What Do You Know, Kid? The Album

Here it is---the album that invented the genre called "kids' jazz". (Well, at least that's what I called it.) This audio blog is the complete album, not including the karaoke tracks; the individual song tracks appear elsewhere on this site and in the archives as single audioblogs. Song titles are:

What Do You Know, Kid?
E=mc Squared
Antibiotics
Thomas Alva Edison
Photosynthesis
John Maynard Keynes
The Apostrophe's Song
Constants
Gravitation
Albert Einstein


From the original liner notes:

---When I was ten years old, my mother brought home a copy of what would become the most listened-to album of my youth: Allan Sherman's My Son The Folk Singer. Along with his follow-up album My Son The Celebrity, the Sherman genius kept me laughing for hours, though I wasn't always sure why I was laughing. But I knew that the songs were funny (my mother was laughing, too) and that kept me listening. My reward? The records introduced me to a world of people, mostly real people, whose names either rhymed with each other (David Dubinsky, Bo Belinsky) or sounded very interesting on their own (Benjamin Disraeli, Newton N. Minow, Vladimir Horowitz). Sherman's lyrics also referred to places and things that, along with those thought-provoking names, kept my parents busy answering questions: "Where's Shaker Heights? What's a line of plastics? Why did that guy polish all the apples?" Adults, I thought, knew quite a bit that I didn't, and the songs drew me into their world in a way that made me want to find out more.

My primary intent for What Do You Know, Kid? is to get kids to want to find out more by making them aware that there is so much more to find out.The album is offered for enjoyment and as a catalyst--not a substitute-- for real learning. (I am very sympathetic to the notion that we do our kids a disservice when we try to sugar-coat the hard work that goes before true understanding.) I'm attempting to expose kids to difficult concepts and important names by introducing them in a playful framework that will draw out questions, or perhaps encourage a trip to the library. And who knows--maybe hearing and getting used to these words at an early age will make them seem less forbidding years down the road when they matter more (say, during finals week at Princeton or in the development of a Unified Field Theory). I hope that parents or other adults who are listening have some fun along the way, too.

And then there's the music. The mix of instruments varies from track to track, providing broad exposure to the sounds of acoustic jazz--its distinctive harmonies, timbres, and rhythms. The format of most of the songs is similar to that of mainstream jazz recordings of American pop standars--chorus, improvised solo with rhythm section backup, chorus. I'm convinced that all kids have jazz ears waiting to be excited by the music.