Ben Sidran - Picture Him Happy (2017) [Official Digital Download]

The jazz hipster is a kind of quirky subgenre that has been around since the late 40s or so, appearing about the time of the beboppers. They combine beat poetry with clever, often tongue-in-cheek lyrics accompanied by bop-oriented jazz. There have been a couple generations of them, going back to Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks, along with Bob Dorough, Mose Allison and Dave Frishberg. It’s a genre that has few, if any new significant performers coming up. But Ben Sidran carries on, through an interesting and varied career.

Ben Sidran got into music early in his native Wisconsin, where he still lives, playing boogie woogie piano starting at age six. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he met and formed a band with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. The latter two went to the West Coast to try their hand at music, while Sidran continued his academic pursuits, eventually receiving a Ph.D. at the University of Sussex in England. He returned and joined Miller and Scaggs in the Steve Miller Band, appearing on their early classic albums, and co-writing some of their hits, such as Space Cowboy. He returned to Madison, Wisconsin, to teach and also became a Public Radio host for the Peabody-Award winning Jazz Alive, and an interview program called Sidran on Record. All through this time, he has been putting out an album almost every year, as well as authoring at least three books on jazz, one of which was based on his doctoral thesis. He has also worked in a sideman capacity.

Joining Sidran are his son Leo, who has played drums on his father’s last several albums, plus A-list bass player Will Lee, jazz and funk guitarist Will Bernard, John Ellis on sax, along with Moses Patrou on percussion. His new album is another hipster kind of record, with jaundiced, sometimes sardonic lyrics provided with a litttle smirk, and in the process making some keen observations. The album is also a bit of elegy to one of the icons of the jazz hipsters, Mose Allison, who died last year, with an original song about him and covers of two tunes by Allison, one of his earliest and of Allison’s last songs, with both conveying the clever, but vaguely snarky outlook of most Mose Allison songs. The sound is somewhat similar to Sidran’s other recent albums, with the composer-vocalist on mainly electric piano, with the band playing a beat that ran range from a laid back ballad to a couple of old-time boogaloos. Often the music has a funky tinge. It covers a range of subjects, with the recurring theme of something underhanded going on.

PICTURE HIM HAPPY is a response to the saying that our music is made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions: you often can’t affect what happens but you can determine how you respond to it. It’s a record that’s right on time.

The central image is that of Sisyphus, the mythical man doomed to push the same rock up the same hill for eternity. French philosopher Albert Camus suggested that given the similarity between the life of Sisyphus and our lives today, the only reasonable response is to try to imagine him happy – hence the title of this project. We live in hard, frustrating times – perhaps we always have – and now more than ever, we need to turn to the music to make this hill we climb bearable.

With logic like that, we give you ANOTHER OLD BULL, a song about Trump and all the other little trumps out there. The antidote to their cynicism and self regard is found in the prescient music of the late Mose Allison, whose personal wisdom and wise words are recounted in TOO MUCH TOO LATE as well as in one of the first songs he wrote, BIG BROTHER, and one of his last, WAS. Mose was a shining light of reason in a world of dark dissemblance.
The song I COULD BE WRONG recounts what we’ve lost and the song EVERYBODY’S FAKING IT explains how we lost it. And for levity, there’s a love song to the New York subway that brings the hipsters in and out of Brooklyn, THANK GOD FOR THE F TRAIN, and a jaundiced look back at our communal COLLEGE experience.

All together, twelve songs, recorded in a hot three days in a Park Slope studio with Will Lee on bass, Will Bernard on guitar, John Ellis on saxophone, Leo Sidran on drums and the inimitable Moses Patrou and Trixie Waterbed.

If music is not only a reflection of our lives but a way to understand it, this album, once again, establishes Ben Sidran—in the words of DownBeat magazine—as “the voice of his generation”.

Tracklist:

01 - College
02 - Discount Records
03 - Picture Him Happy (Sisphus Goes To Work)
04 - I Might Be Wrong
05 - Too Much Too Late (What Mose Said)
06 - Shaboogie
07 - Faking It
08 - Thank God for the F Train
09 - Another Old Bull
10 - Big Brother
11 - Who Are You
12 - Was

Produced & Mixed by Leo Sidran. Mastered by UE Nastasi at Sterling Sound, NYC.
Recorded by Leo Sidran & Tomek Miernowski at Electric Poodle Studio, Brooklyn.

Musicians:
Ben Sidran - Wurlitzer, voice
Leo Sidran - drums, backing vocal
Will Lee - bass, backing vocal
Will Bernard - guitar
John Ellis - saxophone
Moses Patrou - percussion
Trixie Waterbed - backing vocal


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