New York Public Radio station WNYC's Soundcheck staff have released their Picks of the Week. The show's executive producer, Gisele Regatao, points to Youssou N'Dour's Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), and host John Schaefer names David Byrne's The Knee Plays among the "stand-out new albums" worth checking out now.

On this morning's edition of Today, BBC Radio 4's flagship news and current affairs program, David Byrne talked about the inspiration behind The Knee Plays. The piece was originally devised as part of an epic theater piece by director Robert Wilson in 1984 and has just now been released on CD by Nonesuch. Read what he had to say here.

Craig Smith, 60, Founder and Artistic Director of Boston's Emmanuel Music, has died. Opera News reports that Smith, a frequent collaborator of the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, passed away last Wednesday, November 14, in Boston, from complications due to diabetes-related kidney failure. We at Nonesuch offer our heartfelt condolences to Craig Smith's family and colleagues.

The DownBeat 72nd Annual Readers Poll results are in, including the Best Jazz Album of the Year: Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau's Metheny Mehldau. Metheny was also named Best Guitarist and Mehldau Best Acoustic Pianist. "There was a real exchange and richness of ideas," Metheny tells DownBeat about the making of the album. "We talked about the most complex, simple, detailed, or general idea at will. We moved around within three dimensions, sound-wise or texture-wise, harmonically or rhythmically."

Caetano Veloso spoke with Newsday about his new album, the rock-infused, Cê, and his long history with the genre, going back to the early days of Tropicália. "I never intended to solve the contradiction between traditional and contemporary music," he says. "Real contemporary music can use tradition in so many ways: to reaffirm aspects of it while refusing others, to create a total contrast to it, to choose the role of its savior. Or, as we Tropicálistas did, sway through all of the above."

On New York Times music critic Jon Pareles's list of events to look out for this week are concerts by Caetano Veloso and Youssou N'Dour, two "musicians who qualify as full-fledged national heroes." While they come from different continents, both "accepted the same mission: to make contemporary pop that sounds both local and global, and highly individual." And each will perform at New York's Nokia Theatre.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross will be reading from his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, tomorrow. In advance of the reading, he spoke with Washington Post's Express about the state of classical music, and offered readers some Top Five lists on the subject. Number one on his list of contemporary classical works pop listeners might like: Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians.

"Daniel Day-Lewis is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for his performance as an unscrupulous prospector in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!" So writes Ruthe Stein in her preview of There Will Be Blood in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle special holiday movie section. "Day-Lewis is in almost every scene, and he shows how ambition can destroy as well as nurture," she reports. "He's scary. Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) is frightful in another way as a fire-breathing preacher and would-be healer."

Catch a glimpse of director Paul Thomas Anderson's monumental new film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a merciless turn-of-the-century oil baron. In the preview, you can hear Jonny Greenwood's powerful score, which the LA Times says gives the film with an "epic sonic scope" worthy of an Oscar nomination. Nonesuch will release the soundtrack December 18; the film hits theaters December 26.

k.d. lang was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, featuring the UK broadcast debut of the song "I Dream of Spring," off her forthcoming album, Watershed. She spoke with Jane Garvey about writing and producing the new album, due out in February, preparing for her US tour, and visiting her hometown of Consort in Alberta, Canada—pop. 736, up from 650 when k.d. was growing up there.

Caetano Veloso's tour through California in support of his album Cê began earlier this week in Pasadena, and Variety magazine reports that the singer "sounded effortlessly contemporary. Even more impressively, he did it without compromise." For Variety writer Steven Mirkin, the rocking stage show brings comparisons to Talking Heads, Lou Reed, and the Strokes.

The Criterion Collection has announced that it will release a special four-disc set of the Bernardo Bertolucci masterpiece The Last Emperor on February 26, 2008. The film depicts the tumultuous life of Pu Yi, who came to power in 1908, at the age of three, and became China's last emperor. It garnered nine Academy Awards, winning each of the categories in which it was nominated, including Best Original Score, by Ryuichi Sakomoto, Cong Su, and David Byrne. Among the special-edition DVD's bonus features are audio commentary by Sakamoto and new video interviews with Sakamoto and Byrne.