Jean Picard
Always casual, forever cool, 75-year-old jazzman Ben Sidran is Madison’s original hipster. Sidran says it was no sweat sorting through decades of recordings to choose what would make it onto his three-CD career retrospective. Proof positive that he searches through his music the same way he plays it. And man, does he play a lot of music in Ben There, Done That: Ben Sidran Live
Around the World (1975-2015).
Truth is, he had already done the heavy lifting by the time Sunset Blvd Records contacted him last year with the idea for the project. “I had gone through more than a hundred hours of recorded concerts to digitize the material before I turned all my archives over to the UW last spring — so I knew where some of my favorite recordings were,” he reports from Madrid, Spain, where he is mid-tour. “Then I narrowed it down to the 27 songs that had the best feeling — that is, they represented the music, the musicians and the audience at their finest. It wasn’t hard at all. It was actually a pleasure.” Those 27 tracks have, until now, never been released.
With a head full of Miles Davis and Horace Silver, Sidran arrived in Madison from his hometown Racine as a UW-Madison freshman in 1961. Madison has been the launching pad for his journeys ever since: local collaborations with fellow Madison travelers Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs; academic pursuits that led to a doctorate at the University of Sussex; recording contracts, national radio shows, and always, always gigging.
Ben There is a worthy sampler of the artist’s career so far. He chose all live performances for the project because, as he put it, in concert “the music comes alive … and the musicians sometimes wind up chasing after it rather than merely playing it.”
The package is not chronological. The cuts zig-zag back and forth in time but flow together, one after the next, like a well-charted jazz number. Tracks were recorded in clubs in cities all over the world including London, Milan, Paris and Tokyo. One track, the be-bopping “House of Blue Lights,” was captured at the top of State Street at a Wednesday night “Jazz at Five” set.
Sidran’s dynamic piano and vocals are surrounded by members of a rotating core band. Bassist Billy Peterson and drummer Leo Sidran (Ben’s son) seem to read each other’s minds on songs such as “Ballin’ on the Reservation,” recorded in 2000 in Madrid. Saxophonists — including Bob Rockwell, Phil Woods and Bob Malach — each throw their own distinctive punches. And throughout the three CDs, the listener can’t escape the sensation that Sidran is one hell of a band leader.
Malach plays on the “Blue Lights” cut recorded in Madison, a track Sidran says surprised him on rediscovery because of its “energy, passion and spur-of-the-moment improvisation.” Sidran says he was also pleasantly surprised to find the version of “New York State of Mind” recorded in 2001 at the London Pizza Express as a trio with Malach on sax and Leo Sidran on drums. Ben lets his piano color inside the melody on this one, while his vocal take is close to a recitation — the way a streetcar operator might declare the stops while rumbling through a New York borough.
Sidran has always had large followings overseas, and more than half of the cuts on Ben There were recorded outside the U.S. “In Europe and Japan I am part of the ongoing dialogue about American popular culture and the evolution of jazz. The conversations I have while overseas are almost always more wide-ranging and interesting than those in the States,” says Sidran. “In Europe, the conversation is much broader, reaching into subjects like man’s fate (Malraux), the pros and cons of popular will, and the stubborn pervasiveness of racism in America.”
The CD package is a limited release. Only 3,000 copies were made. It comes with a 24-page companion book that reads like a jazz novella, brimming with insights on 40 years of music and its master.
