Kaia Kater: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

March 13, 2019, Bob Boilen The expectation upon seeing a banjo hanging is one of rollicking rowdiness, but when Kaia Kater began to strum her fivestring, the mood in the office turned plaintive and a bit mournful. The AfroCaribbeanCanadian singer and songwriter, who studied Appalachian music at West Virginia s Davis Elkins College, often references the Black Lives Matter movement, within a music form that doesn t exactly snap to mind as being in dialogue with modern issues. These days, Kaia Kater records for Smithsonian Folkways, and some of the songs she brought to the Tiny Desk come from her recent recording Grenades, a record she worked on while exploring her father s home country of Grenada. It s a country that has experienced a lot of political turmoil, she says. My father left when he was 16 years old and he came to Canada as a refugee, on his own. It s a story I ran away from for a long time, where I didn t want to reconcile with myself being this kind of hyphenated Kaia Kater