For the second time this year, the Tiny Desk has spawned its own category on Jeopardy!; plus, a new show from Cinder Well, a Tiny Desk Contest update and more.
Neil Tevault/NPR
I don’t know about you, but I’m currently marinating in a blessed respite from front-page cultural news. The Super Bowl Halftime Show and the Grammys are but distant memories involving… Billy Joel, perhaps? Something about a shirtless gentleman on roller skates? The Oscars aren’t for another three weeks or so. The upcoming music-release calendar may be full of huge names — among them Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Norah Jones, Justin Timberlake, Kacey Musgraves, Lenny Kravitz, Tierra Whack, Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow and The Black Crowes — but most of their albums don’t start rolling out until March. Even Taylor Swift, who spends every waking moment living rent-free in the news media’s brains, is halfway around the world and thus fleetingly out of mind.
The Tiny Desk at least seems to be lying low this week, too. Since the release of last week’s newsletter, we’ve only published one new show — a lovely set featuring Cinder Well, out just this morning — though we’ve kept ourselves busy by recording a few doozies, not to mention watching hundreds of fresh entries in the Tiny Desk Contest.
So it seems like as good a time as any to wallow in a few recent successes — namely, the Tiny Desk’s placement as a full-fledged category on not one but two recent episodes of Jeopardy! Back on Jan. 2, the game show’s celebrity edition presented a series of answers tied to the Tiny Desk, and while Mira Sorvino got shut out of that particular category, Utkarsh Ambudkar (from Ghosts) and Lisa Ann Walter (from Abbott Elementary) had little trouble knocking out all five correct questions. (Ambudkar got three to Walter’s two, but I’m calling it a tie because 1) I love both of their shows; and 2) he seemed genuinely uncertain when he uttered the words, “What is NPR?”)
We were psyched at the shoutouts, and doubly pleased that the show threw in a mention of the wonderful singer-songwriter Laura Gibson, who helped inspire Tiny Desk concerts’ creation all the way back in 2008. But then, during the heady week between the Grammys and the Super Bowl, Jeopardy! returned to the Tiny Desk well with yet another category. Generally speaking, Jeopardy! makes its questions considerably tougher on players who are neither school children nor celebrities, but Round 2 seemed roughly comparable to me, difficulty-wise. Sadly, the show’s YouTube clip omits the $2000 answer, which read, “This acerbic singer sang that Putin puts his pants on one leg at a time.” (They provided a visual assist in the form of a photograph, but I’ll leave you unspoiled and instead link to the performance in question.)
The Jeopardy! mentions aren’t the only day-brightening plugs the Tiny Desk has received in recent weeks: On Feb. 1, we also received a lovely writeup (with an accompanying video) from The Associated Press, which described the series as “a gigantic pop culture phenomenon” and even went so far as to include the phrase “NPR is cool!” in the headline. As unlikely as it once seemed that the Tiny Desk would pop up on Jeopardy!, our proximity to AP-anointed coolness feels even more bizarre to me, somehow.
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Tiny Desk Contest update
We’re still accepting entries in our 10th annual Tiny Desk Contest, and great ones are pouring in. We’ll start sharing some of the highlights soon, but in the meantime, spread the word — and, if you’re a musician yourself, be sure to enter!
Recent Tiny Desks
Cinder Well’s Amelia Baker grew up in California, but now spends her time on the Western cliffs of Ireland. At the Tiny Desk, her music split the difference between the two locales that shaped her life.
The genre-smashing pop and R&B star Tinashe showed up the day of a D.C. snowstorm, then fired us up with a show that demonstrated her famous versatility.
The Atlanta singer Berhana paid homage to his roots with the help of Ethiopian jazz pianist Kibrom Birhane and members of the Ethio Cali band.
Ben Carr, who performs as Carrtoons, carried on the Tiny Desk tradition of shining a light on great producers such as Kenny Beats and Zaytoven.
Saxophonist Joshua Redman brought a song-by-song tour of American cities to the Tiny Desk, with bittersweet stops in Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.
On-time departure for the 'Swan Lake' flyover ...
Around public radio
Rock bands don’t always generate a ton of buzz these days, but The Last Dinner Party is proving to be an exception. The British group visited WXPN’s World Cafe Live in Philadelphia recently and played its breakout song, “Nothing Matters.”
Nashville’s WMOT brought in old friend Rosanne Cash for one of the station’s “30A Songwriter Sessions” — and she played “The Wheel,” which is always a must-listen.
The wonderful Japanese band CHAI recently announced its breakup, but we’ll always have this very pink KEXP studio session.
Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno is one of NPR Music’s longtime favorites, and she released a new album today (which you can hear all about on New Music Friday), so why not revisit her gorgeous live session from Minnesota Public Radio’s Live From Here?
Another newsworthy video from public radio’s vast archive of studio sessions: Andra Day, who just sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Super Bowl, performed her signature song “Rise Up” for The Current way back in the beforetimes of 2016.
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