David Byrne, day two: this ain't no Mudd Club or CBGB

Last night was day two of David Byrne's four-night takeover of Carnegie Hall, and he was not even billed to perform. He was instead due to introduce an evening of, for lack of a more knowledgeable word choice, weird folk. The lineup: CocoRosie, Adem, Cibelle, Vetiver, Vashti Bunyan, and Devendra Banhart.

Why, you may wonder, would a David Byrne fan attend a David Byrne concert without David Byrne? For the answer to that, we have to go back to 1989 and the founding of Luaka Bop, Byrne's own record label until recently. I know many of my readers will recall the label's first release, the tropicália anthology known as Brazil Classics, Vol. 1: Beleza Tropical. Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Jorge Ben—that album was many Americans' introduction to Brazilian music, myself included. And many more great albums followed on the Luaka Bop label. The man has impeccable taste.

Despite all the music I listen to, I don't think I had heard a single song by any 'weird funk' act other than Joanna Newsom, even though I had some mp3's sitting unlistened to on my hard drive. Would Byrne's curatorial magic strike again?

Reader, after Friday night's concert, I may go broke trying to catch up on all the great albums I've missed by the artists he gathered at Carnegie Hall. Every one of them was a surprise. The biggest surprise had to be CocoRosie's trippy combination of straight-up opera singing, high-pitched Newsom-esque vocals, and rapping. It sounds too cool for school, but there was nothing cheeky about it. I don't understand how or why it worked, but I do intend to get their recordings and get back to you about them. The other acts were less bizarre in varying degrees but no less revelatory.

But what about the host of the evening? He did join all the acts for a final number, a song I was unable to identify, but he hung back behind the young 'uns and was barely audible. I attribute this to his modesty and his earnest desire to showcase these exciting young musicians. (Only Vashti Bunyan was not young. Let us say instead that she is young again.)

In the program notes, Byrne invoked the From Spirituals to Swing concerts of the late 1930's, an influential series that brought together Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Big Bill Broonzy, and others in order to expose their work to a bigger public and to explore the common roots of their various musics. But sitting there watching all these bright, young, irrepressible fonts of enthusiasm and experimentation, I thought of a more apt comparison: New York from 1977 to 1981, for my money the most exciting music and art scene of the twentieth century.

Think about it. We had David Byrne and Talking Heads, Brian Eno and everybody, Debby Harry and Blondie, the Ramones, Basquiat, Keith Haring, plus Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and the entire first generation of hip hop all in one city at the same time. Throw in the UK influence of the Clash, the Gang of Four, the Fall (thanks, Dan), and others, and the result is a scene of incomparable experimentation, excitement, and achievement. A lot of those people passed through CBGB and Glenn O'Brien's TV Party but never all at once. (There are a lot of reasons I'm glad I was born in the 70's, but to have been that geographically close, yet too young to have seen any of it in person, remains endlessly tantalizing, even in retrospect.)

Now, I'm not saying the weird folk folk are that great, but they are pretty special. A lot of them asked David Byrne why he chose them to play Carnegie Hall. Apparently, they were genuinely surprised, and unabashedly wide-eyed and amazed to be playing Carnegie Hall. But Byrne knows why it was important to get them all together on one of music's great stages for at least one musical snapshot of the scene as a whole in 2007. I don't know if he watches Six Feet Under, but Nate Fisher tells us the answer in the final episode: 'You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone.'