A day on the world’s biggest small stage: How a Tiny Desk concert is recorded

The world’s largest tiny stage is housed inside a glass building in a gentrifying Washington neighborhood. It is set up three or four times a week around noon, behind what was once host Bob Boilen’s desk in the newsroom of the American public radio station NPR. Boilen, who retired in October, came up with the idea for the Tiny Desk Concerts series after the frustrating experience of attending a concert interrupted by other people’s conversations. The intimate, improvised format has become a true global sensation, a date with live music that is watched by up to 120 million people. The videos are first broadcast on the station’s website and, within a few days, posted on YouTube, where they receive some 45 million views a month.

Last April, the Catalan singer-songwriter Sílvia Pérez Cruz performed at what has been an iconic venue for contemporary music for years. She played four songs, one of them unreleased. Due to logistical issues inherent to an office space, these concerts are not open to the public, so there were only about 20 people present, including the team that organizes the Tiny Desk series (producers, technicians and camera operators), a few curious NPR employees who came down to see who was playing that day, and a few personal guests of the artist.

“The stage is imposing, so bare, fragile and intimate,” said Pérez Cruz in the improvised dressing room inside a small meeting room after the recital, which was broadcast in early July. “It is also intimidating to have the possibility of reaching so many people. In these times, it is to be appreciated that there is a format that defends quality live music, which stands on its own without the aid of artifice. Performing here provokes contradictory sensations: a mix between the strength you need to overcome the test and the fragility with which you expose yourself.”

Before the singer and her two musicians, cellist Marta Roma and bassist Bori Albero, showed up, Suraya Mohamed, executive producer of NPR Music, had explained the rules of the Tiny Desk concerts: “We suggest that the group be small, although we are flexible on that, as demonstrated by the fact that the marching band Mucca Pazza put 23 musicians behind the desk. And the concerts, about 20 minutes long and with as little amplification as possible, must always be held in our offices.” There was only one (and not just any) exception: the day in 2016 when the White House called and asked them to organize a concert by the rapper Common, when Barack Obama was still president.

The Covid pandemic broke the rules of the Tiny Desk, which temporarily allowed a new format: concerts recorded by the musicians themselves and sent in to NPR. But as soon as they were able to, they returned to the original spirit. The lockdown also meant, Mohamed explains, an explosion in the popularity of the concert series. “So much so that when our special correspondents went to cover the beginning of the war in Ukraine, they told us that if they introduced themselves as NPR journalists, no one knew what media they were from, but if they said they worked ‘at the Tiny Desk station,’ everyone wanted to talk,” she says.

Another rule is that artists are not paid by NPR to come and perform. Although nothing prevents musicians, who play for free, from paying for their own travel to the U.S. capital, most of the time the Tiny Concerts come about because the musicians happen to be playing in the city, as was the case with Pérez Cruz, who that week was performing at the Kennedy Center auditorium with a special program with the American jazz band Snarky Puppy and the singers Silvana Estrada, Gaby Moreno and Fuensanta. “Doing it at midday is very convenient for them. They don’t have to get up early. And when they finish playing they still have time for the sound check,” Mohamed adds.

Donations, information and music

NPR is a listener-funded network with stations across the country. It is primarily devoted to news, but it has always been known for its commitment to music. Part of that commitment is what led Boilen and fellow radio host Stephen Thompson to the South by Southwest festival in 2008, held annually at venues throughout Austin. They were curious to see folk singer Laura Gibson live, but the crowds at the bar where she was playing made that impossible, so they suggested that she pay them a visit at the newsroom next time she was in Washington. Gibson took them up on their call within a few weeks.

“When she came to us, we were like, ‘Why not record it? ’” recalls Mohamed, who has been on NPR’s music desk for more than three decades and was promoted to executive producer of NPR Music seven months ago. “Then it was like, ‘What if we put it on our website? There wasn’t much of that on the internet then.’”

Seen today, the style of those early recordings is austere, with more numerous and shorter shots. The setting has also changed, and not just because the radio station moved offices; Boilen’s shelves, which at the time contained just a few CDs and books, have been filled in these 16 years with hundreds of objects that musicians leave as a memento of their time there: from autographed CDs to Funko dolls, cans of IPA beer, a deck of tarot cards, a reggaeton singer’s underwear or a pair of socks from the Washington 9:30 room. Pérez Cruz left a hairbrush.

The series has already accumulated some 1,100 names, with real milestones such as visits by Coldplay, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo and Karol G, or the 2015 concert by rapper T-Pain, which, according to Mohamed, marked “a before and after.” On the one hand, because listening to the “king of autotune” without embellishments made many reconsider his worth. “Also, from then on, we diversified the offer a lot, and little by little we opened up to all kinds of styles,” she adds. That is another of the great things about the Tiny Desk series: it is aimed at lovers of all kinds of music, and they are just as likely to program a rock star (Phish) as a soprano (Lise Davidsen), greats of jazz (Gary Bartz) and soul (Chaka Khan), a Brazilian legend (Milton Nascimento) or an electronic musician (Fred Again).

The job of choosing is shared among 11 producers who are more or less specialized by genre, although they are not rigid in their compartments. The team spends the day researching which bands deserve to occupy the Tiny Desk stage. Sometimes they seek them out; other times, it is the artists who reach out because they are interested in participating. The producers make the selection with the same genuine interest in the big names as in the fresh-faced performers, and they pride themselves on the fact that they have never rushed to make room for anyone. They also often joke that the only ones left to play a Tiny Desk concert are “Paul [McCartney], Ringo [Starr], Beyoncé and Jesus Christ.”

Another feature of the series and, by extension, of NPR, is the great attention they have paid to Latin American music for years, to which they even dedicated a special issue between September and October, during Hispanic Heritage Month. The person largely responsible for conquering that space is Félix Contreras, host of the podcast Alt.Latino since 2010 and one of the 10 selectors of the Tiny Desk series. In a conversation with EL PAÍS, he defined the success of Despacito, by Luis Fonsi, in 2017, as the big bang of America’s love affair with the “Latin diaspora.”

“There were many important names and moments before that, of course: Tito Puente, Machito, Marlon Brando playing the bongos, Carlos Santana, José Feliciano, Gloria Estefan… but they were isolated cases, they did not generate a change in culture,” explains this expert. This time it is different, he believes, thanks to the internet: “Before, when you went to a record store, everything was categorized: rap, jazz, rock… Now on Spotify that doesn’t exist. You listen to trap, which can be in Spanish, but that doesn’t mean they separate it out for you to put it in the Latin music bucket,” explains Contreras.

These vanishing borders have also helped boost the presence of musicians from Spain, which has grown at the Tiny Desk thanks, in part, to the work of Anamaria Sayre, a young Californian of Mexican descent who arrived a few years ago as an intern. “I think it is a very interesting country because of its connection with Latin America, and because at the same time it belongs to Europe.”

The first concert she worked on was C. Tangana’s. One of those pandemic exceptions, it was recorded around a table in Madrid, and contributed to the popularization of the format in Spain, a country that is in the top 10 of the countries where Tiny Desk videos are most viewed. In the last year, the Tiny Desk series has hosted five Spanish artists: in addition to Pérez Cruz, Omar Montes, Nathy Peluso, María José Llergo and the Catalan duo Tarta Relena have also performed. Before that, the guests, from Diego el Cigala to Paco Peña or Antonio Lizana, had mainly come from the world of flamenco. Still pending is a visit by Rosalía.

When Pérez Cruz’s concert was over, Sayre briefly interviewed her, describing the singer as “an old soul, full of wisdom,” while the technicians packed up and began the post-production process, a job that usually takes about two weeks before the video is posted. Pérez Cruz explained that she felt “like she was on an altar.” Later, in the dressing room, she said that the experience had made her think about “what makes places become special places.” “In reality, it is a corner in an office, but it is not just any corner, but one where many people have come to give their best,” she said about a sum of voices that has contributed to the largest small stage in the world being behind the desk of a glass building in Washington.

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