Ben Sidran

Jazz and Modernism: Architecture as Frozen Music. A Concert with Conversation

Over 55 years and 40 albums, including the Grammy nominated Concert for Garcia Lorca. Ben’s live repertoire has been a fluid collection of songs and stories. His performances are legendary for their mixture of swing, groove, and free-form philosophy, always infused with humor and hipster wisdom.

The jazz life was a profound experience because it was unique to a time and a place. The time being mid-twentieth century, the place being the American road.
— Ben Sidran

The harmonic structures used by American jazz musicians are remarkably similar to those used by 20th century American architects.  Both helped create a new sense of the future that was born in the 1920’s and flourished in the 1960’s, sending an aesthetic message to the world and ushering in a new era of style, cool, and transformation.  From Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis, Frank Lloyd Wright to William Krisel, how these two parallel 20th-century modernist movements, jazz and architecture, reshaped cultural landscapes by rethinking form, function, and the relationship between tradition and innovation.