Artist Bio:
Scottish-born David Byrne will always be known as the frontman for the Talking Heads, but he's also been a key player in introducing the work of international artists to American audiences.
The Talking Heads — the rhythm-oriented, minimalist band he formed with classmates from the Rhode Island School of Design — burst out of the Manhattan punk scene in the late '70s and released some of the postpunk era's most influential records beginning with 1977's Talking Heads: 77. In 1980 Byrne's alliance with producer Brian Eno and heavy use of session musicians threatened to turn the Heads into a solo project but resulted in the band's catchy, funky, polyrhythmic masterpiece Remain in Light. The first inklings of a globally conscious Byrne surfaced on his collaborative album with Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which took its title from a 1954 novel by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, and used electronics and African rhythms to simulate the sounds of an imaginary Third World country.
In the '80s, as the Talking Heads continued, Byrne composed music for dance pieces by Twyla Tharp, wrote and directed the film True Stories and contributed to the scores for the films Married to the Mob and The Last Emperor. In 1988, just as the Talking Heads were issuing their swan song, Naked, Byrne's fascination with world music led him to form the label Luaka Bop. Luaka Bop issued its first collection, Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical, in January 1989 and Byrne's own Latin-pop album Rei Momo later that year.
Luaka Bop was neither a dance, postpunk or anthropological-oriented imprint. Byrne had been making compilations for friends from his vinyl collection, and the label turned his obsessive appreciation of obscure world music into something undeniably hip. Luaka Bop's attention would often be drawn to artists who fused traditional styles with instrumentation of the '60s, such as wah-wah pedals and Farfisa organ, rather than those that attempted to preserve the purity of traditional sounds.
Asia Classics 2: Peppermint Teahouse Best of Shoukihki Kina collected the works of an Okinawan musician who synthesized reggae-garage-surf-boogie, and Everything Is Possible surveyed the career of Brazilian tropicália psych-pop outfit Os Mutantes. Stellar compilations from the label exposing the sounds that fell between and across national and ethnic boundaries also began to tumble forth such as 1993's Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru and Adventures in AfroPea 3: Telling Stories From the Sea. Byrne was given access to the vaults of EGREM, the Cuban state record label, which resulted in a collection from Sylvio Rodriguez, the Cuban poet and songwriter, which made his music available for the first time in the U.S. During the '90s, the label also signed independent acts with internationalist tendencies, such as Geggy Tah, Cornershop and Zap Mama. More recently the label has had hits with the ersatz French bossa nova of Nouvelle Vague, issued vintage African acid rock on World Psychedelic Classics 3 and released new material from Brazilian modernist Tom Zé.
Luaka Bop has also been home to many of David Byrne's solo outings, which have varied in their absorption of world-music influences and level of experiment. While Rei Momo was based on Latin rhythms, 1992's Uh-Oh went back to rock-pop. The electronic-folk fusion collection Feelings followed in 1997. Look Into the Eyeball was issued on Virgin Records/Luaka Bop in 2001, and in 2003 Byrne's music for the film Young Adam was released as Lead Us Not Into Temptation by Chicago's Thrill Jockey label. Grown Backwards appeared in 2004 on Nonesuch, finding a commanding Byrne working in a modern internationalist groove with guests such as Rufus Wainwright and arrangements from the Tosca Strings. Byrne's involvement in world music has also included documentary filmmaking with Ile Aiye (The House of Life), which examined Yoruban dance music. – John Dugan
