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NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Soweto Gospel Choir: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published April 16, 2012 at 9:31 AM MDT

Today in "They Pay Us To Do This": a performance by South Africa's Soweto Gospel Choir, which managed to tie the all-time record for most musicians squashed behind Bob Boilen's desk for a single performance in the NPR Music offices. (They join the early-music a cappella ensemble Stile Antico, also with 12, though Soweto Gospel Choir threw in percussion in the form of a lone djembe.) To watch and sway along was to be blasted with some sort of ray gun that shoots beams of joy and hope.

Singing in a number of South African languages, as well as English, Soweto Gospel Choir fuses the praise music of many Christian cultures, with nods to traditional African songs of celebration — complete with occasional clicks and bird songs. Taken as a whole, the group's music positively radiates warmth of spirit, not to mention motion: For as beautifully as these 12 voices blend, the rhythms are what really keep the mixture vibrant and alive. Here's hoping you get a full sense of what it was like to become enveloped in these songs live, because being there was special.

Set List:

  • "Seteng Sediba"

  • "Emarabeni"

  • "Emlanjeni/Yelele"

  • "Kae le Kae"

    • Credits:

    Producer: Bob Boilen; Editor: Michael Katzif; Videographers: Michael Katzif and Doriane Raiman; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Kainaz Amaria/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Tiny Desk Concerts
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson
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