Since NPR’s Tiny Desk live performance sequence 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 12 months’s nationwide Tiny Desk Contest, their efficiency introduced such a rush of exuberance, spontaneity and sheer pleasure to the desk that you just may end up watching that video time 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 shade. Tank herself is equal components previous soul and everlasting little one, right down to earth and grounded in particular person whereas her inventive spirit floats on clouds that may be product of cotton sweet. She began writing poetry as a 12 12 months previous, 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 after we had this dialog on the Blue Be aware in New York. She’d simply heard the exhilarating information that her current 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 telephone was blowing up with congratulations, and her temper was ebullient. With this mission, she deliberately positions herself as a poet in her personal proper, sharing her life journey from her New Orleans childhood by way of 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 track that clearly expresses Tank’s mission to outline poetry itself as music for our time. In her personal phrases: “I would like poetry to get extra respect and for much more younger folks to get into the expression of poetry. I would like it to be seen as cool once more.” And if anybody can accomplish that mission with timeless power and style — and just a little little bit of cotton-candy magic — it is Tank.