CD Choice

DAVID BYRNE The Knee Plays Nonesuch *** **

While maverick singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist David Byrne has written music for Twyala Tharp's The Catherine Wheel and Wim Vandekeybus's In Spite of Wishing and Wanting dance pieces, The Knee Plays marks the Talking Heads frontman's first and most remarkable foray into music theatre.

In 1984 the groundbreaking theatre director Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach) invited Byrne to compose music for the "knee plays" (or interludes) of his day-long epic play the CIVIL warS, which was commissioned as part of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. In fact, the CIVIL warS was never performed in full (its parts proved more successful than the whole in numerous international performances). But Wilson and Byrne's The Knee Plays was first staged in 1986 in New York and toured worldwide, anticipating The Forest, their second and much stranger collaboration, two years later.

Finally released on CD two decades after its initial vinyl pressing (when it was called The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down), The Knee Plays proves to be as innovative and beguiling as ever - Byrne even performed songs from it in a one-off concert in New York last February. Inspired by the low-down gut bucket horn sound of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (their cover album of Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On last year is genius), Byrne's bold fusion of New Orleans swing, spoken word and postmodern knowingness injects his words and music with a funky groove and syncopated flow, including the jazz version of a Bulgarian folk song, Theadora Is Dozing, and the pulsing fugue for horns Winter.

With two new instrumental versions, five previously unreleased Kabuki-inspired compositions - all the more compelling for their brooding austerity - and a DVD slideshow of photographs of Wilson's original staging, The Knee Plays is Byrne at his most artful and original. www.nonesuch.com JOCELYN CLARKE

Download tracks: Tree, In the Future