Bob Boilen

Ólafur Arnalds, Live In Concert

Bob Boilen — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:57:00 +0000

How can music be happy and sad at the same time? Listen to Olafur Arnalds and you'll hear it. Depending on your mood, the tone changes, and a song that may have been uplifting one day sounds like an elegy the next. It's spacious, undeniably beautiful work. Much of the music performed in this concert, recorded on April 18 at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City, is drawn from the Icelandic musician's recent album For Now I Am Winter.

Father Figures: Tiny Desk Concert

Bob Boilen — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:26:00 +0000
In a small, packed Washington, D.C., living room late one December night, I heard a cacophony of horns, keys, drums and guitars that simply floored me. It was brash, zany, brainy, scary and danceable. At the end of a long year of amazing live music, this would turn out to be one of the most memorable concerts I'd seen.
I walked up to Adam Schatz, the man behind the saxophone and chief instigator in Father Figures, and told him his band needed to play the Tiny Desk. How this music would translate to the brightness of day — to say nothing of a busy office — was hard to anticipate.

Pedro Soler And Gaspar Claus: Tiny Desk Concert

Bob Boilen — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:52:00 +0000
Music can be a beautiful conversation — rarely is that more evident than in this Tiny Desk Concert performance with the father-son duo of Pedro Soler and Gaspar Claus. Soler plays a delicate, intimate version of flamenco guitar, while his son turns the cello into an exquisitely expressive voice. Though 45 years separate them, pay attention to how they communicate.