Ah, Putumayo Kids, you compiler and purveyor of music from around the world, you must be running out of themes, right? Rock & Roll Playground? Isn't there another region of the world you need to unearth some musical treasures from? What's next - Pop Playground? Hip-Hop Playground? (Actually, please get on that, stat.)
Most regular readers have heard many of these tracks (or at least the artists), but credit Putumayo for having the sense to string 'em together in a happy-happy pop-rock mixtape with few if any duds. For example, Taj Mahal -> Dan Zanes -> Charity and the JAMband = win. (Or, Rhythm Child -> Rosie Flores -> Uncle Rock = win.) Best for kids ages 3 through 8 (samples here), you could probably put together your own 34-minute playlist, but why bother when they've already done the work for you? Recommended.
Having said all that, Jazz Playground is my favorite of all the Putumayo "Playground" series disks, and that's saying something. The nature of jazz is such that it covers lots of styles and permits fresh interpretations of songs we've heard dozens if not hundreds of times before, and as a result, there's a nice mix of new and old, providing new perspectives -- and isn't that one of the major points of the Putumayo concept anyway? The album deftly navigates the line between over-reliance on English language voices (which you can get anywhere) and non-English language songs (which can be hard for English speakers to fully appreciate, no matter how funky the liner notes are).
Beyond that, it's just plain fun through and through, from Zooglobble favorite Lewis Franco & the Missing Cats doing his swing original "Stomp, Stomp" to Chris McKhool's fiddle-based take on "Spider-Man" to the Latin jazz of Jose Conde's "Cumbamba." And on down the line. Best for kids ages 2 through 8, the 31-minute album (again, samples here) goes onto my shortlist of essential jazz-for-kids albums. Definitely recommended.
Why such a tiny review for such a big superstar as Laurie Berkner? Because it's a greatest hits disk, the future of which is somewhat in doubt in the mp3 era. After all, if your family are superfans, you'll get it just for the three new-to-CD tracks, including rerecordings of "Pig on Her Head" and "Moon Moon Moon," both previously seen on video, and the new track "Open Your Heart." (There's a deluxe edition as well, featuring four videos, including a previously-unreleased one for "Mouse in My Toolbox," which is similar in scope to Berkner's other Nick videos. You superfans will probably want that version.) The rest of you? You might just download the extra tracks from the album you don't have (there are no more than four from any particular album).
But that obscures just how important a songwriter and performer Berkner is for the pre-K set. As a whole, it's a solidly constructed disk, with no major omissions -- I personally would've included more tracks from her debut Whaddaya Think of That?, but all the big tracks are here. And over the roughly 15 years or so Berkner's been performing for kids she's compiled a catalog of songs that would be the envy of just about any kids' musician. "We Are the Dinosaurs" is a stone-cold kids' classic, for example, one that works equally well performed live by a band and performed by your preschooler's teacher. "Moon Moon Moon" is the only lullaby written in the past hundred years that I actually sing to my kids. And "Victor Vito" is cheesy, dorky, and stuck in your brain for the next week now that I've mentioned it. And so on.
While other artists slowly slide up to the 4-to-8-year-old age range, Berkner's continued to make music -- darn good music -- for preschoolers. So while I'm not sure many regular readers actually need The Best of The Laure Berkner Band! given the relative lack of new songs, as a collection of some of the best original music for preschoolers of the past twenty years, it's highly recommended.
(Disclosure: I was provided a copy of the regular edition of the album for possible review.)
If you're going to title your second kids' CD Funky Fresh and Sugar Free, you better bring at least a modicum of funk, am I right? Luckily, Oklahoma's Sugar Free Allstars meet that test. The heart of the music is still Chris Wiser's Hammond B3 organ and Rob "Dr. Rock" Martin's drums, but they've opened up a little more on this disk, with Wiser occasionally playing sax or bass, and Dr. Rock pulling out the theremin. If there's nothing on the album as instantaneously memorable as "Bathtub Boy" from their debut, this new album is much more consistent -- heck, just better -- overall. "Rock Awesome!" is actually the least funky track on the disk (though kids may get into the call-and-response) and "The Train Beat Song" I think works much better live than it does on the album. But the eight songs in the middle are solid tracks -- I'm particularly fond of "Little Red Wagon" -- and Wiser's sense of humor is evident on the silly "SFA Disco Dance Party" and the stroll-down-memory-lane "6th Grade Band." (Note: not my memory lane. Sixth grade orchestra is muuuuuch less interesting.)
With the aspirational exception of "6th Grade Band," kids ages 3 through 7 are most likely to enjoy the songs here. (You can stream the whole album using the player below.) Funky Fresh and Sugar Free is sweet, but your kids may even lose some calories overall dancing to the music. Recommended.
Disclosure: I was provided a copy of the album for possible review.
Based in the Twin Cities, The Sweet Colleens normally play Celtic-flavored roots music for adults, but they've branched out on The Monkey Dance: All the Kids Are Doin' It!, their first album for kids. It's a hodge-podge of styles, from the more rockin' title track and the especially fun Cajun'-tinged "No Beans, No Brownie" (the chorus soon to come to a home near you), to the more traditional "The Terrible Twos Step" and "Who's My Pretty Baby?" (Covering Woody Guthrie will usually earn you bonus points 'round these parts.) Though the Minneapolis Youth Chorus sounds great on a number of the tracks, they also sound a little out of place on the album -- I'd've rather heard the band tear through another traditional roots piece to get the kids dancin'.
The album will be most appropriate for kids ages 2 through 7. You can hear a few of the songs from the 41-minute album at the band's new Myspace page. For a first kids' album, The Monkey Dance is pretty decent -- some fun tunes, good musicianship, and a willingness to get playful. I'm recommending this for fans of roots rock. And I think if the band decides to record their second album for families and figures out what they really want to do, look out -- it could be seriously good.
It's taken me a little time to fully appreciate Randy Kaplan for what he is -- one of family music's most inventive storytellers. There were times at which I thought songs like "Shampoo Me" were, though amusing, a little silly and not quite the Dan Zanes-like music I thought Kaplan could -- or maybe should -- make.
I was wrong. It's songs like "Shampoo Me" that are what make Randy, Randy. The fanciful stories sprung from the conjoined heads of Shel Silverstein and Bob Dylan are Kaplan's calling card, and he's very, very good at them. His third album for kids, The Kids Are All Id, is to my mind, his most story-intensive collection yet. From the get-go, Kaplan tells inventive stories in folk songs about characters you haven't heard from -- "The Hebrew-Speaking Bear," an Elizabeth II-aping queen bee on "Little Bee," or his monkey Kqxhc, who makes a return appearance on "Is She a Girl or Is She a Monkey." Kaplan doesn't dig too deep into lessons -- his cover of "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" and his original "My Little Laugh," about laughing at situations that might otherwise make him cry are about as deep as he gets.
The album is titled The Kids Are All Id on purpose -- there are lots of characters here who are somewhat exasperating -- Joe, of course, the title character in the folk-punk "The Kid Is All Id," Kaplan's younger self in his rreworking of "Don't You Leave Me Here," or the toddler who responds to every joke setup line with "This Guy." The first ten or so songs are, if not frenzied, at least active. As a result, the trio of Ezra Jack Keats-based songs about two-thirds of the way through the disk come like a soothing balm. "I Like Cacti" is a sweet, sweet song -- I can't get over the line "What attracts us / About a cactus?" Indeed, while I've been focusing on the words here, Kaplan writes some great musical bits (there's a part in "The Kid Is All Id," in which the adult supervisor breaks free with a plaintive, soaring chorus) and he and his producer Mike West give the album a natural, expansive sound.
The 54-minute album will be most appreciated by kids aged 4 through 8. You can listen to 3 of the tracks at Randy's Myspace page. The Kids Are All Id is Randy Kaplan's best album yet, and shows Kaplan's greatest strength -- his ability to listen to and interact with the kids who are his audience and to turn that into stories in song. Instead of suggesting that Randy could be the next Dan Zanes, perhaps I should've suggested Bill Harley. Definitely recommended.
I'd like to think I have a good record of introducing new artists worth following to the world, but I can't be first all the time. As you'd expect, Bill Childs gets his fair share of disks, and last week in his typical understated way, he made an aside in an unrelated e-mail, saying, "I like that Pop Ups CD." I hadn't heard it, and so worked to change that ASAP and...
This is nothing less than the kids music debut of the year, an inventive mix of beats and melodies that will tickle the eardrums of young and old alike.
It's called Outside Voices, and it's from the Brooklyn duo The Pop Ups. The Pop Ups consist of kids music teacher Jacob Stein and Jason Rabinowitz, frontman for the indie-pop band The Bloodsugars and co-writer/producer of three Little Maestros disks on Kid Rhino, so they've come into this project with both a kids music background and no small amount of experience recording music for adult ears.
The opening track, "Outside Inside," is as striking an opening track as I've heard on a kids album in some time. A guitar strum, a piano, and then a soaring vocal accented by an insistent drum track, all in the purpose of describing the difference between outside voices and inside voices. The next track "Subway Train" is an '80s-tinged electronica-assisted tale of alliterative animals on the New York subway system. The reggae-style "Balloon" leads to "Apes in Capes," which must be a Postal Service hidden track about using basic geometric patterns to draw objects. The midtempo rocket "F & G" is the greatest song about a letter pair since They Might Be Giants' "QU."
And so on. The second five tracks are slightly less awesome than the first five, though I have no small fondness for the horn-assisted garage-rocker "Pasta" (I think you can guess what that one's about). And "Up and Down" is pretty much a Sesame Street video begging to be made.
The 37-minute album is pitched toward kids aged 3 through 7, though I can definitely see this being one of those albums that parents occasionally sneak into the car's CD player after dropping the kids off somewhere. For the moment, you can just purchase the album via download. It's now available in both mp3 and tangible CD format. Feel free to stream the whole album below. (Um, that's an order, actually.)
Can you tell I'm over the moon about this album? Good. Because it's seriously great; it's this year's out-of-nowhere surprise equivalent to John and Mark's Children's Record. Totally for kids, with no compromises for the adults listening in, this album is winning in every way. I may not be the very first to tell you about Outside Voices, but I can guarantee you that I will not be the last. Highly recommended.
Note: The band provided a copy of the album for possible review.
Ah, Putumayo Kids, you compiler and purveyor of music from around the world, you must be running out of themes, right? Rock & Roll Playground? Isn't there another region of the world you need to unearth some musical treasures from? What's next - Pop Playground? Hip-Hop Playground? (Actually, please get on that, stat.)
Most regular readers have heard many of these tracks (or at least the artists), but credit Putumayo for having the sense to string 'em together in a happy-happy pop-rock mixtape with few if any duds. For example, Taj Mahal -> Dan Zanes -> Charity and the JAMband = win. (Or, Rhythm Child -> Rosie Flores -> Uncle Rock = win.) Best for kids ages 3 through 8 (samples here), you could probably put together your own 34-minute playlist, but why bother when they've already done the work for you? Recommended.
Having said all that, Jazz Playground is my favorite of all the Putumayo "Playground" series disks, and that's saying something. The nature of jazz is such that it covers lots of styles and permits fresh interpretations of songs we've heard dozens if not hundreds of times before, and as a result, there's a nice mix of new and old, providing new perspectives -- and isn't that one of the major points of the Putumayo concept anyway? The album deftly navigates the line between over-reliance on English language voices (which you can get anywhere) and non-English language songs (which can be hard for English speakers to fully appreciate, no matter how funky the liner notes are).
Beyond that, it's just plain fun through and through, from Zooglobble favorite Lewis Franco & the Missing Cats doing his swing original "Stomp, Stomp" to Chris McKhool's fiddle-based take on "Spider-Man" to the Latin jazz of Jose Conde's "Cumbamba." And on down the line. Best for kids ages 2 through 8, the 31-minute album (again, samples here) goes onto my shortlist of essential jazz-for-kids albums. Definitely recommended.
Why such a tiny review for such a big superstar as 
If you're going to title your second kids' CD Funky Fresh and Sugar Free, you better bring at least a modicum of funk, am I right? Luckily, Oklahoma's 
Based in the Twin Cities, 
It's taken me a little time to fully appreciate 
I'd like to think I have a good record of introducing new artists worth following to the world, but I can't be first all the time. As you'd expect, 
