Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times David Byrne performing with Les Misérables Brass Band at Zankel Hall on Thursday.

David Byrne Honors Joints That Connect the Limbs

By Anne Midgette
The New York Times
3 February 2007

Inviting David Byrne to play host to a Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall seems redundant. The point of Perspectives is to allow artists free rein to explore their interests, wherever they may lead, and Mr. Byrne’s entire career, from his days as leader of the Talking Heads (1976-88) to a recent gallery exhibition of drawings of chairs, has already been about just that.

His Perspectives, which began on Thursday night and continues through tomorrow, is a four-concert potpourri variously devoted to experimental folk rock (last night), music of different styles linked by a single note (tomorrow night), and Mr. Byrne’s own new work, probably the most exciting part of the proceedings for die-hard fans (tonight).

Thursday’s concert was the retrospective segment: the music that Mr. Byrne wrote in 1984 for the entr’actes to Robert Wilson’s projected 12-hour theater project “the CIVIL warS,” which was never realized in its entirety for lack of funds. Mr. Wilson calls them “knee plays,” small segments that form the joints between a work’s larger limbs. Since all the limbs were never assembled, Mr. Byrne joined 12 knee plays together to create an album and a show that toured in the mid-1980s and was recreated, without scenic elements but with many of the original players (Les Misérables Brass Band, led by Frank London), at Zankel Hall.

Gospel oomph with a keening saxophone (Matt Darriau); the splintered, icy chords of “Winter,” morphing into a tolling like that of bells; an intended homage to the Italian film composer Nino Rota in “Admiral Perry” (“I missed by a long shot,” Mr. Byrne said), with a sleepy melody from muted trumpets supported by a bass beat. New Orleans, rather than the Talking Heads, was the musical reference point for a varied evening of fine brass playing.

This was music experimenting as theater, trying on different roles — a primal beat in “Jungle Book,” a Bulgarian folk song in “Theadora Is Dozing” — to which Mr. Byrne’s spoken texts acted now as gloss (in “The Sound of Business,” exploring the question of what it sounds like to work at given moments), now as counterpoint. But like much incidental music, the evening as an aggregate suffered from a sense of abridgement, passing quickly and offering small tastes of things you would have liked to hear more of.

One loud fan did his best to shout the event into the realm of a rock concert; the rest of the audience appeared delighted to receive whatever Mr. Byrne was willing to offer.