Website Review: Jitterbug.tv

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Tired of listening to your kids’ same old CDs over and over again? Jitterbug is here to help! The site seems to be in something like beta right now, with just a handful of artists available, but the premise is awfully cool.

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In the site’s words: “Discover great independent music for kids.

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we hand pick the good stuff…you won’t find Barney here.”

It’s a sentiment I can’t argue with, certainly, and I can personally vouch for Jitterbug’s appeal to one particular three-year-old who told me, after watching one video, “I love this site.”

What would be nice is the ability to stream a Jitterbug radio station, or download a Jitterbug podcast — hand-picked content aside, the site is essentially just acting as a portal for embedded content that seems to be mainly hosted elsewhere. Once Jitterbug gets its legs, hopefully they’ll add some of the extra functionality that will help turn them from a video gateway into a must-visit site for the “hip kids” they’re targeting in their manifesto.

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CD Review: “Come Dance with Us”

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Various Artists – Come Dance with Us (2007, First Wave)
purchase this album (Amazon)

First Wave, the company behind Come Dance with Us, is also responsible for the Fundamentals series of DVDs, which is geared toward teaching very young children to speak clearly — so it should come as no surprise that this CD is a perfectly old-school slice of kids’ music, about as far removed from the hipper, more rockin’ stuff that’s popular with the parental units these days. On the junior set continuum, it’s far, far closer to Barney than Yo Gabba Gabba!

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For what it is, though, Come Dance with Us is very well made, and it comes with a sweet back story: First Wave is run by a daughter-mother duo, Melissa and Dolores Ormandy Neumann, and the songs on this disc were sung by Dolores to Melissa when Melissa was a young girl. Those songs — with titles like “I Know a Little Girl” and “Sitting in a Train” — are arranged around a story about a brother and sister who take a trip to visit some family the day before vacation.

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(I suppose this makes it the kiddie music equivalent of a concept album.

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) The storyline, such as it is, is incidental to the songs, which are just as short, cute, and catchy as you’d expect for something geared toward the under-5 set.

The music is stereotypically “kiddie,” by which I mean it’s performed with a lot of not particularly expensive-sounding synths, and the vocals are coated in syrup — and although that lessens its appeal to older kids and parents, it won’t have any significant impact on how your young ones respond to it. To hear samples of Come Dance with Us (and/or purchase it), click on the above link or visit the First Wave website.

CD Review: Mama Doni, “I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids)”

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Mama Doni – I Love Herring & Other Fish Shticks for Kids (2008, Mama Doni)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Let me begin this review by saying that I think children’s music with a Jewish focus is a terrific idea. Speaking as someone who gets up to his pupik in holiday songs every year, the overall lack of explicitly Jewish modern American music is a sad, troublesome thing, and any album that nudges the scales in the other direction is a good thing in my book. Earphones. Whatever.

On the other hand, I am honestly and utterly uncertain what to make of Mama Doni and her debut CD, I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids). It’s a most…unusual album, and when you consider that I’ve listened to multiple full-length efforts from Wing this year, that’s saying a lot. Not to muddle the religious waters, but as I listened to this album, I was frequently reminded of an expression used by the Mormon girls I knew in high school to signify surprise, befuddlement, and fear:

Oh…my…heck.

Here’s the deal: Mama Doni, also known as Doni Zasloff Thomas, has arranged 16 eclectic songs here, all of them relating in some way to Jewish…well, culture, I guess, but when you’re talking about songs with titles like “Bubbie’s Tupperware,” in which a gefilte fish named Shlomo is taken as a pet to show & tell, you have to understand that the emphasis is on its irreverent aspects.

Which is fine, really, but Mama Doni either really likes her morning (and afternoon, and evening) coffee, or she’s just naturally bursting with the kind of energy that drives a person to pose on the back cover of an album as a cowgirl with a shofar horn (“Jewish Cowgirl,” “Sportin’ My Kippah”), a wannabe Rastafarian (“Bagel Time,” “Shvitzin'”) and a floppy hat-wearing middle-aged woman (“Oy Yoy Yodel”). It’s a comedy album, sort of, but the humor is very over the top, and about as subtle as spoiled borscht.

Still, if you can handle Mama Doni’s relentless mugging, I Love Herring isn’t a bad record at all. It definitely fills a void in the marketplace, all the songs are written and performed well, and the production values are high. We’re still talking about an album that includes songs such as “Jewperheroes,” “Mensch Appeal,” and “Fahklempt,” but hey — maybe that’s just the sort of music you’ve been looking for. To sample some of Mama Doni’s wares (including her new holiday EP, I Love Chanukah!), visit her at her official site.