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Show and Tale: This Jazz Man
Stay-at-home dad Charlie, a former library assistant, shares his love of books and music with his toddler daughter. His pick is This Jazz Man, written by Karen Ehrhardt and illustrated by R.G. Roth.
Charlie says, "My soon-to-be three year old and I have fallen for This Jazz Man, a clever riff on the "This Old Man" nursery rhyme (you know, "This old man he played one...") Karen Ehrhardt's lively text offers great opportunities for kid participation, and R.G Roth's beautiful collages, in a cool, "Mad Men"-era style, feature portraits of real jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Little capsule biographies of each of the musicians portrayed close out what is surely the grooviest counting book out there!"
Do you have a favorite book about music, or even one where the words just sound musical?
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6 Comments
Jazz Baby by Lisa Wheeler (and fabulous illustrations by R. Gregory Christie) is another good choice. It has a short swingy text that's a lot of fun to read. Very jazzy :)
Miles the Crocodile Plays the Colors of Jazz: Baby Loves Jazz (Board book)
by Andy Blackman (Author), Andrew Cunningham (Illustrator) is a wonderful book in a series of similar books. This one teaches color as it relates to mood with a great CD to play along.
Song and Dance Man by Karen Ackerman and illustrated by Stephen Gammell is a classic. Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman and Eric Beddows also has a great lyrical quality without being an actual book about music nor are the words based on a song. Oh, yea! And there's
Take Me Out of the Bathtub and Other Silly Dilly Songs by Alan Katz and David Catrow, which is great for family sing-alongs.
Ahh! Too many choices!
We read When Louis Armstrong Taught Me Scat by Muriel Harris Weinstein (Ill. R. Gregory Christie) last fall, and Catherine picked it up at her school library last Tuesday. She was so excited to have re-found it and has been scatting about for a week!
Once you've seen the DVD and heard the song for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, its hard to ever read it the same way again. I'm still not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.
I'm happy to see this book recommended. I've seen the cover in my library and not taken it out , so now I'm glad to have the recommendation to pick it up. I love the old classic Hand, Hand, Fingers Thumb ("Dum Ditty Dum Ditty Dum Dum Dum...". I was so relieved when my son loved it as much as me.