"My biggest fear as a parent," confesses a first-time father and YouTube documentarian, "was that I would have to spend the next several years of my life listening to Barney or The Wiggles." He was spared that fate, he says, by Dan Zanes, a Brooklynite folk-rocker who crafts children's music that parents are equally mad for. On Dan Zanes and Friends’ 2006 Catch That Train!—probably the first “children’s music” disc you could pick up at Starbucks, thanks to a deal with the coffee juggernaut's Hear Music entertainment division—Zanes' friends include Nick Cave, The Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant and The Blind Boys of Alabama. When Zanes plays the National Hispanic Cultural Center this Wednesday, Feb. 6, his friends will be of the home-grown variety (I’m just not sure who, at this point). Bring the wee ones out for this concert. For once, it's not overreaching to say the whole family will enjoy it. Cost is $15 advance, $20 at the door for adults, and $10 advance, $15 at the door for children under 12, through TicketMaster and the NHCC box office (with no service fee, 724-4771). The show starts at 6:30 p.m.
Over the years, music director, trumpeter and gentleman Wynton Marsalis has maneuvered several smaller craft—a quartet, a quintet and a septet—through New Mexico's jazz waters. Next week, he’ll dock the quindectet Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the flagship of that New York institution, in Albuquerque for a program of Duke Ellington’s love songs. One thing is for sure: The evening will swing.
I just got word from Derek Caterwaul that the Little Women show slated for Thursday, Jan. 31, won't be happening—the guitarist developed tendonitis while touring, and won't be driving in for the show. But I did a perfectly good interview with the experimental punky jazz quartet from Brooklyn, and thought I'd tell you about them anyway. Little Women balances tight, turn-on-a-dime changes with a rowdy, frantic energy, a kind of unpolished polish I'll call spit-shined. Take in the frenetic, bursty approach at myspace.com/littlewomensounds. Little Women's first recording, Teeth, will be out March 4 on Gilgongo and Sockets records.
