Public radio often talks about “driveway moments,” listening experiences that keep you in your car listening even after you’ve reached your destination. Trombonist and bandleader Joe Fiedler had one that changed his life and set him on a career path that brings him and his Open Sesame band to The Treelawn on Friday.
If you haven’t heard of Fiedler, 59, you’ve probably heard him hundreds of times without knowing it, especially if you have children. As the music director of “Sesame Street” for the last 15 years, he’s written around 15,000 musical cues, a third of which he performs on too.
But it wouldn’t have happened without Fiedler’s driveway moment. It happened when he was a math major at the University of Pittsburgh in his hometown dreaming of a career in music. Driving home from his girlfriend’s house one night he hear a remarkable sound in the radio. “I’m like, holy shit! This is how I want to play ,” he said from his home studio in Westchester County, New York. “I pulled the car to the side of the road because I didn’t want to miss hearing who it was. It turned out to be [trombonist] Ray Anderson, and then my whole life changed.”
Did it ever. Fiedler headed for New York where his solid technique and adventurous spirit made him an indispensable man on the try-anything downtown scene. Fiedler also played 350 nights a year on New York’s Latin music scene. It was enjoyable but exhausting.
“B” Is For Big Break
“Then I got a call out of nowhere to play a Broadway show,” Fiedler said. “It was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first show ‘In the Heights.’ They wanted the lead trumpet and lead trombone player to be guys who were from the Latin scene.” Check and double-check.
One of the orchestrators on the show was Bill Sherman, Miranda’s roommate at the time. When he became music director for “Sesame Street,” Sherman remembered Fiedler and asked him to write some arrangements. The two worked well together and before long the trombonist was brought on board to write and play for the beloved children’s program. Some 400 episodes later, he’s still at it.
“We have about 35 session weeks that are really big weeks for me,” Fiedler said. It’s an intensive schedule, but one that leaves four months for writing, recording and touring. “I try to put out a new record and do at least a tour or two a year.”
Fiedler leads a jazz trio and the raucous Big Sackbut band playing mostly his original compositions, but when Open Sesame tours, it doesn’t stray far from the neighborhood. The genius of “Sesame Street” is the way it slips witty adult humor into a children’s show. In that same way, Open Sesame refracts these beloved songs through a sly sensibility that explodes with the joy of communal musicmaking and inspired silliness.
Somebody come and play
Call it an extension of these musicians’ personalities. “All three of us have that serious side yet the super playful side, but we’re all kind of coming at it from three different places,” Fiedler said, speaking of his front-line partners, slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein and tenor saxophonist Jeff Lederer. “We’re all good foils for one another and we all can cover so much terrain from way inside to way outside.”
That nudges familiar tunes like “Rubber Duckie” or “C Is for Cookie” —melodies that many of us grew up with—into new directions. But the magic word that unlocks the Open Sesame sound is groove. The crackling backbeats of drummer Michael Sarin and pushy bass of Fima Ephron, who steps in for Sean Conly on this tour, bring the a joyous if unlikely touch of the dancefloor to favorites like “People In Your Neighborhood” and “I Love Trash.”
On the current tour, the core quintet will be joined by Jon Irabagon, a saxophone provocateur whose antic sensibility and riotous musical humor were honed in Moppa Elliot’s Mostly Other People Do The Killing. He’ll fit right in.
All of this promises a highly entertaining evening for the audience. But who is the audience for a wild and woolly jazz band doing “Sesame Street” covers?
“I have no idea because, you know what? I haven’t figured it out,” Fiedler said, “There’s some people who come because they’re obsessed with the Muppets. Sometimes it’s young people. Sometimes there’s no young people. It’s wild, man.” Wild: that might be the best way to summarize Open Sesame’s style—an evening of driveway moments that you can enjoy indoors.
Joe Fiedler’s Open Sesame, Fri., Sept. 20, 8 p.m., Treelawn Social Club, 15335 Waterloo Rd, Cleveland, Tickets $10-25, all ages, available here.
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
