NPR Music is rolling out a series of videos this week that feature “Field Recordings” by major musicians in Aspen — recorded in a partnership with the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Aspen Institute this June.
Artists like Common, Chris Thile and Hurray for the Riff Raff performed short, acoustic sets outdoors on the Aspen Meadows campus; the lineup also includes the Jonathan Scales Fourchestra and Son Little.
Keith Jenkins is the vice president of visuals and music strategy at NPR.
“When we came up with the concept of Field Recordings, I was very heavily influenced by the recordings of Alan Lomax and his work chronicling musicians in places where nobody had really ventured and definitely had not recorded them,” Jenkins told Aspen Public Radio at the Ideas Festival in June.
Lomax was an ethnomusicologist who logged decades of performances, interviews and anecdotes in the 1900s, “and they were usually out in the world, around a campfire or close to a factory or near people's homes,” Jenkins said. Lomax’s project resulted in the “Field Work” catalog — the “legacy” of which gets a nod in NPR’s “Field Recordings,” Jenkins said.
NPR has produced videos like this before, in the mid-2010s, from locations like an old bar, a cemetery and even a rowboat. They’re similar to Tiny Desk Concerts — minus the tiny desk — and Jenkins said it can help people take a break from the world around them.
“I view them as moments for people to slow down and to step away and to think about something different, to turn off whatever has been running their day for the last six or seven hours, and to go someplace different,” Jenkins said.
A new video from Aspen is coming out every day this week on NPR Music’s website and YouTube channel. Each one runs about 20 minutes, combining unplugged, curated concerts with the beauty of natural surroundings.
“We're really proud of the way we can capture this, and it's kind of unique and special,” said Suraya Mohamed, the executive producer at NPR Music.
“It's a really neat way for audiences to experience music,” she added.
