Sidney Madden
NPR Music s Tiny Desk series will celebrate Black History Month by featuring four weeks of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and playlists by Black artists spanning different genres and generations each week. The lineup includes both emerging and established artists who will be performing a Tiny Desk concert for the first time. This celebration highlights the beautiful cornucopia of Black music and our special way of presenting it. We hope you enjoy.
Cornrows braided back with the precision of an architect. Stiletto nails commanding a sampling machine. Gold-glinted lids to match her light-up Beads Byaree earrings. With every move, KeiyaA shines so bright, it s impossible to look away. And while your eyes are fixated on her person, the music KeiyaA conjures inside Brooklyn s Electric Garden is what leaves you completely spellbound.
Lauren Onkey
NPR Music s Tiny Desk series will celebrate Black History Month by featuring four weeks of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and playlists by Black artists spanning different genres and generations each week. The lineup includes both emerging and established artists who will be performing a Tiny Desk concert for the first time. This celebration highlights the beautiful cornucopia of Black music and our special way of presenting it. We hope you enjoy.
Meshell Ndegeocello s Tiny Desk (home) concert feels like a narrative film. Shot in vivid black and white, the concert includes songs from throughout her career framed by her thoughts on the importance and influence of James Baldwin: He deserves flowers every day. Most of all because he was willing to discuss things that were painful, hard to look at, hard to see, hard to accept.
NPR Music s Tiny Desk series will celebrate Black History Month by featuring four weeks of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and playlists by Black artists spanning different genres and generations each week. The lineup includes both emerging and established artists who will be performing a Tiny Desk concert for the first time. This celebration highlights the beautiful cornucopia of Black music and our special way of presenting it. We hope you enjoy. Just bear with me while I just enjoy this and soak in it, GIVĒON admits with a laugh. Switching between the demeanors of a seasoned, nonchalant crooner and a giddy-grinned newbie, the fast-rising R&B star makes a point to show his humility during his long-awaited debut at Tiny Desk.
Nov 13, 2020
Tom Huizenga
The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It s the same spirit stripped-down sets, an intimate setting just a different space.
Since 2008, we ve invited almost 1,000 musicians to come to NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., to play songs beside a desk that belongs to my colleague Bob Boilen. Since the pandemic hit, artists have been getting creative incorporating their own desks, and other makeshift setups, into Tiny Desk home concerts.
But the desk – and the home setup – for this performance beats them all. The location is the home, and not so tiny writing desk, of Aaron Copland, America s beloved composer.
Originally published on February 4, 2021 10:34 am
NPR Music s Tiny Desk series will celebrate Black History Month by featuring four weeks of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and playlists by Black artists spanning different genres and generations each week. The lineup includes both emerging and established artists who will be performing a Tiny Desk concert for the first time. This celebration highlights the beautiful cornucopia of Black music and our special way of presenting it. We hope you enjoy.
Within the warm walls of Williamsburg Music Center, one of Brooklyn s last surviving black-owned jazz venues, Melanie Charles takes us on a journey that embodies the soul of jazz: exploration. A Brooklynite proud of her rich Haitian heritage, Charles is conscious of the giant shoulders upon which she stands and takes steps to both honor and advance this music. Behind her, smiling pictures of her guardian angels, Mary Lou Williams and Billie Holiday, encourage Charles while she and her musician