Since NPR’s Tiny Desk live performance collection launched in 2008, a dizzying vary of musicality has proven up behind the long-lasting desk. From Yo-Yo Ma to Billie Eilish to Anderson .Paak to yours really, it is almost unattainable to decide on a favourite efficiency. However when Tank and the Bangas performed a set in 2017, because the winners of that yr’s nationwide Tiny Desk Contest, their efficiency introduced such a rush of exuberance, spontaneity and sheer pleasure to the desk that you simply may end up watching that video again and again, including to its 14 million views on YouTube.
Since 2011, when the members of the band met at a New Orleans open mic, the Bangas’ quirky, vibrant, genre-defiant sound has been constructed round lead singer Tarriona “Tank” Ball’s voice and poetry, each of which have a seemingly infinite vary of expression, pitch and colour. Tank herself is equal components outdated soul and everlasting baby, right down to earth and grounded in particular person whereas her artistic spirit floats on clouds that could be made from cotton sweet. She began writing poetry as a 12 yr outdated, after which started setting her phrases to music, creating songs which can be an ageless exploration of the human expertise, its meanderings and missteps, its peaks and valleys.
Tank was flying excessive once we had this dialog on the Blue Notice in New York. She’d simply heard the exhilarating information that her latest recording, a three-part spoken phrase assortment known as The Coronary heart, The Thoughts, The Soul, had earned a Grammy nomination for greatest spoken phrase poetry album. Her cellphone was blowing up with congratulations, and her temper was ebullient. With this challenge, she deliberately positions herself as a poet in her personal proper, sharing her life journey from her New Orleans childhood via the adventures of coronary heart, thoughts and soul which have led to discovering her power as a lady on this world.
The opening observe on The Coronary heart is known as “A Poem Is” — a tune that clearly expresses Tank’s mission to outline poetry itself as music for our time. In her personal phrases: “I need poetry to get extra respect and for much more younger folks to get into the expression of poetry. I need it to be seen as cool once more.” And if anybody can accomplish that mission with timeless vitality and charm — and a bit little bit of cotton-candy magic — it is Tank.