Small-scale concert series makes human and digital connections
A new concert-recording project inspired by an immensely popular NPR series is leveraging human connections made in an intimate space to create a valuable digital product for artists.
"A great, appealing thing about the Tiny Desk format is how natural it is," said Tony Flanagan, an organizer behind the Pocket-Sized Series of concerts. "I appreciate the effort they put into really communicating a stripped-down live show, with very little distracting from the human element of the performer."
Tiny Desk Concerts mostly take place at the NPR offices in Washington, D.C., with artists like Chappell Roan, Usher, U2, Wu-Tang Clan, and Dua Lipa racking up hundreds of millions of views. Typically, artists perform more acoustic versions of their material than usual, even if they play with a near-comical number of musicians in the modest space.
In Edmonton, the Pocket-Sized Series is a six-month engagement taking place at Paper Birch Books at 10825 95 Street NW on the third Saturday of the month. The Mbira Renaissance Band played the first show in February, and its video was posted on April 3. The March show featured Mallory Chipman. The shows have room for about 50 people in total, including the band, audience, and recording crew. The stripped-down component at the concerts mostly comes down to the fact that the Pocket-Size Series team forbids amplified vocals.
"It's rather uncommon to play behind an un-amplified vocalist as a member of a seven-person band," Flanagan told Taproot. "Both groups dealt with the challenge that presents, where they have to play gently enough and quietly enough to allow the vocalist to communicate to this room of people."
The Pocket-Sized crew didn't come up with the vocal rule just for cozy purposes. Flanagan said vocals heard directly from a singer and instruments played with restraint allow his team to get ultra-crisp sound recordings.
The recordings are meant to amplify performers in the other sense of the word. Flanagan received a $25,000 major projects grant from the Edmonton Arts Council in 2025, specifically to help Edmonton musicians reach a larger audience; he's now executing on that with collaborators Tomáš Andel, Anthony Goertz, Holly Mazur, and Chris Larsen. Videos that can be shared and watched on a viewer's schedule can go much farther in audience growth than a single concert, and the visual aspect has an edge that audio-only output does not.
"We think there are a ton of great artists in Edmonton who deserve to be showcased," said Flanagan, who is also a musician. "Having a video of them performing be accessible to as wide an audience as possible … is so helpful. It goes beyond just being able to provide (an audio) sample to somebody."
The next Pocket-Sized Series concert is on April 18 with the Biboye Onanuga Blacktet, a jazz ensemble that interprets classic hip-hop artists and showcases contemporary rappers. Onanuga told Taproot that the unmic'd recording format is fun, challenging, and leaves more control in an artist's hands. And video is invaluable for gigging musicians.
"Examples of videos is the thing that bookers of festivals — and even just venues — look at, after how many tickets you can sell," said Onanuga, who, like Chapman, has served as musician in residence for the Edmonton Public Library. "Seeing how you interact with the crowd is invaluable in getting more bookings. Recorded music and live music are honestly just two different things."
