MEDESKI MARTIN AND WOOD — Let's Go Everywhere (review)

MEDESKI MARTIN AND WOOD — Let's Go Everywhere album cover Album · 2008 · Eclectic Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
M.Neumann
Leave it to the forward-thinking trio of Medeski, Martin and Wood to record what may be the most unexpected item listed here at Jazz Music Archives: another unique album of post-Jazz, post-Rock Fusion, but this time directed toward a pre-school audience. Step aside Big Bird; this is one of those all-too rare collections of kid songs even parents can enjoy without reservation.

The album title all but sums up the band's adventurous career so far, blending into a single unified style just about every musical sub-genre you can name (and that's only a slight exaggeration). How about a hip-hop cover of "Pat-a-Cake"? Or a stuttering percussive swing-rock version of "Hickory Dickory Dock"? In between the unusual renditions of public domain standards are several original songs (with singing: a rare thing for this typically instrumental band), and more than one precocious MMW jam.

Some of the compositions are intentionally silly in a way only a toddler could appreciate ("Pirates Don't Take Baths"). But nowhere does the trio compromise their high creative standards, best heard in "Where's the Music", a groovy stop-start game of musical chairs (minus the furniture), and in the breathless geographic rap of the title song, with side trips to just about every rhyming and/or alliterative country on Earth, and beyond ("...Kowloon, Saskatoon, Brigadoon, to the moon!")

Most children's music these days is either incredibly condescending (and why do I suddenly have a mental picture of a big, purple dinosaur?) or else marketed as an aural pacifier: think of Raffi and his baby belugas. Not so MMW. Even at its most arcane there's always a playfulness in their music, and here they've simply tailored it to the youngest possible audience.

As an added benefit to the band the album might help consolidate a future fan base for their more esoteric jazz-rock fusions. If so, more power to them: exposing children at a young age to music with some real ambition might be the first step toward a more civilized world ("...Yokohama, Tijuana, don't forget to call your mama!")
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