JAZZ cat!
Actually, I’d call this number from jazz/R&B/pop/rock legend Ben Sidran more blues than it is anything else, but that’s probably just me. See what you think, bearing closely in mind Rule #1 with all things musical: Always go with what your heart tells ya.
The brilliantly understated piano and guitar solos work together with the likewise spare but quite tasteful fills from the tremolo-soaked Stratocaster and that perfect Hammond B3/Leslie pairing to juice this modest piece right on up to genuine “earwig” status. Sidran’s laid-back vocal stylings are just the icing on a VERY tasty cake; he and his backing musicians play so far behind the beat here that they’re in serious danger of having it come around behind to lap their asses.
Sidran has been kicking out the jams since about 1960 or so, winning his spurs with an insanely wide variety of fellow artists. To wit:
Ben Hirsh Sidran (born August 14, 1943) is an American jazz and rock keyboardist, producer, label owner, and music writer. Early in his career he was a member of the Steve Miller Band and is the father of Grammy-nominated musician, composer and performer Leo Sidran.
Sidran was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, where he became a member of The Ardells with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. When Miller and Scaggs left Wisconsin for the West Coast, Sidran stayed behind to earn a degree in English literature. After graduating in 1966, he enrolled at the University of Sussex, England, to pursue a PhD. While in England, he was a session musician for Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, and Charlie Watts.
Sidran joined Steve Miller as keyboardist and songwriter on recording projects, appearing on the albums Brave New World, Your Saving Grace, Number 5, and Recall the Beginning…A Journey from Eden. He produced Recall the Beginning and co-wrote the hit song “Space Cowboy.” In 1988, he produced Miller’s jazz album Born 2B Blue. He has also produced albums for Mose Allison, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones, and Diana Ross.
Sidran returned to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1971 and has spent most of his life there. He taught courses at the university (on the business of music) and beginning in 1981 hosted jazz radio programs for NPR (including the Peabody Award-winning Jazz Alive series) and TV programs for VH1 (where his New Visions series in the early 1990s won the Ace Award). While hosting that series, Sidran frequently expressed his desire to “demystify the world of jazz; jazz musicians are just like the rest of us, only more so.”
As a musician and a producer he has released over 35 solo recordings.
And even that catalog of achievement, remarkable as it is, is but the tip of the Ben Sidran iceberg. There’s a way-cool backstory for the above embed, specifically the title shared by both song and album.
The original idea for Rainmaker was to throw a party in a Paris recording studio in honor of my 80th birthday. I saw it as a way to celebrate the survival of so many things, including myself, a life without borders, and my friendship with so many musicians abroad.
I imagined that it would be a blues record, so I began by writing some original blues songs and revisiting some of my favorite classic blues too. But as often happens, what we discover is not necessarily what we were looking for, and in this case I found myself writing songs that felt dystopian, not all of them traditional blues forms, and not what you might imagine as “party music”.
But by the time we finished recording at Studio de Meudon with new and old friends from America and France, the record had found its own sound. Somewhere between tragic and celebratory, shaggy and polished, broken and healed, I guess you could say that Rainmaker really is all about surviving in the modern world.
“Just like the rest of us, only more so.” Yeah, you sure said yourself a mouthful there, Ben.
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