What are you listening to right now?

February 15, 2010
Not many of us were familiar with Abaji before he came to play this Tiny Desk Concert. But after he left, we all knew a bit more about music from half a world away, and a lot more about a big-hearted musician with a quick wit and a passion for instruments.

Abaji's work spans many cultures and languages. With roots in Greece, Turkey, Armenia and France, he's at home strumming a twangy bouzouki, blowing into a breathy duduk or bowing a soft-toned kamancheh. When recording his latest album, Origine Orients, he played 10 different instruments, many of them simultaneously, with no second takes or overdubs. It took him just two days.

Abaji begins with a song from the album, "Min Jouwwa" ("From Inside"), accompanying himself on an invention of his own, a tricked-out Western-style guitar with extra strings, giving it the sound of an Egyptian oud. He follows it with "Summertime," with its haunting, serpentine riffs on the bouzouki and verses alternating between Arabic and English. Scatting in Arabic never sounded so natural.

After the cameras shut down, Abaji hung around for a while to rummage through his menagerie of instruments, showing us " and demonstrating " a large duduk (an Armenian cousin of the oboe), an Indonesian suling (flute) and a Colombian saxophone (of sorts) made from bamboo that looked more like a snake. It was something like getting a lesson in world music from a good friend.

David Rawlings And Gillian Welch: Tiny Desk Concert
by ROBIN HILTON
February 1, 2010
David Rawlings is a remarkably gifted producer, session guitarist and singer who's most widely known for his contributions to other musicians' work " particularly his longtime partnership with folk and traditional country artist Gillian Welch. But when he and Welch stopped by NPR for this Tiny Desk Concert, it was to promote Rawlings' own album " the first he's ever recorded under his name (actually, it's under the moniker Dave Rawlings Machine). For A Friend of a Friend, Rawlings took on lead vocals and songwriting duties, and got some of his old friends to help out. Welch appears throughout the album, of course, along with other artists such as Ketch Secor and Morgan Jahnig of Old Crow Medicine Show.

Welch and Rawlings settled in to play together at Bob Boilen's desk as easily as if they were slipping on a pair of old boots. They've got the sort of magnetic chemistry that comes with writing and recording together for more than 15 years, but even with that history and their friendship, the two had to rethink the way they do things for Friend of a Friend.

"A lot of the arrangements we'd worked out over the years " the way we put chords, the way we sing together " I was shocked at how little they worked for my voice or my record," Rawlings says.

"We had learned to make records in a particular way because we were always framing [Welch's] voice, which is this large, takes-up-a-lot-of-space, very intimate, very good-sounding thing," he adds. "A beautiful tone. So you can frame it in a skeletal way. It almost seems to me that the less you put on her records, the more powerful they are. But when we started working that way with my voice, which is so different, it turned out that nothing from that approach was valid. So we had to find different sounds and treatments that we were happy with. I was really surprised when we started that we were in territory as uncharted as we were. We broke new ground from necessity."

In this Tiny Desk Concert recording, Rawlings and Welch give a breathtaking performance to a packed office at NPR Music. Each was getting over a bad case of bronchitis, though you'd never know it. For a typical soundcheck, most artists will piddle through a few bars of something. But Rawlings and Welch took a full, and utterly thrilling, run through Bill Monroe's "I'm on My Way Back to the Old Home." It was almost as though they couldn't stop once they started. If they hadn't stopped, that would have been fine by us.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123086467

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