Leo Sidran

What's Trending is Leo Sidran’s eighth solo record. In many ways it picks up where his celebrated 2021 release The Art Of Conversation left off. If The Art was a “hymn to empathy” (El Pais, Spain) and “a treasure chest of intimate and introspective portraits of family life during the pandemic” (West Coast Soul, Germany), this latest release is a hip, deeply personal exploration of how music can make life more livable in difficult times.

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.

Mucho Leo is Sidran's fourth record as a solo artist, but his first in a decade, and when we say "solo," well, Sidran not only sings and plays everything on this new effort, he could also take credit for recording and mixing the album. It makes complete sense, says Sidran, "It's a very personal project, and after a long period of working behind the scenes, it's an important creative statement for me, but I also have a larger story to tell."

In the song “The Cool School,” Michael Franks asks, “Am I dinosaur? Yeah you bet. I grew up listening to Mose and Chet […] me I attended the Cool School.” In a few short lines he describes what many jazz fans today are feeling: he’s an insider, his influences are hip and classic, a member of a small club, the kind of club that is both impossible to join and to which everyone can belong.