Mr. Greg / Cass McCombs: Mr. Greg & Cass McCombs Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Mr. Greg and Cass McCombs’ Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children, released as part of Smithsonian Folkways’ ongoing 75th anniversary celebration, is an ambitious entry in the label’s rich history of children’s music. The lifelong friends have written a set of new songs that attempt to cover the entire Folkways kids’ curriculum in one go: civil rights, flora and fauna, language, conservation, self-image. In the liner notes, each song is accompanied by suggested lesson plans; these ideas usually involve listening to one or more records from Folkways’ sprawling (and never out of print) catalog. In turn, the catalog folds itself back into the record: There are spoken cameos from folk lifers Peggy Seeger and Michael Hurley, as well as samples of children’s recordings from Woody Guthrie and Ella Jenkins, who made her Folkways debut in 1957 and celebrated her 99th birthday this month.

With all those canonical references, this album could have easily ended up as a glorified syllabus. But McCombs and Mr. Greg (aka Greg Gardner, a preschool teacher in San Francisco whose students make frequent appearances here, along with his own kids and even the family cat) generally know when to honor the past and when to break from it. For every “A Builder’s Got a Hammer and Nails,” with its cheery light-industrial percussion and a melody cribbed from “The Wheels on the Bus,” there’s a “Roll Around Downtown,” a jaunty tribute to skateboarding backed by drum machine and a guitar that coughs up chalk dust. It sounds like McCombs building a Tinkertoy model of George Thorogood. On “The Sounds That the Letters Make,” McCombs opts for beatnik jazz, content to scratch some feedback against Ben Sigelman’s tense, crabbed cello. “We Build a Lot of Muscle When We Exercise” is surprisingly glum, with a title that’s practically longer than the song; at the last moment, keyboardist Sean Trott pulls the arrangement out of an indie-twee death spiral.

I admit: If I were a kid with computer privileges, that description might make me shut the laptop. Children’s music is the rare genre that’s not defined by formal characteristics or place of origin, but by its audience. Which means, in theory, that it can take pretty much any form: the chirpy, rhyme-free dada of the Pinkfong empire, the emotional-regulation ditties of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, or Pierce Freelon’s Grammy-nominated forays into psychedelic R&B and chamber soul. Still, its intended listeners are more or less captive to parental preferences. For a certain cohort of grown-ups, that means folk that’s lightly didactic, of antique provenance, and performed solo. (“A lot of those old Folkways records are like that: just a banjo and a vocal or something,” McCombs notes, approvingly, in the press material.)