The Best Music for Kids

Nancy's posting about Greg Wiggle got me to thinking about kids music, which is a good thing, because this is a subject about which I actually know something.

For several years, up until about a year ago, I reviewed children's music for South Florida Parenting. This meant that I was treated by recording-industry PR people with huge piles of children's music CDs. The bad thing was, I had to listen to it all. I need to tell you, most of it just made me cringe.

My main rule of thumb in judging any children's music was: Can I listen to this for more than five minutes?

Thankfully, I did find a few stand-outs over the years for which the answer was yes. And that's not counting the various Mozart and Beethoven CDs for babies and the non-stop flow of music from the Walt Disney Records machine (fueled by a deep catalog of Disney movie music and everything on the Disney Channel, which seems to create a new star a month).

Here's my less-than-definitive list of good, fun, listenable, worthwhile music for children.

Putumayo Kids
This is a whole record label devoted to finding, recording and collecting the best world-music recordings for children. There's a whole series of "Playground" music CDs, and all of them are worth buying if you like the style of music. My personal favorites are New Orleans Playground (some of the proceeds from this album still go to Hurricane Katrina relief), Caribbean Playground and African Playground. There are many others: French Playground. Reggae Playground. Folk Playground. Irish/Celtic Playground. Some of the Putumayo Kids recordings also come with multicultural activity kits for teachers and home-schoolers.

Laurie Berkner Band
Since she's coming to Boca this month (March 25, 2007), it's worth putting in a plug for the best little-kids musician since Raffi. Your kids will love Laurie. Maybe they already rock out to her music on Noggin. She is, after all, a rock star for 3-year-olds. Really. Go to the concert. There's more info about her performance on South Florida Parenting's web site.

Baby Rock Records
What's your favorite band? Coldplay? Metallica? Pink Floyd? Led Zeppelin? The Cure? U2? Now imagine music by these bands, and other rockers, played on chimes, glockenspiels, melltorons, vibraphones and other ethereal instruments. It's like angels playing rock. Weird, but oddly soothing. It's good. You can check it out online before you buy it.

Dan Zanes
The former Del Fuegos frontman is the other rock star of kids music. Zanes is a dad who really knows music and how to rock kids' worlds -- without getting on the nerves of the 'rents. Oh, and he has some really cool friends who show up on his albums.

And finally, if you must include classical music, include Beethoven's Wig. True, this one might get on your nerves a little, especially if your kids get enough of a kick out of it to play it over and over again. But first, you'll laugh a lot. Listen to the lyrics. You might learn something about classical composers.

Happy Listening!

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