316: Ben Sidran - Jazz and Modernism

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.

With Billy Peterson and Ben Sidran in Palm Springs, February 2026.

Drawing on conversations with musicians 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.