at the University of Sussex, where he successfully avoided the U.S. draft. When the Steve Miller Band came to England in the late 60s to make a record, Sidran sat in with them and wrote "Space Cowboy," their breakthrough hit. He also worked as a session player for British rockers like Clapton and the Stones.
After receiving his doctorate, Sidran returned to the U.S. Facing a glut of college teachers looking for work, he went to Los Angeles to become a record producer specializing in contemporary jazz, and toured with the Steve Miller Band. He has also written several books about jazz, and spent six years hosting "Jazz Alive," his interview program on NPR.
In the early 80s, Sidran returned to live in Madison with his wife Judy and their young son Leo. It was Leo, now 17, who inadvertently inspired "Life's a Lesson." Despite his own alienation from Jewish life, Sidran wanted to give his son some sense of identity as a Jew. This yearning brought his family, about a decade ago, to a small, alternative High Holy Days service at the Gates of Heaven, the oldest synagogue in Wisconsin.
The services featured guitar accompaniment by Hannah Rosenthal, a former Jerusalem seminary student now chairing the state Democratic party. Sidran later took over the musical chores on piano, and the shul's services now attract standingroomonly crowds.
The idea for making a record came when Sidran realized that there really wasn't any Jewish music he knew of in the U.S. he has never been to Israel, and admits to a dearth of awareness of the Israeli scene that sounded contemporary. "There was no record I could put on for my son," he says, "that sounded like the music I listen to."
"Life's a Lesson" features some 15 cuts, with vocals supplied by Sidran himself, two Jewish singers folk star Lynette and singer/songwriter Carole King and instrumentals by a veritable who's who of contemporary Jewish jazz artists Bob Berg, Randy Brecker, Eddie Daniels, Lee Konitz, Mike Mainieri and Josh Redman. Most are traditional Jewish prayers and songs "Hineh Mah Tov," "Yedid Nefesh," "Kol Nidre" set to unorthodox modern jazz melodies composed by Sidran. There are also swinging renditions of more contemporary Hebrew music "Eli, Eli" and "Hatikvah" and the album's title
track, an original English composition penned by Sidran ("Life's a lesson, you can fail it/You can set your spirit free or jail it") which has become a regular feature of his synagogue's service.
While Sidran was able to enlist enthusiastic contributions from the many Jewish artists who perform on the album, he had less luck with the Jewish recording industry executives he approached to support his effort. With no small irony and a hint of bitterness, he says the backing for the album came from "the Axis powers" a small Japanese recording company he works with, and their German distributors.
"Life's a Lesson" was released last autumn with little fanfare, and has sold some 20,000 copies through mail order (Go Jazz Records, P.O. Box 2023, Madison, WI, 53701) and Judaica retailers. It received positive reviews from jazz critics, and Sidran thinks it might have
a crack at a Grammy if there were a single category in which it could get nominated. He points out that there are at least five Christian categories, and two for Gospel music, but none that might accommodate a jazz/Jewish liturgical fusion. He's written a letter complaining about this to Mike Green, the Jewish president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
"I said that, given the contribution of Jews to popular music in this country, wasn't it ironic that there was no category for contemporary Jewish music?"
Sidran has yet to receive a reply.