Interview: Cory Cullinan (Doctor Noize)

Cory Cullinan is a busy man, a fast talker, a guy with boundless enthusiasm. And for much of the past decade, he's channeled that energy into being Doctor Noize, recording and performing music (often though not always with a classical bent) for kids. His most recent project is his most audacious -- Phineas McBoof Crashes the Symphony is a two-act (or two-CD, if that's still how your family listens to music) work of musical theatre for kids that runs the gamut of musical styles. It's definitely one of the most ambitious works for kids from the past several years.

Cory chatted with me about his musical background, the process of creating this latest album, and his favorite memories from the experience. As I noted, he's got a lot of energy, and is passionate about this project, so there's a lot to dig into here...

Zooglobble: Let me start by asking, when did you first start getting into classical music? Did the ghost of Beethoven appear somewhere?

Cory Cullinan: When I was 17. It was a combination of things, pretty serious. I had very interesting high school years where my brother was a computer programmer -- Steve Jobs used to come over and hang out at my house with my brother, so I had an interesting intellectual background. My brother got a brain tumor and ended up dying two years later. And my father who was also very well known in the Bay Area and very depressed about this and killed himself less than a year after that. So when I was in high school I had opportunity -- undesirable opportunity, you might say -- to look at life differently from most 15, 16, 17-year-olds. I was really inspired by my brother. He wasn’t into music, he was making games, programming for corporations. He was doing what he loved at a very young age and a very high level. And I decided I wanted to do that. I’d always loved music and soccer. I’d played in a bunch of rock bands, I’d written rock songs. By the time I was 17 or 18, I still loved rock songs, and I still do, but I felt it a little bit constricting and boring since it was always the same structure and always the same instruments. So I started reaching out to other forms of music, and I looked at jazz and looked at classical music. And I decided orchestral music and classical music was awesome. It was amazingly colorful and vibrant and literally limitless.

So by the time I was 18 and got to Stanford, I was a classical music major. I’d gone from being a soccer kid 3 years earlier to being a classical music major. I still played soccer at Stanford for a little while, but retired soon after.

So that’s a long way of saying I had a series of inspirations and events that made me think, I want to reach for something really, really interesting and challenging. Because when [my brother] was dying, it made him happy because he was doing something significant and challenging and wonderfully rich intellectually. And I thought, I want to do that. When I became Doctor Noize, it’s ironic, my first hit song was “Banana,” which is not exactly the most intellectually rigorous song that’s ever been created in this world. But I knew I wanted to be more challenging for kids than the genre would typically demand of me. And that has been both positive and negative for my career in terms of exposure and success level I’ve had as Doctor Noize. But I learned from my brother, I don’t care. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and hopefully people will like it enough to support me, and if they don’t, I’ll do something else. That’s sort of been my philosophy in everything, from building this crazy studio in my basement to Doctor Noize, I’m going to do what is most interesting and what I can contribute most to the world and hopefully there will be enough people to support it and if there aren’t I’ll do something else.

And I know you understand about classical music... don’t you play cello?

Violin -- I’m not in a symphony currently, but I still pull out my violin every couple weeks or so.

So I know that you get it. An orchestra is like a sports team, too, like a football team. There are 65 people in an orchestra, and they’re all trying to do something bigger than themselves. That’s a really beautiful thing about orchestral music. The same thing’s true with a 4-piece rock band, but it’s much more so with a giant orchestra of a bunch of players who are playing very sophisticated, contrapuntal music and trying to make it come together to make something really beautiful.

Were you always more interested in orchestral music than ensembles or solo work [in classical music]?

I love them both -- I love the Haydn string quartets and there’s other things I love, but I really like the Romantic orchestral music and so does the modern world because almost every film score is a Romantic piece in new clothes. I love the chamber music, too, but as I said before I’m fascinated with a large group of people coming together to do something bigger than themselves. That’s just conceptually beautiful. It’s also challenging to write for -- it’s much more challenging to write for an orchestra than for a string quartet.

When did you start writing the score for Phineas McBoof Crashes the Symphony?

I think it was back in 2010 or 2011. What happened is that it started as a commission for a live work. I got a commission from the McConnell Foundation in Northern California, the Chico/Redding area -- I got a $10,000 commission to write a live, orchestral work for kids. And Kyle Pickett, who was the ultimate conductor of this CD, was the conductor of the North State Symphony at the time. He and I were music majors at Stanford way back in the day, and we both sung in the Stanford Chamber Chorale together -- they are the adult choir on this album.

Phineas McBoof Crashes the Symphony cover

The task was to write a 45-to-60 minute show that got kids jazzed about orchestral music. So what we did was we did the shows, we did a tour of Northern California -- we went to Chico, Redding, and some other cities on 3 consecutive days, and each time we got more than a thousand people there in big auditoriums, and the crowds went nuts. So we were like, “Wow, this is awesome, we’re on to something here” and we decided then that we wanted to make a recording. The first version of that is we did an orchestral version of “Banana” on a Doctor Noise album -- that was fun, we got Nathan Gunn. And then it became this bigger ambition, which Kyle and I had talked about from the beginning, which was to do an album of it, a two-act musical. But the shows will still be the 45-to-60 minute version we originally did on the tour.

It was funny -- one of my favorite pop/rock guys is Elvis Costello, and just by chance every night on that tour, we played the day after the nights Elvis Costello played in the same theatre. So his buses would go out the same night we would come in, and that made us feel good. I never met, though, the bus was always literally pulling out as we were pulling in.

When you’re writing an original orchestral work for kids, how hard is it not to hear Peter and the Wolf constantly?

Oh, it’s easy, I don’t care about Peter and the Wolf. I mean, I like Peter and the Wolf, but although we marketed it as a modern kid’s Peter and the Wolf, or a modern version of Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, I’ve always looked at every Doctor Noise album as an audio Pixar movie for kids. I really wanted to write a musical that introduced kids to the orchestra and knew from very early on that we didn’t want to do a 15- or -20-minute thing like Peter and the Wolf. There is a Peter and the Wolf-ish section in the second act when all the instruments are introduced in a dramatic narrative sort of way, but didn’t really think about Peter and the Wolf at all, to be honest.

That’s interesting because if you were to ask someone, is there a classical music piece for kids, they might say Peter and the Wolf and if they had more than 5 [classical] CDs in their collection they might say, there’s that other, by that English guy, but beyond Peter and the Wolf and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, there’s really not much there. But what struck me was -- you used the phrase “musical theatre,” and deliberately, because there are songs in there that are clearly not in the classical tradition, they’re much poppier, or musical theatre-y. So that was one of your goals from the beginning, to be not just classical, but more inclusive, genre-wise?

Totally. If you look at the Doctor Noize characters, one the ways I set it up so it’d be fun, was that characters have totally different voices -- we have opera voices, we have bad country voices, we have pop voices, so the idea is that every time one of these characters steps forward and sings, they’re learning about this other style of music, but they’re still bringing their own thing to it. It’s not like we’re going to have the Lenny, Phineas, and Sydney the Beak all of a sudden singing opera. That wasn’t the goal from the beginning -- it was, wouldn’t it be interesting if these three tenors characters and Lenny and Sydney the Beak, who’s a rapper, they all educated each other about their styles of music and they all learned to love all those styles. That was always the premise behind the storylines of all the Doctor Noize albums.

When you were coming up with the storyline, did you start with the premise that you wanted to tell a story and then weave some basic classical music knowledge in there --?

Yes.

So that was the way you worked rather than setting up a structure of “this is how the orchestra operates and I’m going to wrap a story around that.

Totally. I learned from 3 places -- being a parent, being a high school music teacher, and watching Pixar movies -- that the way to get anybody engaged in anything is to tell a story with characters. So that is always the first thing. When I was a high school music teacher, I had this music history class. It’s possibly the thing I’m most proud of in life because it made me realize I could do this in other arenas. I had this classical music history class elective in high school and it became so popular it was made a required freshman course. The way that happened was I learned that if you played Beethoven’s Fifth for people and talked about this amazing 4-note motif, they’re going to get bored out of their minds. But if you tell a story around it, and you talk about Beethoven and how he went deaf, and why they wrote their stuff, you can get anybody, even a 9-year-old, you want to hear it and they’ll say, “Yes!” All of that is about building drama into music, which is very easy when you’re talking about classical music because all these musicians are freaks. There are crazy stories about all of them.

One of my favorite moments as Doctor Noize was when we made a trumpet player cry. In the North State Symphony, in the show, we had this bad guy, Mama, who hated classical music and was trying to get us to stop the show. We get to this part of the show where we say, “But then we’d have to play Beethoven’s Fifth. Do you want to hear Beethoven’s Fifth?,” and a thousand kids scream, “Yeaaaaahhhh!” And the trumpet player started crying. I realized we don’t have to play to a bunch of blue-haired old ladies driving Lexuses. We can introduce this music to kids if we share with them the excitement of the music instead of just getting up and playing the music for them.

The music is very easy to write once you have the story, because stories create emotional situation and drama and things that for a composer are just fun to write. I’ve always found for me that once you have a structure, the music writes itself.

You’ve written a lot of the music, so how do you go about getting the cast of characters -- not the characters of the musical, but all these artists -- how do you get their participation in the project?

Well, one of them was my wife, so that’s easy. [Laughs] There’s a recording studio in the basement, so that’s easy. Two of them are my children, so that’s easy. Then it gets more complicated. The whole Doctor Noize cast came back, so that was kind of easy. Everybody knows that every year or two, we’re going to get together to make another recording.

The two big snags we had were Isabel Leonard and John McVeigh. Isabel and Nathan were friends and had performed in many things together and Nathan [Gunn] had been on the Doctor Noize CDs since the first CD, so it’s nice to have a Grammy-winning opera singer on your first CD when no one’s ever heard of you. That allows you to get people like Isabel Leonard interested, which was so amazing -- it’s unreal what she does. When I called Isabel, I thought I would be selling her and pitching her on the recording, but after a minute, I realized she was in, that Nathan had already told her about it and said this would be really fun, and she was in. So that was ridiculously easy.

There’s a track on the CD called “Mama’s Lament,” and it’s Isabel’s big introductory torch song, and that is all one take. There’s no overdubs, and there’s no pitch-shifting. And for a composer who’s used to working in a studio and working with all us pop singers who meticulously perfect every note, it was ridiculous to listen to her do that. If you listen to that piece, it goes from musical theatre to pop to whatever, it’s all over the place, it’s hysterical, and she’s acting. And in one take. So working with her was just amazing. That was one moment I will never forget in my recording career, just watching her record that.

John McVeigh is a guy who’s perform with the Metropolitan Opera, and done some musical theatre, and we got him through... I can’t remember, Kyle Pickett’s wife knew somebody who knew him, I don’t remember. But I just contacted him and he flew out here to Colorado and recorded his part. He got the role of the shark coming out and being himself over time. He got it for all sorts of musical and personal reasons and he was just hysterical to work with. He was the last person we recorded and he made it way better.

Other people, like Sidney the Beak -- the woman who plays Sidney the Beak is the only non-professional of the major cast members and she was my high school student when I was a high school teacher in the Bay Area. She was a basketball star and one of the only kids who could rap at the school, and she recorded some rap songs for me and I hired her early on and she kept coming back. Now she’s 30 years old and I think she’s [with] the global health initiative for the Clinton Foundation or something very impressive like that, but we still get her every 2 years to record for us. It’s the only thing she does musically, as far as I know [laughs].

I was going to say it was impressive, certainly listening to Isabel Leonard, but listening to the whole album in terms of the number of styles, vocal performances -- it’s a very impressive collection.

I appreciate that, and we have people who are not super-famous who are amazing on this album, like Ben Evans plays both Bottomus and Lenny, who, if you’ve heard them, have totally different voices. He was a guy I went to college with, and while everybody who [was there] knows Ben Evans, he’s not a household name. He was amazing.

Cory Cullinan, Isabel Leonard, Nathan Gunn, and Kyle Pickett

The great thing about working with Isabel and Nathan is they’re both hysterical. They’re both big-time opera stars. This is the problem with marketing classical music -- everyone thinks they’re so serious, but they’re actually normal people with kids who have fun.

It was really a gift for me working with people of their stature and working with the Prague Philharmonic. I felt extremely fortunate to have been able to write something and on the recording for that level. It’s not something I took lightly. It was a real gift to me. Certainly I did my part in setting up that gift, but I got lucky in a lot of ways. It was pretty neat that they wanted to do it. And they wanted to do it because they “got it.” Even my PR agent, Elizabeth Waldman Frazier, when I sent this project to her, she e-mailed back in ten minutes and said, “yeah, I want to do this.”

I don’t know how much you want to get into this philosophical discussion, but we live in a world where attention spans are constricting, constricting to the point where -- and I don’t even consider this a political comment -- one of our two major presidential candidates has, like, a 10-minute attention span. That’s the world we live in now. And you can see why -- it has to do with the internet, it has to do with all sorts of popular culture type things. And I love pop culture. I would just like us to also be able to apply our minds to things that are more sophisticated and have a longer duration. There are problems like climate change that our kids are going to need to solve, and it’s not going to get solved by something where if you can’t figure it out in two minutes, we’re going to move on to something else.

So one of the neat things about this project was that everybody was on board from the beginning with the absolute insane crazy and counterintuitive-to-the-modern idea that we are going to make a 2-act operative work of musical theatre for kids. Right there, that’s nuts. And part of the appeal of the project is that it’s nuts, right? It doesn’t really fit in the modern world anymore. In a weird way that makes it fit because there’s nothing a whole lot like it. What sort of impact we can make will depend on how many live shows we can book and how many folks like you we can get to talk about it. But at least we’re giving it a shot.

And what we’ve found from the live shows, is that people love it. I’ve never had a response like this to the CD I’ve recorded -- we have, like, 75 write-ups, and everybody likes it. I don’t know if it’s good or people are thinking, “Oh, if I criticize a children’s orchestral album I’m going to sound dumb,” I don’t know. It seems to me that people get that this is a worthwhile thing to do. And I think it’s a worthwhile thing to do, it was worth the risk. It’s my project, I’m certainly no victim, I’m lucky, but it was -- and still is -- quite a financial and career risk for me to do this. I spent a lot of my time on this, and that time has not yielded money back yet.

Twenty years from now, what are you going to remember about the project and the process of making and performing this particular work?

A couple things. One, I am going to remember doing this with and for my kids. Kids, for example, are the ones who came up with the idea of Mama being a bunny. My kids were directly involved in the story. My kids were the ones who came up with the idea of her casting spells and instruments flying all around with the musicians attached to them in the concert hall. So my kids were at the perfect age, they were between the age of 7 and 13 as this whole process went on. My kids helped me record this, which I do so my kids would have something like this. So that’s number one, a very selfish reason. I got to do the album I would love to do for my kids, with my kids.

And number two is, partly because what Doctor Noize had done before, and partly because of the preposterous premise of the whole thing, and partly because of the connections I happen to have, I was able to get literally the exact cast -- the exact orchestra to the exact singing cast -- that I would love to have to do this work. And rarely in life, whether you’re a creative musician, or an athlete, or anything, very rarely do you get to play on the team you dream of playing on. I’m almost getting teary just talking about that, just working with this cast on this project... I hope I don’t, but I could die tomorrow and the main thing I wanted to do in life, I’ve gotten to do and very few people get to say that. I consider it not only my obligation and my opportunity and my good fortune to get to talk about this and get shows and play the album, but I’ve already gotten to do the thing I really wanted to do in life which is a work of musical theatre with an orchestra for kids. So I feel very lucky is what I’m trying to say.

And that feeling of being fortunate of getting what you want to do in life I know from my childhood is not always going to be the case. There are going to be times of challenge and sorrow in your life and when you get the opportunity to take a risk and do something you really want to do, you should do it. Every single Doctor Noize album and book tells that story. I feel fortunate to have been able to do that.

Interview: Bonnie Ward Simon (Maestro Classics)

Lest you think that the concept of having several careers in a lifetime is the exclusive provenance of the Millenial generation, Bonnie Ward Simon has been -- among other things -- a middle school teacher, a graduate student in both Japanese history and Chinese literature, and a booker of classical music concerts. She is also the cofounder of Maestro Classics, which presents recordings of timeless (and new) pieces from the classical music world in kid-accessible packages. Maestro Classics has released a dozen albums recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra over the past decade. And while Stephen Simon unfortunately passed away in 2013, Bonnie has continued her efforts, most recently with the release of a version of “The Nutcracker” trimmed down to just one hour.

She and I chatted by phone earlier this week about growing up in a (non-professional) musical household, her circuitous path to Maestro Classics, and the challenges facing classical music in the 21st century.

Zooglobble: What are your first musical memories?

Bonnie Ward Simon: A great hodgepodge... At age 3, [I remember] marching around the living room to “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.”... Later on, I met Burl Ives. My father met him before he was famous -- he invited him to sing for his high school English class.

My parents were serious listeners of classical music. They listened to their 78 rpm records the way people watch TV today. Father took his violin lessons... There were string quartets [at home] every Thursday night -- Father would play the violin and viola; Mom, the cello. I’d go to sleep listening to them playing Brahms quartets.

The thing I miss most is “family orchestra.” We had 4 children, and we all played instruments. After Thanksgiving, Dad handed out Christmas carol parts to all of us. At Christmas, we played them. We kids grumbled [about doing it], but there was lots of laughter, too. Growing up, I thought every child played instruments.

But your parents weren’t professional musicians?

No, my father was an English professor and poet, and my mom was a biologist. They were avocational musicians.

You have backgrounds in both music and education -- in which door did you step through first, professionally?

I was genetically predisposed to education. My grandmother was an elementary school principal at a time when it was unusual for a woman to do that. My father and mother were both educators. My sister was a dancer, but then taught at the American Ballet Theatre, and later in south Florida. So music was a... pleasant thing.

After college I got a job at Carnegie Hall -- this was in 1968 or 1969. At the time, it was run by 9 people, and I lucked into a job as an assistant. After close to a year there, I was told, you’ve worked less than a year here, so you get one week of leave. I was in shock -- “What!?!” -- after years of long vacations.

So I got a Master of Arts in Education, and taught at 2 different middle schools. I remember there was an 11-year-old [named Jason, whom I failed], and... after I talked with him, I wrote a note to his parents that said, “Jason says that neither you or he cares if he fails music.” And I never heard back from him or his parents. It was hard for me to teach in a place where music wasn’t as important as math and as important as I thought it was.

I heard there was a program at Cornell to teach Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, a la the Monterrey Language program, to teach those languages in a year. I never worked so hard in my life, but in 12 months I could read Chinese. Then I got an MA in Chinese Literature. I liked Japanese, too. I had majored in Japanese studies, so went back and worked on a dissertation.

I’d had one child, but wanted another child, but I was heading west [to Asia] while Stephen was going in the other direction [east, to Europe]. So I got back into music.

We had a no TV rule in our house, but a friend gave us a copy of “The Red Balloon,” and [my son] Basil loved it -- every time he got a balloon, he’d let it go because he thought it would follow him. So I thought it was OK to let him watch the ABT version of “The Nutcracker” with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Then I got other copies.

Bonnie Ward Simon and Stephen Simon low res photo credit Elizabeth Forbes Armstrong.jpg

Then I took him to see a live version of “The Nutcracker.” And after that I went to a concert where Stephen was conducting, and at the beginning, in that pause while the conductor walks from the side of the stage to the podium, Stephen made it halfway, and Basil screamed, “Dad!” We took him out immediately, but Stephen, in one of the nicest things he ever did, just said, “That was my son."

At the time, people thought you need mimes, or clowns, but if it’s really good kids like it. I remember seeing Verdi’s Requiem performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Sir Georg Solti conducting. Leontyne Price sang... Pavarotti sang tenor. Kids loved it.

At the time, I was still on the board of Carnegie Hall, and I was looking to bring greatness in child-sized portions. Musicians were already playing Friday and Saturday night, with the musicians coming from out of town, so was there some way to do something Saturday morning. [And while] classical music is very abstract, I had experience teaching foreign things.

So we put on a performance and the good news was that the Washington Post classical music critic attended the show and said it was the best thing since Leonard Bernstein. The bad news was I’d created a monster -- by the end of the year we had 200 families on the waiting list. I said I’d give [them] a year, which turned into a number of years.

Maestro Classics came out of that. We’d seek funding [for a series], but grants like to see 50% earned income, which meant we couldn’t continue in a 500-person small hall -- we had to do a family series in a concert hall. Everybody goes to Aunt Phoebe’s concert, where she’s performing, but everybody really likes singing Christmas carols. So we said, let’s just do that. Stephen used to say that he led an orchestra and a 2,700-person chorus with no rehearsal.

“Peter and the Wolf” is the [children’s] orchestra’s “Nutcracker,” so we did that, but we needed a second half, and so we’d hear comments from families who’d say, “we bought tickets for ‘Peter and the Wolf,’ but we really liked 'Mike Mulligan,’ where can we get a recording of that?”

So in 2004 we had some free time, and we started thinking about how to do it. We had to figure out how much talk to put on a piece, for example. It took a lot of tweaking -- the music behind the biography [of the composer on each album] can’t be the favorite piece, it has to be a little dull...

How did you and Stephen split duties?

We really worked together. My sister said that it was the most intense artistic collaboration [she’d] ever seen. Stephen did a lot of the basic choosing, he wrote a lot of it.

He had to be inspired -- it took me a long time to convince him to “Nutcracker.” He was a Handel specialist, and had the nickname “Sir Snips” for how he could stitch together different parts [of Handel pieces]. For “The Nutcracker” [which is also abbreviated], there was no computer program to do this, so I got out strips of paper and made copies. I got them ready the night before I landed [in London for recording with the London Philharmonic]. And the only way to be sure everything was in order was if I counted every measure of every part. I spent the next 3 days putting measures together....

What is the future of classical music?

Classical music will never go away -- it’s complex, it’s interesting. The form it’s in, that’s what I’m more worried about. Orchestras are big, and the production costs are enormous, so the funding or orchestras will be difficult.

Bonnie Ward Simon in the recording studio

My biggest worry is streaming -- it’s taking money out of the artists’ pockets. With records, producers still get 60%. But we had 25,000 streams, and we made $26 -- I took ourselves off, I said we can’t afford it. It may be the end of all new performances.

And how do you hope Maestro Classics plays a part?

I’m hoping parents will listen and learn [about classical music] as families. We’re at one generation coming up to two generations without music education in the schools. These are multi-generational projects, and I say it’s like getting on the first step of an escalator. We spend a tremendous amount of energy [focusing] on quality, because the performances make a tremendous amount of difference.

Photo credits: Elizabeth Forbes Armstrong (Bonnie Ward Simon and Stephen Simon)

Review: Christmas and Holiday Music 2015 (Albums)

Every year brings a handful of Christmas and holiday-themed albums from the kindie world, and 2015 is no exception. (Here's my review of 2014 holiday kids music, in case you want to reminisce around the fire about last year's efforts.) This year, I'll be splitting my holiday posts into at least two -- this post will focus on reviews of full albums and EPs, while a follow-up will take a look at holiday singles and videos.

Without further ado, then, let's get into it.

Andrew and Polly - Other Days

This is the shortest holiday album I'll be reviewing, but it's also my favorite. It's non-religious but ecumenical -- Hanukkah and Christmas happily coexist (especially in the leadoff track "Thank You for the Box") -- and in less than 12 minutes the four indie-pop tracks celebrate the season with a decidedly sunny attitude (there's a song called "L.A. Christmas" featuring Mista Cookie Jar, after all). But the closing track "A Mapmaker's Song" is a kindie successor to "I'll Be Home for Christmas." (Listen to the album on Bandcamp and Spotify.)

Rocknoceros - Happy Holidays

Ranking a close second on my holiday list this year is this collection from the Washington, D.C.-area trio. They ease into the holiday with a Halloween song ("Halloween Masquerade") and "This Thanksgiving" before turning their attention to the December holidays with songs original and traditional. (Or, in the case of "Oh Christmas Brie," silly puns.) One of the things I look for in holiday albums is something that distinguishes the music from the tens of thousands of other such albums, and besides the power-holiday-pop, I guess for me it's their mashup of "Auld Lang Syne (Enjoy Yourself)" -- not quite a Christmas song, but a great song with which to head into 2016.

Greg Page - Here Comes Christmas

Best known in the United States probably for being the original Yellow Wiggle for the massively successful Australian preschool rockers, Page hasn't been totally silent in the meanwhile -- he's done a TV show, Butterscotch's Playground. But this is his first newly-recorded album in a long time. The best tracks here are the originals that lead off the album, particularly "Here Comes Christmas" and "Christmas Bells." They're appealing pop songs that should entertain kids and families who have no memory of the Wiggles. The rest of the tracks feature a wide variety of secular and religious Christmas songs. Page's strong voice is sometimes undercut by electronic accompaniment -- if releasing a kajillion different holiday albums with a big band works for Brian Setzer, I think it could work for Page, who has a clear affinity for traditional arrangements.

Rain For Roots - Waiting Songs

Rain For Roots consists of four vocalists (including Coal Train Railroad's Katy Bowser) who make Christian kids music that's devotional without being tacky. This new album, specifically designed for the waiting season of Advent, sees them continuing that approach. The album features original songs from the quartet (with some kids singing along in places), along with traditional songs "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus" bookending the new songs. The explicitly Christian approach will limit the audience for this album perhaps, but if you are celebrating the Christmas season from a Christian perspective, this is an excellent addition to your holiday music rotation. (Stream the album on Bandcamp.)

Little Rockers Band - Yule Be Cool cover

The Little Rockers Band - Yule Be Cool

Yule Be Cool is, as you might guess from the album cover, fairly ecumenical in its approach to the holiday season, with a number of Jewish Hanukkah songs to go along with the Christmas songs (or, sometimes, both in one, as in the reworking of "Feliz Navidad"). The 47-minute album is a mix of old and new, and most interesting when it emphasizes the band's pop sound, like on the '60s sound of "It's Christmas Time Again." Finally, after hearing their take on Madonna's "Holiday," I can't believe that we haven't heard that particular song on more holiday albums.

London Philharmonic Orchestra (Maestro Classics) - The Nutcracker

Finally, it's another take on what must be a top-10 Christmas album subject, Peter Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker." What differentiates this version from most (if not all) of the hundreds (thousands?) of other recordings is twofold -- first, the recording features narration to go along with the music. Lots of kids have probably seen some form of the ballet either live or on TV, so it's not like the narration is necessary, but it might actually help those kids who've seen it to remember more of the story, particularly in the first act. Second, the recording pares down the 90-minute ballet to just shy of an hour. I doubt any but the most obsessed listeners will notice the difference. I wouldn't recommend this version as a family's primary copy of "The Nutcracker" -- it's much-beloved for good reason -- but as an alternative, it'll do just nicely.

Note: I received copies of all albums in physical or digital format for possible review.

Review: Peter and the Wolf and Jazz! - The Amazing Keystone Big Band with David Tennant

The Amazing Keystone Big Band - Peter and the Wolf and Jazz! album cover

I wouldn't say that if there's one classical music piece you've heard, it's "Peter and the Wolf," because orchestral melodies are woven throughout modern life, even if you're only vaguely aware of it. But if there's one classical music piece you've heard because somebody was trying to teach your child (or you, when you were young) the concepts of symphonic orchestral music, it's "Peter and the Wolf."

Composed in 1936 by Sergei Prokofiev in Russia, the piece tells the story of the young (and brave) boy Peter, who along with his animal friends, outwits and captures a wolf intent on eating several of them. Prokofiev gives each character a primary instrument (strings, for example, for Peter) and a melody, and mixes and blends them both as different characters interact. There's a narrator providing some basic storytelling guideposts, though Prokofiev tells his musical tale so well, that once the story gets going, the words are, while not unnecessary, not bearing the weight of the story.

The piece is a classic, and there are literally dozens -- if not hundreds -- of versions recorded over the years. We've got at least a couple on our own shelves. And because it's a classic, there's really no need to have more than one or two versions unless you like the particular narrator.

Or unless the musicians have taken an entirely different approach, which is the case on Peter and the Wolf and Jazz!, a brand-new recording from France's The Amazing Keystone Big Band. The big band features 18 younger French jazz musicians, and this new version deftly blends Prokofiev's symphonic story with a big band sensibility. So instead of the string section (violins, violas, etc.), Peter's theme is represented by the band's rhythm section -- piano, bass, and guitar (which are, as the album's liner notes remind us, stringed instruments themselves). The wolf is represented by the trombones and tuba instead of the French horns, and so on -- instruments that are similar in tone, but not necessarily the same ones.

The melodies themselves are unchanged, but the band's arrangement brings in a wide variety of jazz styles -- stride piano, hip-hop, free jazz, blues, cool jazz, and the like. None of the stylistic shifts seem out of place -- rather, they feel appropriate to the story. The triumphant parade march at the end is a swing style which to my ears sounds something like a New Orleans second line band would play in their own parade.

As for the narrator, David Tennant, best known on these shores as one of the Doctor Whos, does a fine job telling the story. The wouldn't necessarily recommend the album just for his narration, but it's more than up to the task. The liner notes are excellent, featuring many pages of the narration and illustrations by Martin Jarrie along with explanations by the band of their arrangement choices. (The 54-minute album is appropriate for kids ages 3 through whatever, but you knew that already.)

Peter and the Wolf and Jazz! isn't the first attempt to rework Prokofiev's tale for a jazz audience, but as best I can tell, it's the first in a half-century. More importantly, it's taken that classic piece and made it sound fresh. As a jazz album, it's wonderful, and as a classical album, well, it's wonderful, too. Highly recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review.

Interview: Andrés Salguero

Andrés Salguero isn't the only musician making music for families in both English and Spanish, but his route to that calling might be more unusual than most. The South American-born musician made his way to the United States playing clarinet, and while he couldn't have anticipated making music for families as a career, he had recorded a kids' album long before he even moved to America.

I chatted with Salguero about his childhood, his entry into making kids music Dino O'Dell in Kansas City, how kids' musicians can have a long-term impact, and the dual nature of his audiences.

Zooglobble: What are your first musical memories?

Andrés Salguero: Singing and dancing… seeing my dad play guitar around the house. When I was six, I joined a folkloric group, a dancing and singing group. I made lots of friends in that. When I was 8, it was led by a famous writer, and she teamed up with a song writer and recorded an album. It was fun, but as a child, everything was new.

You grew up in Colombia -- how did you make it to Kansas City?

I got my Bachelors' degree in Colombia, and looked at options for my Masters' degree. Lots of those in the arts in Colombia look to Europe and America for those sorts of advanced degrees. So I sent in my tapes of clarinet performance to universities and got a full ride for a Masters in Fayetteville, Arkansas. From there, I applied and got into the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and over six years got my Doctorate.

You got your start playing kids music with Dino O'Dell -- how did that happen?

In Fayetteville, it's 12% Hispanic. I played with Pablo Salveza, he played salsa, merengue, bachata. He was Chilean, the singer was from Cuba, some musicians were from Puerto Rico. It was different, because in Colombia, there were not so many different styles and backgrounds.

I was playing with Pat Conway who came in from Kansas City. He played with Dino and asked me to fill in for him [Pat] at a gig. I remember meeting Dino for the first time while Pat was playing at a salsa gig at a beautiful outdoor venue.

At that point, I'd already written some children's music, but working with [Dino] really got me into the scene. From him I understood the need for interaction and how to play with kids.

What made you want to play for kids full time?

I was always torn between playing my own music and that of others. I was always interested in creative writing -- I won a music composition award in 2000. Since then, I wanted to express myself, my own songs.

A few years ago, a relative of someone I was dating asked how I'd make a living do this. And I said "play my own music."

Did you read that piece on being a kids' musician by the member of The Que Pastas?

I did.

I liked that. You have to deal with the nicest people -- librarians, people who adore you, students. Classical music is very competitive. I play very specialized music -- contemporary avant-garde music. I'd go to festivals and see the same people. Fifty, two hundred people competing for the same spot.

This seemed like a viable way to make a career. It was also very important to me to reflect my own culture, represent my country and help others have a pleasant experience with another culture.

I understand why some people have fear of another culture, fear of the unknown. I wanted to introduce people to it in a friendly way.

Was that -- the desire to share culture -- something new?

Yes. In Colombia, I played folk music, but I also had a rock band, playing the Clash and the Sex Pistols. But moving here was a cultural shock, so I became interested in cultural identity. In Kansas City, for example, I produced a play with a playwright on the topic.

Coming here, I realized I was different. Colombia was homogenous, but here, people are different.

What were you trying to accomplish with the new CD?

I wanted to represent different aspects of Latino culture in the United States -- not just bringing folk music here, but music like mariachi. Salsa -- a big part of that came out of New York City, one of the big record labels was founded by an Italian-American. Bachata -- love songs -- came out of the Dominican Republic, but the biggest artists are born in New York, in Washington Heights, and Manhattan).

There's also a theme of multiculturalism, cross-cultural acceptance. Some songs straight-forward, like "Hola, Amigo" -- "let's all be friends." "My Friend Manuel" tells the a story from someone here experiencing a new culture, different way of viewing the world. "Nuestra Fiesta," or "our party," says there's plenty of space, everyone's welcome.

What kind of audience do you typically get at your show? Because sometimes the kindie concert scene can be… pretty Caucasian.

Very varied... you know, kids are honest, lots of kids with rich parents, lots with poor parents. Sometimes at a show kids will come up to me and say, "My parents are from Colombia!" Yesterday I was at a posh private school playing a show, and one child came up and said, "Hey, my au pair is from Colmbia!" Some kids feel validated by seeing me up there.

The rest is to bring a cultural experience -- we practice Spanish, show off this fun culture. There's a lot of interest in bilingual schools, a parent told me there's a waitlist of 800 families for one school. The fact that there's a broad interest, that's good. There's this Korean kid, he's come to 5 shows, knows some of the songs -- that's awesome!

There's still racism and prejudice -- I remember an ATM in Kansas City where somebody had scratched off the Spanish text. So some people hate it, but hate comes from fear. I can never change that person's mind, but hopefully I can do that for a kid.

Quick story: I'm trying to get some t-shirts and merchandise printed, and the person who I'm working with told me, "Hey, Barry Louis Polisar came to my elementary school, and seeing him changed my life." You don't know what kind of impact you can have.

What's coming up next for you?

I'm going to Boston to play there for the first time next week. I'm having a guest performance with Jazzy Ash, and meeting more friends in the kindie scene generally. I'm going to play La Casa Azul in New York City for the Latin Alternative Music Conference, and they're going to have a family stage for the first time. And I'm going to Tulsa for a week.

I'm also going to do a full Spanish version of my CD. I couldn't do the album in just Spanish before. Now I'm going to do this version not just as a translation, but as sort of the "negative" of the original, so "My Friend Manuel" becomes "Mi Amigo Paul," told from the point of view of the Spanish-speaking kid who moves in whose new neighbor Paul can only speak English.