Listen to the first single from Esperanza Spalding’s upcoming album
Spalding’s new single featuring Algebra Blessett is pretty catchy and beautiful, but what really got us in this video was the intro; do school kids these days get enough African history? We imagine it’s better now that Black History Month is observed every February, but we can’t recall learning anything about African princes and democracy back in elementary school. (Though, to be fair, we also didn’t get much world history until high school — elementary school history is a lot of Samuel de Champlain ’round these parts).
We’d like to know if any Bunch families have special Black History Month traditions, or if you plan to set aside some time to talk to your kids about important figures in the quest for Civil Rights. Read more...
1950′s jazz DJ Al “Jazzbo” Collins isn’t exactly a household name, even if he was, briefly, the host of The Tonight Show. However, December’s fun post-mortem release, Al “Jazzbo” Collins Tells Fairy Tales for Hip Kids, seems poised to bring his name back into recognition by the children and grandchildren of his original audiences.
From the product description: Al ‘Jazzbo’ Collins defined a whole new way of presenting a music radio show. His specialty was cool and sophisticated Jazz and he was one of the very first DJs to adopt an intimate, conversational approach peppered with hipster slang and outrageous verbal improvisation. In 1953, comedian Steve Allen wrote a piece for Down Beat in which he retold the story of Red Riding Hood in the hip argot of Jazz, just as Lord Buckley funked up Shakespeare and the Bible. When Jazzbo read it out over the air in his best hipsterish storytelling tones the response from the public was fantastic and a hit single was inevitable. On this collection, hear that hip tale and many more.
