A Sleigh-Load of Christmas/Holiday CD Reviews

There's so much holiday music in the kids music genre that just listening to it all this year was a daunting task. I've got eight albums that grabbed my attention in one way or another; one of them is bound to please your family (unless you're looking for a solstice, Kwanzaa, or Festivus album). Let's start out with my 3 favorite albums of this particular season...

The most ambitious kids music holiday album of the year comes courtesy of The Hipwaders, whose A Kindie Christmas isn't so much an album of Christmas music as much as it is a Christmas concept album, covering the emotions and anticipation of the season. It's a collection of all-original tunes, done in the Hipwaders power-pop/rock style. "It's Wintertime" is a great dance tune, and "Santa's Train" sounds like an outtake to a Johnny Cash Christmas album, but my favorite track here, maybe of the season, is "There's Too Much Good," a very affirming sentiment at this time of year.

To say that the collaboration of Danny Adlerman, Kevin Kameraad, and Yosi finally bridges the divide between Christian and Jewish holiday traditions makes ...And a Happy New Year sound a lot duller than it really is. In reality, the three kids rockers mostly take turns in providing songs, alternately deeply sincere ("Starlight" and "Two Sets of Footprints") and goofy (the "12 Days of Christmas" reworking "A Pickle for my Christmas Tree" and a cover of Tom Lehrer's "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica"). Featuring the season's hardest-rocking tune, the trio's cover of "Frosty the Snowman," it's an interfaith collection worth exploring regardless of whether you light menorah or advent candles.

Robert Burke Warren, AKA Uncle Rock, spent time in London's West End performing a Broadway show but also rocked in far earthier terms. On Express Your Elf, Warren taps into both of those performing personalities. On the one hand, he offers a crooning take on "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and a peaceful "My Favorite Things" (a perfect holiday song, when you think about it). Those tracks share space with the rootsy ~~original~~ long-lost nugget "Santa's Coming in a Whirlybird" and a cover of "Feliz Navidad" that neatly weaves "La Bamba" into the mix. It's a tough (and close) call, but it's my favorite kids music holiday disk of the year. There are others for your listening pleasure. Read on for more...

Review: Two Feet Tall - Dan Bern

Dan Bern might not be the first person you'd think to release a kids music album -- a discography filled with socially and politically charged songs (sample: "Bush Must Be Defeated") isn't necessarily the typical precursor to singing songs about binkies. But Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Ella Jenkins didn't exactly hide behind their political convictions, so why shouldn't politically-minded contemporary folk musicians be any less free to sing for the preschool set? Having said that, if you're expecting you're expecting the just-released Two Feet Tall to be your toddler's introduction to progressive politics, you'll be disappointed. Instead, the album features amusing couplets like this in "Hen Party" -- "They'll be playing ball games / They'll be eating applesauce / One thing we know for sure is / They won't be playing an egg toss." The closest Bern really gets to being political is "Labor Day," and that's really just a celebration of walking outside with an infant. Instead, Bern's more interested in turning a simple story of putting on pants ("Trousers") into a digression on how pants became trousers (Jack Trousers, 1751, apparently -- strange how Wikipedia is oddly silent on that issue). Or a manic telling via lyrical couplets of the people behind Listerine or Kleenex or Schwinn bicycles ("Mister Lister"). Or telling a child she's too young to do things she wants to do with lyrics that will thankfully go over the 18-month-old's head ("If you came to me and said / I want to hold a shiny red purse and / Hang on the corner of Hollywood and Vine / I'd say / You're too, too, too young / You're too young for that / Why don't you sit on my lap / And we'll drink cookies and milk..."). And occasionally Bern comes up with classic kid-folk songs, like "Shoes" ("I like that you don't have a mortgage / I like that you don't have a mortgage / That's OK when you're old and gray / But today you can run and play / I like that you don't have a mortgage...") "Only a Mouse" lists all the things only a mouse knows -- the migratory patterns of cats, certain qualities of cheese, and mixing a sloe gin fizz, apparently, among other things. There are plenty of other tracks here, such as "Donkey to Brunch," "Secrets," and "Monkey and the Kangaroo" that could easily have been recorded on a Folkways album of fifty years ago. Bern's clearly in love with his kid, and that tenderness comes through loud and clear. Well, at least clear. Clocking in at 38 songs and about 70 minutes in length, the album could have been trimmed by at least a third, not because any of the songs are bad (OK, I'd be happy never to hear again the vibrating chair in "It Vibrates") but because there's relatively little variation in the arrangements, with whistling or bells occasionally offsetting Bern's sightly nasally voice and guitar (or ukulele) playing. (There's a reason I've been focusing on Bern's wordplay here.) The songs here are most appropriate for kids ages 0 through 4. You can purchase the album at Bern's store or hear samples through iTunes. As if he were the child of Kimya Dawson, Barry Louis Polisar, and Woody Guthrie, Dan Bern's put together a collection of gentle and witty lo-fi songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves and occasionally achieve transcendance. Two Feet Tall isn't for everyone, but if you know a relatively new parent (or are one yourself) and are looking for an album celebrating infant- and toddlerhood with some roughness around the edges, you might just adore this album. For those folks, it's recommended. Disclosure: I purchased this album. Is that a disclosure?

Review: 76 Trombones - Dan Zanes and Friends

Let's stop for a moment to appreciate Dan Zanes' output over the past ten years -- 10 albums, 2 DVDs, a couple books, a ukulele, a Grammy, and the eternal gratitude of tens of thousands of families (not to mention dozens of musicians and reporters, who could always count on him for advice or a good quote). That's right -- in 1999, only a few folks around New York City had heard Zanes' "age-desegregated" music passed around on a home-recorded tape, but ten years later, his music's been heard Australia, the Middle East, off-Broadway, and, no doubt, a number of Starbucks locations. Well, now with 76 Trombones, his tenth album for families, he's finally made it to Broadway, covering a wide variety of Broadway tunes owned by Sir Paul McCartney's music publishing company. He and his friends (both his regular band and a bunch of Broadway stars such as Carol Channing, Matthew Broderick, and Brian Stokes Mitchell) have given melodies from the Great White Way the house party treatment, sounding less like a formal musical and more like a local parade (a noun that Zanes himself uses to describe the album in the liner notes). A key to any successful cover album is to find a kernel of truth in the song that the artist can then apply to their own style. Several songs here achieve that success -- the soulful rock of "I Won't Grow Up" from ~~Annie~~ Peter Pan, the parade of the title track (from The Music Man), or the jubilantly defiant "I Am What I Am" from La Cage aux Folles. And at other points, Zanes doesn't mess much with what's worked in the past, such as giving Frank Loesser's beautiful "The Inch Worm" a relatively untouched treatment. It's all here, the elements from every other fine Dan Zanes album -- the guest stars in abundance, the song in Spanish (Zanes' and Sonia de los Santos' bilingual take on "Tomorrow" from Annie), the skit and duet with Father Goose. And, yet, the album didn't move me like Zanes' other albums have. I've been thinking about why for a long time, and I'm not sure I have a great answer. Some songs don't work great (the duet on "Tomorrow," Peter Pan's "I'm Flying"), and perhaps it's because although Zanes has some great singers with him, and while Zanes has many strengths as a performer, his vocals don't necessarily carry songs which were written to be sung by singers whose voices can be belted across a stage. The best answer I could come up with relates to Zanes' own career and approach. When he released Sea Music and his Carl Sandburg cover album, those thematically and stylistically focused albums were interspersed between his five more standard "family" albums which culminated in the Grammy-winning Catch That Train!, which has to be on the short list for best kids music album of the decade. His concerts have been giant parties, melding cultures (musical and otherwise) and building communities. But his past three albums have been more narrowly focused -- a Spanish-language disk, a disk of ecunmenical religious tunes, and now this one. None of them have been bad, they're all worth just checking out. But it's been more than 3 1/2 years since the release of Catch That Train!, and I miss that potpourri. Like with all Zanes disks, the idea of an age range is a little silly, but I think kids ages 5 and up will most appreciate the themes and lyrical sophistication here. You can hear the title track here or samples at all your favorite digital e-tailers. I don't blame Dan Zanes for recording the album -- if Sir Paul McCartney's people asked me to narrate the phone book for an audiobook, it'd take me about 2 seconds before grabbing for the Yellow Pages. And I'm afraid that the tone of this review is more negative than the album merits, because it's filled with a number of really good songs, few duds, and is still better than 90% of the music being made for families today. I'm just used to Dan Zanes being better than 98% of the music being made for families today. 76 Trombones is recommended, though, and I expect Zanes' second decade recording music for families to be as joyful as the first. Disclosure: Dan Zanes' Festival Five Records provided me with a copy of the album for possible review.

Concert Review: Imagination Movers (Mesa, December 2009)

We are no longer the Imagination Movers' target audience, if indeed we ever were. Back before they were a Disney sensation, they were known to us only via CDs, CDs that I was just sort of "meh" about. And their good fortune (based on a lot of work) of securing a Disney TV show didn't help us, a non-cable-TV household. (We've only seen the show maybe a couple times.) So while I was definitely interested in seeing the band in concert on their West Coast swing, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, either from my own perspective or that of Miss Mary Mack and Little Boy Blue.

First off, I expected, and found, a sizable audience for the band. The lovely new Mesa Arts Center was hopping Friday with attendees for various events, but the Movers had the biggest theatre and given that the Ikeda Theatre seats nearly 1,600, I'd guess that at least 1,000 of those were filled, which, well, beat out Dan Zanes when he last came through on a Friday night. It helps to have Disney's muscle backing the band, I suppose, so I got this shot of labelmates' TMBG's cover/reworking of "Davy Crockett (In Outer Space)" playing on the video screen before the show. (I have chosen to omit photos of my kids' slackjawed appreciation of the familiar video.) But 7:08 rolled around, the scrim went up, the band came out, and we were off.

DVD/CD Review: "Readeez Volume Two" / "Songeez" - Readeez

There are 3 operative points of comparison when discussing Readeez, the creation of Atlanta-based Michael Rachap -- Baby Einstein, Schoolhouse Rock, and Sesame Street. Or, at least, those were the three I thought of as I listened to the latest Readeez products, the Readeez Volume Two DVD and the Songeez CD. Let's start with Schoolhouse Rock, famously created to try to educate kids via advertising techniques. Rachap used to work in the advertising industry, but rather than deliver educational nuggets via 3-minute pop songs, he typically does it in about 60 seconds. Which means his educational scope, such as it is, is a little circumscribed -- it's hard enough to describe conjunctions in 3 minutes and essentially impossible in 60 seconds. So the songs that have some educational content, such as "A Special Name for Twelve" or "Circle and Square" (from the first DVD, but also on the Songeez disk), cover much narrower ground, which is fine. But if you're expecting "learning" from these two items, it's much more on the level of TMBG's Here Come the 123s (with some Dial-A-Song mixed in) than Here Comes Science. Let's move, then, to TMBG's Disney label mates, Baby Einstein. I know that it's easy to slag on the series, but if you set aside their overhyped claims for the product, their later stuff is competently produced and offers a wide variety of visual stimulation for young'uns. For an independently produced DVD, Volume 2 looks great. (It's what made this headline -- Readeez Company Acquired by Disney" -- so great. Yes, it's on both disks.) The attention to detail at times even surpasses Einstein's (note the timing of the placement of periods at the end of "The Land of I Don't Know"). The comparison does, however, highlight one of Readeez' ("Readeez's"?) few shortcomings, and that's the relative monotony of the visuals on the DVD. I like the concept of displaying the words as you hear them, and the crisp, clean look of the background and text is balm for a "Dear Teacher"-font world gone awry. But I long for more visual variety, as the Einstein videos employ. The occasional use of pictures or non-white backgrounds to offset the charmingly illustrated Julian and Isabel Waters (or live-action Rachap) would go a long way. Which brings us to Sesame Street. Forty years down the line, they've had some great songs written for the show. The best songs don't feel like they were written with education in mind. And while the Volume One DVD often felt like the "education" aspect played a more important role, Volume Two has much less of that feel, and, as a result is a more enjoyable experience sonically. (Though Volume One is not without considerable charm.)

Book Review: "Kids Go!" - They Might Be Giants

Books are so 20th century, right? Then why do people insist on continuing to write them? Who knows, but in the case of They Might Be Giants, their proficiency in the non-book world has led them to Kids Go!, their second book. It's a song they wrote for PBS converted to book format featuring the illustrations of Pascal Campion, who's animated a number of their videos for their "Here Comes...." series. As a book, it's fine, really. While song lyrics written on the page can look odd, especially given the verse-chorus-verse nature of most songs, Campion's energetic line drawings with muted colorings help move the plot of the book, such as it is, along. And, hey, it comes with a DVD video that mimics, though doesn't copy, the book illustrations. But I think a lot of parents, excited to get another TMBG item to go along with, say, Here Comes Science, will be disappointed. For the same price as the book (if not cheaper), you can get an entire DVD and CD of TMBG music. Even compared to TMBG's previous book foray (Bed Bed Bed, which featured a 4-song CD), the package is a little lacking. (And isn't it a little weird to read a book about putting books down and jumping around?) The book will be of most interest to kids ages 4 through 7. You can buy the book just about anywhere -- here the whole song here or watch a minute's worth of the DVD video here. It's a fun and might make a neat gift for the They Might Be Giants superfan in your family's life, but most folks can probably hold off. Until they figure out how to package the Kindle text and iTunes video download for $5.