With more than 30 recordings to his credit, he has developed a strong international following, and won a Grammy® Award in 1999. Absorbing musical and aesthetic ideas from sources as diverse as The Beatles, concrete poetry, the French Dadaists and the Brazilian modernist poets of the 1920s, Veloso—together with Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, his sister Maria Bethania, and a number of other poets and intellectuals—founded a movement called Tropicalismo that permanently altered the course of his country's popular music.

Veloso recently headlined a five-day Carnegie Hall mini-festival entitled Perspectives: Caetano Veloso. During the festival, Veloso performed two concerts in Isaac Stern Auditorium—one solo and one with his close friend and collaborator, the American singer/songwriter David Byrne. The upcoming Creators at Carnegie program features excerpts from both of these extraordinary concerts, plus interviews with Veloso and Byrne.

For his solo concert, Veloso performed intimate acoustic versions of well-known classics and songs from his new CD, A Foreign Sound. His first recording sung entirely in English, the record is a culmination of his longstanding affection for American music and includes works from Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain and David Byrne. The New York Times calls the album a "comment on border-hopping, a token of kinship and a meditation on exoticism."

Known as the force behind the enormously popular Talking Heads, David Byrne complements his sixteen-year solo career with work as a photographer, film director and author; he has been publishing and exhibiting visual art for more than a decade.

Byrne's first record for Nonesuch, Grown Backwards, was released in the spring. A richly melodic set of fourteen songs that feature strings, rhythm section and guitar, it includes eleven original songs and two opera arias. Byrne performed duets with Veloso at their joint Carnegie Hall concert, plus a number of songs from Grown Backwards and his previous solo records, as well as Talking Heads classics.

This latest installment in the Creators at Carnegie series highlights an exciting collaboration that features Nonesuch Records' artists playing a key role in Carnegie Hall's new and adventurous programming.

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