Dec 21, 2018

As a boy in Detroit, Michigan, Rick Margitza’s mother asked him “do you want to hear a recording of your grandfather playing cello”? Then she put on the Charlie Parker with Strings album. After hearing Charlie Parker play, Rick knew that he wanted to be a jazz saxophone player.

Margitza’s paternal grandfather, a...

Dec 7, 2018

Joe Dart was on his way to Boston. He had enrolled in the Berklee College of music - a somewhat inevitable step for the young, very talented bass player from rural Michigan who loved funk and soul music. Although he had already been performing regularly in and around his home of Harbor Spriannngs, Michigan, he knew he...

Nov 12, 2018

John Fields was a normal kid growing up in a normal family in the Boston suburbs, in prime position to take over his father’s hosiery business. Instead, he moved to Minneapolis straight after high school to hang out with his uncle Steve Greenberg, whose hit “Funkytown” had been a huge international success.

Fields...

Oct 16, 2018

John Leventhal thinks his initial, preanalytical ideas are the good ones. John Leventhal realized that there “really is no daddy, there isn’t anybody who really has it all together, knows all the answers. You’re kind of in the wilderness. You have to take a chance to fail.” John Leventhal isn’t sure how to...

Sep 30, 2018

Mary Sweeney needs some air. “There has to be a flow of fast and slow, and a pause to allow the listener or the spectator to digest and to project their own thoughts.” She thinks I should leave more space in my podcasts, to let it breathe. She tells me this as we sit in the screened in porch behind her summer house...