Toucan Jam's Kelly Mulhollan and Donna Stjerna, with experience in music and performance under their belts, have created a beautiful CD teeming with colorful images, unique characters, worldly instruments, and sometimes impossible rhymes. You try getting away with rhyming "man" with "Houston" in your stuffy poetry class - but it works wonderfully on Toucan Jam's album, A World of Music.
"Please Pass the Peace" is a beautiful song encouraging children to have harmonious relationships in spite of differences. The lesson of the song is wise and so lovely, and it ends with a dinner table dialog - a group sitting at a table asking each other to "pass the compassion," and saying, "This is the best friendship I've ever tasted." A delightful message for the young and not-so-young.
"The Oud is Not Food" is haunting. I can see the drums, see the bells, envision the various instruments being played. The song reminded me that I want my kids to see what's making these sounds. I was inspired to expose my children to more music and more often, since the sounds were so bright, so present.
Toucan Jam's lyrics demonstrate an understanding of animals as living beings with personalities, feelings and a connection to their environment. The rooster in "Cock-a-Diddly Doo" is admittedly annoying to the narrator, but he is also a lively bird, "proud of his hens and his Ozark home." He's a confident animal whom we get to know in the song as more than an annoying alarm clock.
"Snowy Fall's Cat" is narrated by the cat herself, demonstrating her indifference to the day-to-day routine of her life with Snowy Fall but also her commitment to her relationship with him and to the mice who share Fall with her. We're encouraged to join the "cat choir" singing "Meow meow meow… meow!"
Perhaps the most touching of the animal-focused songs is "Little Birdie Nest." The song opens with: "Did you ever climb up in a tree, when the leaves are popping in the early Spring, and find a nest with a bird egg in it...did you ever wonder just how they did it?"
It's hard not to imagine climbing into that tree, grasping the branches and peeking up into the amazing nest. That's the beauty of this album… it takes us adults into the world of a child… the living-in-the-moment experience of being in amazement, enjoying nature that low to the ground, noticing things that adults forget about. Children see the details, and this album weaves the delicate, lively tales children want to hear.
A World of Music is not a smiley faced, dumbed down, happy happy CD, though many of its songs are very lighthearted. The album tells its listener, "I believe you want to know about the world, to learn about people and animals on a deeper level, to explore your world." A few of the songs, like The Oud is Not Food" and "Abagaz" are intense, perhaps even mysterious. The story-telling on this album is fantastic, so the lyrics, which are found on their website, are really worth the read - even without the intricate, beautifully-composed music.
Visit the group's website at www.toucanjam.org.
