Mar 11, 2026
When I arrived in Palm Springs last month, a few days before the
concert-lecture I was to play with my father, Ben Sidran, I found
him surrounded by months of research notes, trying to wrestle his
ideas into something coherent.
The performance was part of the Palm Springs International Jazz
Festival during the city’s annual Modernism Week, and it grew out
of an earlier program we presented at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd
Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. What began as
a playful idea about the relationship between architecture and
music gradually expanded into a deeper exploration of the natural
structures that shape both.
Along the way we found ourselves diving into the harmonic series,
overtones, Fibonacci sequence, and the physics of vibration, asking
how these natural phenomena influence the way we hear rhythm,
harmony, and beauty.
Drawing on conversations with musicians like Gil Goldstein, Howard
Levy, and Jacob Collier, the episode is part personal story, part
philosophical inquiry, and part behind-the-scenes look at how
creative work actually gets made.
And how, in the end, even the most abstract ideas often begin the
same way: with a gig.
www.third-story.com
www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story
www.leosidran.substack.com/