Tiny Desk Concerts - Video

She came to the Tiny Desk a little unsure, and left singing "West Memphis" with intensity and passion. Lucinda Williams has a voice like no other, and it shines in these intimate moments. Williams is on a roll with a new double album, Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, which is filled with fresh and beautiful songs — all this from a songwriter known for working at a deliberate pace. Hearing her perform these new songs with her brilliant band was a rare and exciting treat. 

In the summer of 1971, I was a camp counselor at a sleep-away camp for a bunch of 5- to 7-year-olds. For those eight weeks, I walked home with about $50. I bought a guitar and began to learn the songs I'd come to love from the recently released Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens. "Father and Son" touched me most — it's a song about growing old, and about beliefs and conviction. More than 40 years later, that songwriter is performing at my desk with his son standing right behind me. You can never imagine the turns life will take. Nor could he. In 1976, Cat Stevens almost drowned off the coast of Malibu. In his panic, he says, he shouted, "Oh, God! If you save me, I will work for you" — at which point he recalls a wave that came and carried him ashore. He converted to Islam, changed his name and left the pop world after one last album in 1978. He finally returned in 2006, and now we have a new record, Tell 'Em I'm Gone. From that album of great blues covers and originals, produced with Rick Rubin, Yusuf plays some powerful new music, as well as the 1967 classic "The First Cut Is the Deepest" — and then brought me to tears by dedicating a version of "Father and Son" to me. As I walked around the office after this Tiny Desk Concert, I heard one story after another of an artist who has touched so many. It's a joy to have him back.

Close your eyes and listen, and you might imagine someone who looks a bit like Otis Redding. Open them, and you're likely to see someone who looks more like your neighborhood bank teller.   That man standing on my desk in the golden shoes is Paul Janeway. He was, in fact, a bank teller in Alabama not long ago — and this stupendous seven-piece band from Birmingham has only been doing this since 2012. But take a look at this Tiny Desk Concert and you'll see why St. Paul And The Broken Bones' music is so winning. It's got heart and soul and flair, with a well-worn sound buoyed by strong, fresh songwriting.

Don't ask the members of the Dublin Guitar Quartet to play the time-honored classics of the Spanish repertoire. They might play traditional Spanish style classical guitars, but they're not your standard guitar ensemble. The Dubliners are strictly devoted to contemporary music. They've been commissioning new pieces and adapting others for both acoustic and electric guitars since 2002, when the group formed at the Dublin Conservatory of Music and Drama. Dressed more like stylish bankers than hipsters, the musicians filed behind Bob Boilen's desk in matching suits and proceeded to make string quartet music by Philip Glass shine in a completely new way. Whether you know the Glass quartets or not, it's astonishing how satisfying the music sounds on four guitars. The interlocking parts are transparent and the music seems to breathe fresh air. The group's intonation is impeccable, the rhythms crisp and precise whether they are keeping the propulsive engine chugging or lurching to a sudden new arpeggio. Watch their heads, all bobbing in unison. In these arrangements by DGQ, the music is far more subtle than simple repetitions. Just a slight vibrato on the high notes in the third movement of the Second Quartet gives them a sweet, pearly sheen. And the slow section of Glass' Third Quartet, tender as a lullaby, is punctuated with carefully selected notes that hang in the air like fragrances. In other spots, brash strumming summons the spirit of flamenco. Glass' music has been a staple for these musicians, but they also play pieces by Steve Reich, Henryk Górecki and Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy. They've even paired with a couple of rock bands. With eight hands and 24 strings it seems the DGQ can tackle almost anything.

Sam Amidon takes traditional music and makes it his own. He might begin with a traditional murder ballad and then morph it into something of his own, fueled by Bill Frisell's languidly atmospheric guitar, Shahzad Ismaily's minimal but essential percussion and Amidon's own yearning voice. At other times, Amidon weaves his own new tunes into worn, weary, seemingly ageless sagas. Amidon has been doing this for a long time. In 1998, back when he was 16, NPR aired a story about his Vermont contra-dance band Popcorn Behavior, a group he'd assembled with his friend Thomas Bartlett (a.k.a. Doveman). Sixteen years later, Amidon has made a gorgeous new album, Lily-O, and performed a pair of its songs at the Tiny Desk — followed by "Short Life," from his 2013 album Bright Sunny South. 

Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo do mock-bickering as well as any long-married couple – which, of course, is exactly what they are. More notably, they've formed a commercial and creative juggernaut spanning more than three decades, with the Brooklyn-born Benatar singing and Giraldo working as her guitarist, producer and fellow songwriter. Benatar's recording career spans a dozen studio albums, seven of which have sold more than a million copies, and has yielded multiple Grammy Awards and some remarkably sturdy staples of the classic-rock canon. Though most widely associated with a string of chart-toppers in the late '70s through the '80s — "Love Is A Battlefield," "Heartbreaker," et al — Benatar and Giraldo still draw huge crowds, for reasons made abundantly clear here. Classically trained as a mezzo-soprano, Benatar still possesses a formidable instrument, and the pair's songs have lost none of their appeal in the intervening decades. And, of course, the duo performs with an agreeable mixture of lighthearted banter, chops and charm.   At the Tiny Desk, Benatar and Giraldo ran through three of their classic songs: 1979's "We Live For Love," 1984's "We Belong" and, after a long and satisfying windup, 1981's "Promises In The Dark.”

The loudest guy in the world came to the Tiny Desk to perform some of his quietest music. Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis, for years a guy who's turned my ears red, showed up armed with just an acoustic guitar. I even had an amp for that guitar all lined up, but he decided to not plug in. So we get a rare treat: a low-key J Mascis, performing emotional songs from his new album Tied To A Star, as well as Dinosaur Jr.'s classic "Little Fury Things." If you think Mascis draws all his power from sheer volume, this ought to convince you otherwise.

Davíd Garza was already a favorite son for folks in Austin when I discovered a collection of his past works, filled with stunning songwriting and a voice that seemed familiar yet new. Once I heard his music, I knew I'd always look forward to whatever he produced. Being a fan of Garza means accepting the world on his terms — and his world is filled with infinite musical possibilities. He's got a tremendous collection of musical friends who call on him for his work as a backup musician in studio sessions and on stage. For example, he and vocalist Gaby Moreno (already a Tiny Desk veteran) have been touring together lately, and you get a taste of her powerful voice as she joins Garza here.

 Mix a bit of yodeling with Tuvan throat singing, add in a pinch of Sardinian cantu a tenore, fold in compositions from cutting-edge composers and you have the vocal group Roomful of Teeth. This eight-voice ensemble, which includes the 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, is gleefully dismantling the traditional definition of ensemble singing right before our ears (and teeth!). Musical descendants of the innovative extended vocal techniques of Meredith Monk, the Teeth tend to make sounds — some sweet, others alarming — that you probably haven't heard from a group of humans. In Australian composer Wally Gunn's "The Fence is Gone," verses emerge from an infrastructure of "oh-ha" syllables and a simple drum pulse, ending with women's voices, tight in harmony, like a chord from a Casio keyboard. In Rinde Eckert's "Cesca's View," imagine a lonely cowgirl on some windswept plain. Estelí Gomez gets her yodel on, beautifully, while the three other women vocalize in close, barbershop-style harmony. It literally ends on a high note. To finish, Teeth founder and director Brad Wells contributes "Otherwise." Warm, rounded tones in male voices contrast with a steely sheen from the women and a high drone like a Tibetan singing bowl. The harmonies take a tangy, almost Bulgarian turn, then we get something truly otherworldly. A pulsing, slightly creepy Sardinian "bim-bom" vocalise buzzes like a gigantic cicada. Dashon Burton's operatic baritone soars above it all. The agility of the voices and multicolored blend they achieve are extraordinary. As the applause faded away, one of the Teeth said, "Thanks for letting us yell at you." No, I think it's we who are grateful — and perhaps a little stunned

When Los Lobos' Steve Berlin sent me an audio file of a band he was producing, I stopped what I was doing and listened closely. There was something about the energy coming from Enrique Chi's vocals as the rest of Making Movies enveloped him in sound. The band has been making fans across the country one gig at a time, one song at a time — whether singing in English or Spanish, whether playing guitars or stringed instruments that come directly from Making Movies' ancestral Panama, whether playing drums or dancing a Mexican zapateado.  One of the joys of co-hosting Alt.Latino for the last four and half years has been the way the show has helped me discover new artists who make me feel as if I've been listening to them for years. It's going to a fun ride watching this young band grow and develop from such a strong start. Watch the video here and join us on the ground floor.

Sun Ra was a big-band innovator, a pioneer of recording and playing with electronics, a poet, a cosmic philosopher, a bandleader and a keyboard innovator who claimed to be from Saturn. Herman Poole Blount would have turned 100 in 2014 had he not left us more than 20 years ago. But his spirit lives on, and so does his long-running band. On Halloween 2014, the Sun Ra Arkestra — complete with costumes inspired by Egyptian symbolism and science fiction — performed a rousing, out-of-this-world Tiny Desk Concert. The band was led by 91-year-old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who's been with the Arkestra since the early 1950s. All these years later, no one makes soul-stirring, spaced-out jazz quite like the Arkestra.  

Tiny Desk Concerts often require creative and logistical transformations, from electric bands going acoustic to big bands squashing into a tiny space to many players gathering around a single microphone. But the setting is particularly challenging for vocalists, especially those accustomed to heavy production, effects or — in the case of recent guest T-Pain — generous dollops of Auto-Tune. T-Pain's effects-less set grabbed more attention at the time, given the extent to which digital alterations are expected of him, but this performance by Banks is, in its own way, an even greater high-wire act. Banks' terrific full-length debut, Goddess, is constructed out of layer upon layer of electronics, beats, samples and other means of submerging the singer's voice in swirling accoutrements. With assistance from keyboardist/guitarist John Anderson and percussionist Derek Taylor, she's not all alone behind the Tiny Desk, but her expressive voice is fully exposed here. Kicking off her three-song set with "Beggin For Thread," Banks sets the scene in vulnerable, breathily seething fashion before opening the throttle in her choruses. On record, she's placed at the center of lavish productions, each suitable for throbbing remixes and banks of swirling lights. At the Tiny Desk, though, she serves notice that she's a powerful singer in her own right — and that heavy production needn't be the product of necessity.

T-Pain's fingerprints are all over pop and R&B and hip-hop. He wasn't the first musician to use Auto-Tune as an instrument — he noticed it on a Jennifer Lopez remix, and remembers "Deep" well — but it was, as he says, his style. For a while, in the mid-2000s, he lived at the top of the charts. He dominated that brief moment of our lives when ringtones were a thing. He was celebrated as an innovator, and he happily took his talents where he was invited, which was everywhere. But somewhere along the way, somebody got it twisted. "People felt like I was using it to sound good," says T-Pain, in an interview that will air on All Things Considered. "But I was just using it to sound different.” He just turned 30, but T-Pain has already done enough to drop a greatest hits album next week. We asked him if he'd grace the Tiny Desk without any embellishment or effects to show what's really made his career: his voice, and those songs.

An abundance of facial hair is not restricted to the sensitive male indie-rocker set. Three of the four players in the Danish String Quartet could easily pass for hipster Brooklyn beard farmers. "We are simply your friendly neighborhood string quartet with above average amounts of beard," the group's website says. Yet what's really important about the ensemble is how they play — and judging from this performance behind Bob Boilen's desk, these Nordic lads possess warmth, wit, a beautiful tone and technical prowess second to none. Like most string quartets, they thrive on classics by Brahms, Beethoven, Haydn and the like. But this group recently took a musical detour that landed them in the foggy inlets of the Faroe Islands (a Danish outpost halfway between Norway and Iceland) and various Nordic hamlets where folk tunes are played and passed on. "Folk music is the music of small places," the quartet notes on its new album Wood Works, which includes the tunes in this concert. "It is the local music, but as such it is also the music of everyone and everywhere." You don't own folk music, the band believes, you simply borrow it for a while. Violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin begin with a set of wedding tunes, some dating back some 400 years and still in use today. Then they pair up an old Danish dance that feels like an Irish jig with a traditional Danish reel from near their home base, Copenhagen. And to close, a slow, evocative wedding dance, in a wistful arrangement by their friend Nikolaj Busk that conjures a lonely fjord shrouded in mist. The young musicians may only be borrowing this music, but we're awfully pleased they lent a little of it to us.

Anthony D'Amato sings and writes in the tradition of Bruce Springsteen or Josh Ritter: His songs sound friendly musically, but they also tackle the difficult and the twisted. Like those great songwriters, D'Amato's work is universal without devolving into moping. There's also a spirit to these songs, as it's easy to imagine a crowd spontaneously backing these his powerful choruses. His new album The Shipwreck From The Shore can feel Motown-y, garage-y and Springsteen-y, and all that production serves these gems well. But here at my desk, D'Amato's music is more spare, as the four other musicians simply serve the lyrics and the stories they tell. It's a good entry point if you don't know his music. Then, when you do hear the album, an extra treat awaits.