Ben Sidran at the North Street Cabaret

Ben Sidran has been a major force in the modern-day history of jazz and popular music, having played keyboards with or produced such artists as Van Morrison, Diana Ross, Michael Franks, Rickie Lee Jones, Mose Allison and Steve Miller. A jazz pianist of international renown, lyricist of a rock classic, award-winning national broadcaster, record and video producer, scholar, author, journalist, and father to a second-generation musical prodigy, Sidran makes your average Renaissance man look like a slacker. Born in Chicago in 1943—his father was a friend of Saul Bellow’s—Sidran was raised in the industrial lakeshore city of Racine, Wisconsin, going up to Madison to play keyboards at frat-house parties while still a teenager in 1960. The next year he was enrolled at the university, playing dates on campus and around town. He soon joined the Ardells, a Southern comfort party band led by frat boy singer Steve Miller and his friend Boz Scaggs. But when Miller and Scaggs went west to become stars, Sidran stayed to complete his degree in English lit.

After graduating from the UW, Sidran moved to England to pursue a degree in American Studies at the University of Sussex, in Brighton. But when the Steve Miller Band came to England the following year to record with the legendary British engineer Glyn Johns, Sidran found himself back on the two-track life of academia and music. It started with his haunting harpsichord break on Scaggs’ “Baby’s Calling Me Home” for the Miller band’s debut album, “Children of the Future.” A little later on, Ben would pen the lyrics for Miller’s “Space Cowboy,” earning a place in rock history (and enough royalties to pay for his graduate degrees).