New Music: Wake Up, Clarinet!

In my experience, the best jazz for children is just, well, jazz. You may not want to start with Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman (most adults don't start with them either), but there's nothing even potentially off-putting to kids about most of the genre's classic big names, from Louis Armstrong to at least the early work of John Coltrane. So I've always been skeptical about jazz albums specifically aimed at children; they seem to me to be serving a nonexistent and unnecessary market.

Saxophonist and clarinetist Oran Etkin's Wake Up, Clarinet! qualifies as a remarkable exception, however. The album is being released this coming Tuesday, September 14, in conjunction with the launch of Etkin's Timbalooloo brand of music classes for children, an expansion of ones he's been teaching to New York City kids. Timbalooloo aims to access and augment children's natural musicality, and while I can't really say whether this CD manages that on its own, I can say that you and your kids will get to listen to some seriously high-quality playing while finding out.

That's because Etkin is an award-winning artist outside the children's music arena (his 2009 album Kelenia, which combined modern jazz with traditional Malian and Jewish music, picked up an Independent Music Award), and because he's recruited a killer set of musicians to work with here, including drummer Jason Marsalis and vocalist Charenee Wade. The result is modern jazz that's not only accessible to kids, but designed specifically for them. In a way, it's a jarring contrast: the title track, for instance, is essentially classic instrument personification à la Peter and the Wolf, in which Etkin and the other musicians encourage kids to sing along to help wake up the sleepy clarinet. But the music, and especially the clarinet's solo when it is roused, feels unexpectedly sophisticated for such subject matter. (People probably once said the same of Prokofiev.)

I suspect that some of Etkin's patter introducing the various songs and concepts plays a little better in the directly interactive realm of the Timbalooloo classroom, but children still respond to it, and it's not overly distracting for adults. And the music is as rich, full, and pleasing as you'd expect from such an expert roster, particularly on the tracks that include Wade, whose voice just never stops smiling, or making you smile. 

[Image courtesy of Timbalooloo]

Security Blanket: Music Over Manhattan

Some of my friends call them “loveys”—the especially beloved items that can calm young children when nothing else can. Traditionally, they’re stuffed animals of one kind or another—those endearingly well-worn ones whose dilapidation is almost unbearably cute to all parents. (We know what it signifies, after all.)

Dash, our five-year-old, had (and even still has) traditional loveys, of course, but back in the day, the go-to was a picture book. It was one of his first books, actually, a gift from my sister-in-law: Music Over Manhattan, by Mark Karlins, with illustrations by Jack E. Davis. This was the book he insisted we read him at bedtime when he’d had a particularly rough day, or perhaps a particularly great one he wanted to cap off well, even before he could use real words to do so.

It’s about a Brooklyn kid, Bernie, who feels he can’t do anything right, and certainly not as well as his irritatingly perfect cousin Herbert. But he’s taken under the wing of his Uncle Louis, a professional musician who plays Bernie’s favorite song, “Moonlight Over Manhattan,” so beautifully that the music lifts people into the air. Louis sees talent in Bernie, and over time teaches him to play the trumpet, and before a family wedding he’s playing for, he asks Bernie to fill in for a sick trumpeter—including the solo on the magical song. Bernie is nervous, but in the end, he doesn’t disappoint.

It’s a charming little book, and Davis’s exaggerated style of illustration fits the modern New York caricatures in the tale wonderfully. But the story itself can’t have been much of a touchstone for an 18-month-old who didn’t really have perfect cousins or peers to be frustrated by. It seems to be that magical idea of music making people actually lift off the ground and fly that captured Dash’s imagination early.

That concept has lasted, too—while he’s since moved on to other reading favorites, he still pulls out Music Over Manhattan from time to time for a look. The other day, I noticed him reading it to his little brother, who’s just a little older now than he was when he first fell in love with it. Two-time lovey, perhaps?

[Photos by Whitney Webster]

Security Blanket: Charlie Parker Played Be Bop

I have to admit it: I’m favoring my eldest. At least, in terms of writing about (and, OK, thinking about) his books and DVDs and such. While five-year-old Dash’s horizons are expanding and exploding, 21-month-old Griffin is still in the board-book phase. Worse still, Griff also suffers from the usual second-child “been there, done that” syndrome: Most of his current books are hand-me downs from Dash. Let’s just say I’m having a tough time summoning the proper tone of wonder for “Goodnight nobody” these days.

Happily, there are exceptions. Most are long-established classics that just never get old, the Sendaks and such. But we’re fortunate that Griff’s absolute favorite book, the one he asks for every single night, happens to...well, also never get old: the board-book version of Chris Raschka’s Charlie Parker Played Be Bop.

We first discovered the wonders of this book (originally written in 1992) when Dash was about this age, and a quick troll of the Internet shows we were by no means alone. It’s wonderfully nonlinear, managing to capture the feel of jazz in its illustrations and the pacing of its minimal text. Raschka plays off real words and context-less phrases against scat sounds in a fashion that wouldn’t feel out of place in actual jazz vocals, and the effect is marvelous: “Be-bop/Fisk, fisk/Lollipop/Boomba, boomba/Bus stop/Znnn Znnn/Boppity, bippity, bop. Bang!” (All right, I suppose it’s a little more marvelous next to Raschka’s suitably fuzzy drawings.)

Charlie Parker Played Be Bop essentially forces parents to perform it—the book doesn’t work nearly as well when read “straight.” I’m among those awkward souls for whom even this minimal level of performance doesn’t come naturally, and I often find myself resenting children’s books that require it. But Raschka makes it all so organic that I never resisted; in short order, Whitney and I had created our own sung version of the book, one that’s survived through all our readings with Dash into Griff’s current obsession with it.

This is another of the book’s charms: As with so many children’s classics (the wordless “wild rumpus” pages of Where the Wild Things Are come to mind), every family can have its own unique interpretation. Ours begins with a little hi-hat riff, which Griff (who still has only a few real words at this point) now uses to indicate he wants us to read this book. And I’m sure it’s largely because he’s my toddler, but there’s something especially radiant about a beaming toddler doing a hi-hat riff: “Tssss ts-ts tssss ts-ts tssss...”

I’m sometimes surprised even now that we never tire of Charlie Parker, given how relentlessly Griff requires us to read it (and how relentlessly Dash did for years before him). It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why. But I think it’s that Raschka didn’t write a children’s book about Charlie Parker; he wrote a jazz book for kids, a fact as remarkable as it sounds. It’s a delight to read, and by all appearances a delight to listen to.

[Photo: Courtesy of Orchard Books.]