Tiny Desk Concerts - Video

In pop-music circles, Suzanne Vega is known almost entirely for two songs from the late 1980s: the child-abuse ballad "Luka" and a song that launched literally dozens of dance remixes, "Tom's Diner." But Vega has been making vital, inventive music the entire time — much of it folk-based, though her sound has taken many smart detours along the way — and is about to put out her first album of original material in seven years, Tales From the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles. The challenge, then, lies in capturing a snapshot of her career in only four songs. For this Tiny Desk Concert — performed with her brilliant guitarist and producer, Gerry Leonard — Vega splits the difference evenly between old and new, bookending her set with the aforementioned classics and tucking two about-to-be-released songs in the middle. Game and good-spirited throughout, Vega performed "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" as if she hadn't played them thousands of times before — aided greatly by Leonard, who's worked extensively with David Bowie and lends these songs an extraordinary amount of color and texture. (Check out the "bells" he adds near the end of "Tom's Diner.") Vega's songwriting gifts haven't waned at any point in her long career, and the new songs here — taken from a concept album about the way our world and the spiritual realm intersect — sound as sharp as anything she's done. It only makes sense that, nearly 30 years after her debut, she still examines new realms with grace, empathy and an explorer's spirit.

Truth be told, I was scared. We've stuffed a lot of musicians behind the Tiny Desk, but when I saw Fanfare Ciocarlia (pronounced "fan-FAR-eh cho-car-LEE-ah") at Globalfest the week before the band arrived at NPR, I couldn't fathom how we'd corral these 12 musicians and their various assorted horns and drums into that truly tiny space. But the day this joyous Balkan brass band from the Romanian village of Zece Pr?jini came to play, it was one of the happiest days I've experienced at our new building. From wedding songs to American rock 'n' roll to the occasional James Bond theme, the group plays at a pace that would make the Ramones burst into a sweat. When you get hooked and want more, find Fanfare Ciocarlia's new record, Devil's Tale. It will help make your parties the stuff of blissful memories.

The windowsills were lined with people standing, as every nook between every office desk filled to capacity with NPR employees and their assorted guests. Pixies, after getting misplaced for a time in our parking garage during a moment worthy of This Is Spinal Tap, showed up in time to encounter the largest crowd we've ever assembled for a Tiny Desk Concert. (Our new office space allows for more guests than the old one did, but it's still a mark of this band's significance for so many youthful grownups.) Black Francis played an acoustic guitar for this set, while drummer David Lovering set up a simple snare and a cymbal, tapping a tambourine with his foot where a bass drum might be. With his electric guitar, Joey Santiago was the only plugged-in member of the group. The newest member of the Pixies is Paz Lenchantin, a musician of many talents who played violin at the Tiny Desk, though she handles bass duties at larger concerts. You may miss Kim Deal on bass for all the good reasons one might miss Kim Deal, but Lenchantin rhythmically fits in well, and was a treat to hear (albeit quietly) on violin. Prior to the rolling of cameras, the band warmed up the crowd with "Where Is My Mind," but this three-song set features a 2014 tune called "Greens and Blues," a song yet to make it onto a Pixies release called "Silver Snail," and 1989's "Monkey Gone to Heaven," which melted hearts and seared minds with a new memory from a time long past. 

Angel Olsen came to the Tiny Desk on an odd autumn day, as an impending storm loomed outside our office windows. It all seemed just right for occasion: Watch her and you'll see calm in her eyes; listen to her and you'll sense torment in her heart. Olsen gave us a preview of her third record on that October day; she wouldn't tell us the title, but she did say the word "Burn" with a hint of the title in the words to a song she'd sing. Now, months later and just a few weeks before the release of Burn Your Fire for No Witness, we can share this exclusive preview. Olsen is a Missouri-born — and now Asheville, N.C.-based — musician via Chicago. The new record was produced by John Congleton with a new band featuring Josh Jaeger on drums and bassist Stewart Bronaugh. The trio began rehearsing these songs in a church turned recording studio in Asheville over the summer. The songs are at times explosive and at times lulling. At the Tiny Desk, the expressive and powerful singer stood alone, and in the process gave us the perfect way to first hear these songs.

The third song in this Tiny Desk Concert, explains the jocose pianist Robert Glasper, first appeared on one of his trio's albums of acoustic, instrumental jazz. It was called "F.T.B." then, though it later acquired words and a singer and was retitled "Gonna Be Alright" on the record which won the 2013 Grammy for Best R&B Album. That in itself provides a sense of the worlds to which Glasper has access; depending on your point of view, he either freely traverses or explodes those boundaries. Glasper has released two albums of what you might call neo-soul, or maybe organic R&B, featuring a core band (The Robert Glasper Experiment) and guest stars like Erykah Badu, Lupe Fiasco and Norah Jones. Black Radio and last year's sequel, Black Radio 2, aren't heard much on "urban" radio, but the point is that they ought to be. Glasper builds his songs with old-school values: singers and MCs who don't need software to carry a melody, improvising within a band, hand-building beats and vamps with live instruments. That's what you see at the Tiny Desk. "Trust" features Marsha Ambrosius, formerly of the duo Floetry, and it's a good example of the Black Radio concept in raw, unpasteurized form. The middle tune is an ad hoc improvisation, and a good example of how Glasper and his Experiment have so dialed in their communication that they can plant seeds of noise and harvest blooms of music. By the time "F.T.B" (a.k.a. "Gonna Be Alright") rolls around, the mood is familiar and at ease. It's the sound of a band whose members speak many musical languages, but decide to converse in one that feels like its native tongue.

"Afro Blue" is a jazz standard written by Mongo Santamaria in 1959, with a lyric added later by Oscar Brown Jr. It's been performed countless times, by everyone from John Coltrane to Robert Glasper and Erykah Badu. The beautifully understated words include the phrases "undulating grace," "elegant boy," "beautiful girl," "shades of delight" and "cocoa hue." Afro Blue, a nine-member a cappella troupe from Howard University in Washington, D.C., is all that and more. Its members sing as one with nuance, ease and experience, as if they've been singing together for years. But they haven't: The ensemble is ever-changing, as students graduate and new members audition for a coveted spot in the lineup. Professor Connaitre Miller formed the vocal jazz ensemble in 2002. Afro Blue recently reached the final four on NBC's The Sing-Off, and it routinely performs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It played at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem with Dianne Reeves, and just recently was invited to the White House to perform for the president. The list of awards and accolades continues to grow, as does the list of invitations to sing. But Miller often turns them down so that the students have enough time to study and don't miss class. While it usually performs standard "vocal big band" songs and jazz blended with contemporary pop music, Afro Blue recently stopped by Bob Boilen's Tiny Desk to sing African-American spirituals — songs that can never grow old so long as talented young groups like Afro Blue sing them this well.

Sisters Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz aren't the youngest musicians ever to play the Tiny Desk, but they come pretty close. Their music — a restrained, homespun mix of folk and pop with undeniably sweet harmonies — certainly ranks among the loveliest we've heard. Lily is just 16. Her sister Madeleine is 18. And while the older of the two Indiana natives recently headed off to college, leaving her sister behind to finish high school, they still write and record together. They released a stellar EP, The Weight of the Globe, last June, and a self-titled full-length debut followed in October. Lily & Madeleine's openhearted ballads first found an audience in the fall of 2012, after the pair posted a video for "In the Middle" on YouTube. It quickly received more than a quarter of a million views — enough to draw the attention of the Sufjan Stevens-led Asthmatic Kitty label, which signed the sisters and released both their EP and their full-length album. For the duo's Tiny Desk set, Lily & Madeleine chose not to perform that breakthrough song, opting instead to focus on newer material from the album: the wistful "Devil We Know," "Paradise" and "You Got Out."

Van-Anh Vanessa Vo is a veteran when it comes to taking risks, and it pays off in her compelling music. As a young girl in Vietnam, she knew she wanted to be a traditional musician, even though it was a world dominated by men. It was risky, then, when she pestered a master teacher for three years to give her lessons. He finally gave in, taking her on as an apprentice. Vo also takes risks in blending East with West in her music. She lends a trippy sound to Frenchman Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 3, performed on the dan Bau, the traditional Vietnamese monocord. The instrument ("invented by bad girls on the street") has a single string, but by bending it with a kind of whammy bar made from buffalo horn, Vo creates a haunting landscape of growls, hushed vibrato and graceful slides, all with the exquisite phrasing of an opera singer. Vo's infectious enthusiasm erupts in her own compositions. "Three-Mountain Pass" (also the title of her recent album), for voice and Hang drum, is based on the sensuously evocative texts of Ho Xuan Huong, a groundbreaking female poet (and concubine) from the 18th century. And with "Go Hunting," Vo introduces another traditional instrument, the dan T'rung, a bamboo xylophone from Vietnam's south highlands. This instrument, which looks a bit like a skeleton, is struck with double-headed mallets. The theme starts peacefully at a relaxed pace, but heats up to a dizzying frenzy as Vo's mallets become indistinguishable blurs of speed. Her adventurous spirit moved her from Vietnam to the U.S. — another risk, but one that paid off with more opportunities for composing; she even won an Emmy Award for her work on a documentary film. Vo is also fond of collaborating with new-music ensembles like the Kronos Quartet, and of playing in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and, of course, Bob Boilen's Tiny Desk.

Her voice feels old, but it's got power that's young and vibrant. In fact, Christine Salem sings songs that are old: They're work songs and chants from the maloya tradition on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. I first heard her in New York City as she shook a flat board called a kayamb, made of cane reeds, with two percussionists flanking her to provide rhythm. Salem makes powerful, strongly focused music in which all the elements are essential, with nothing superfluous. She says it feels like the spirits move through her when she plays, and though you may doubt her if you're a nonbeliever, you'd be hard-pressed to deny her your attention once you hear her.

Our goal for this special holiday Tiny Desk Concert is simple: to bring you joy. Preservation Hall Jazz Band is a hot and historic outfit from New Orleans, and its members brought us a tuba-wielding Santa and some original holiday cheer and praise — what they call a Cajun Christmas from the French Quarter. We lit some lights and decorated my desk and shelves as best we could, but it's this amazing band — complete with saxophone, trombone, trumpet, drums and a couple of tubas — that lit this place up. We've never had so much dancing from the NPR crew at a Tiny Desk Concert. So enjoy the show, and happy holidays to all from NPR Music.

La Santa Cecilia spreads joy every time its members plug in to do a show. They do it one dance step at a time, with cumbias, corridos, elegant mambos and plain old rock 'n' roll. I first saw La Santa Cecilia perform in an Austin, Texas, parking lot about five years ago. As all great bands do, it showcased an It Factor that has only intensified as the L.A.-based, Mexican-American group works tirelessly to perfect its musical vision. The video here provides just a hint of the band's dynamic live shows, albeit a spectacular one. No matter how small the device you use to watch this, the songs ought to have a significant impact on your personal joy meter. A bailar!

Part of the Twin Cities hip-hop collective Doomtree, rapper, singer, poet and songwriter Dessa divides her time between singing and rapping, often landing on a spoken-word splitting of the difference. The week she performed this Tiny Desk Concert, she appeared at an All Songs Considered live listening party, during which she opined articulately before closing the night by singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in the style popularized by Jeff Buckley. This year, the former philosophy major released both a new album (Parts of Speech) and a chapbook of poetry called A Pound of Steam. As versatile as she is, Dessa faced down a string of challenges in getting to the Tiny Desk. Near the tail-end of a tour — during which thousands of dollars' worth of her band's gear was stolen — her voice started to give out as she battled a bad cold. (Keep an eye out for her expression of relief at the completion of "The Man I Knew" in this set.) And, of course, Dessa and her band had to come up with ways to perform three songs from Parts of Speech in such a way that the drums and guitars wouldn't drown out the unamplified voices of herself and singer Aby Wolf. Once we started recording, though, the seams never showed, let alone split: If it weren't for a bit of between-song tea-sipping, we'd have never known she was under the weather. Instead, what we got was as forceful and whip-smart as everything else Dessa sings, speaks, raps and writes.

Bluegrass' most beloved pros often play well into their 80s and 90s, so it would surprise no one if our children's children's children turn up at a Sarah Jarosz concert 70 years from now. The singer and multi-instrumentalist first surfaced as an 18-year-old wunderkind with the release of 2009's Song Up In Her Head, which generated the first of what will likely be many Grammy nominations; now a grizzled 22, she's out performing songs from her fine new third album, Build Me Up From Bones. That record forms the basis of Jarosz's recent concert at the NPR Music offices, performed with the aid of fiddler Alex Hargreaves and cellist Nathaniel Smith. All polished young pros, the three breezed in happily and knocked us out with a careful mix of technical proficiency and poppy warmth. It's an enduring combination, as this sweet little set of songs amply demonstrates.

When NPR Music started inviting musicians to perform at Bob Boilen's desk back in 2008, we never could have expected that we'd one day host The Dismemberment Plan. For one, the D.C.-area group had long since disbanded; for another, its fleshed-out and periodically funky sound wouldn't seem to lend itself to vastly stripped-down arrangements. When the newly re-formed band finally did make its way to our offices — on the heels of Uncanney Valley, its first album in 12 years — it unsurprisingly made for an odd fit. According to the group, these particular arrangements of songs from Uncanney Valley were sorted out just a day before this Tiny Desk Concert; after singer Travis Morrison flubbed the call-and-response portion of "Let's Just Go to the Dogs Tonight," he professed nervousness at making the NPR staff holler F-bombs. (No one seemed to mind.) As always, though, The Dismemberment Plan wears its ramshackle qualities well, exuding playfulness and wry charm throughout this set.

Sunny Yang joined Kronos Quartet in June 2013. Now, just five months later, the cellist she says she's learned quite a few new works — not just a handful, but about 70 pieces. That degree of dedication to contemporary composers, coupled with an insane concert schedule, has propelled Kronos Quartet forward over the past four decades. If they wanted, the musicians — who also include founder David Harrington and longtime members John Sherba and Hank Dutt — could reminisce over more than 800 new works and arrangements they've commissioned in 40 years. But instead, the new-music train pushes ever onward to new territories. They remain a living, breathing world-heritage site for music. Now in the midst of its 40th-anniversary tour, Kronos brings to this Tiny Desk Concert a new arrangement, a work from a new album and, for Kronos, something of a chestnut, a piece the group recorded a whopping five years ago. Aheym (Yiddish for "homeward") was written for Kronos by Bryce Dessner; a member of the Brooklyn rock band The National, he studied composition at Yale. The music thrives on nervous energy, pulsating with strumming and spiccato (bouncing the bow on strings) while building to a tremendous fever. It also opens Kronos' new album of Dessner works. "Lullaby," a traditional song with Afro-Persian roots (from the group's Eastern-flavored 2009 album Floodplain), is woven from different cloth altogether. Colorful tones that lay between our Western pitches are threaded through the music, anchored by a gorgeous solo from violist Dutt; his contribution takes on the warm and weathered sound of a grandmother singing to a child. Kronos caps off the concert with another hairpin turn, this time to a fresh arrangement of "Last Kind Words," a little-known blues song from around 1930, recorded by singer and guitarist Geeshie Wiley. In Jacob Garchik's exuberant arrangement (which Kronos premiered this fall), interlocking strums and plucks provide a kind of rhythm section, while Harrington's violin stands in for the now-forgotten blues singer.