Cover art of Putumayo's "Sesame Street Playground."
Children’s music is food for the soul. And like many modern cross-cultural artists, Latin performers are plugging into this pulsating global current more than ever.
Enter Putumayo World Music, the internationally recognized “world beat” label based in San Francisco. It recently launched “Sesame Street Playground,” a CD/DVD that celebrates the U.S. and international Sesame Street characters through their fun songs and music videos.
Representing the Latino community is Mexico’s Aleks Syntek, who along with “Plaza Sésamo” characters, performs the upbeat “Ricas frutas” to the rhythms of a tropical fiesta.
And from Brazil is “Uma pequeña Voz,” a soothing song that gradually picks up tempo as more and more voices join in, paying homage to the country’s children and their version of the popular TV program. Other songs are France’s “La Chanson de l’Amitié,” Tanzania’s “Don’t be Sad Song” and China’s “Rubber Duckie.”
Overall, this is a great compilation of children’s music and videos from around the world, including the Netherlands, South Africa, China, Russia, India, Palestine, Tanzania and Israel, to name a few. It's too bad it didn't include a tune from Puerto Rico and its very own version of Sesame Street.
Nevertheless, and even if you don’t have kids, you'll find Putumayo’s new effort entertaining, for it brings back the kid that's inside all of us.
And if nothing else, it’s definately a perfect holiday gift.
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The following is a bit of background history about the birth of Putumayo, its Kids Division and its founders, Michael Kraus and his business partner and college friend Dan Storper. There’re also some excerpts from a 2005 interview I did with Kraus during one of his many visits to the island.
The Putumayo Kids division is aimed at fostering multicultural awareness through music. It's of particular interest for folks with kids who are working on being bilingual. There’s a Latin Playground Activity Kit that includes a full-length CD, sing-along lyrics and translations, as well as more than 50 hands-on activities, artwork and a children’s passport journal.
Kraus, a pony-tailed New Yorker who has juggled his life between music and the business world, has had a connection with Puerto Rico since the mid-60s. From 1964-66 and again from 1968-72, Kraus – who at the time was a recent music graduate – was hired as a music teacher at a local high school, but he later focused his energy entirely on Putumayo.
“The label was created to introduce people to other cultures through music and also to offer retailers great music to play and sell,” he said in 2005. “We wanted to make customers feel good, so our philosophy has been that if the music is upbeat and melodic, the atmosphere would draw more clients and they would linger more in the stores.”
Though “ethnic or worldbeat” music may be today as common as, say hip-hop, back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it wasn’t at all popular.
“When we started we really had a niche in the market. Back in those days few artists from the U.S. mainstream pop scene were experimenting with world music beats so playing all these spiced-up ethnic rhythms in the stores gave Storper the sort of ethnic appeal and atmosphere he was looking for,” he noted.
If world music artists have skyrocketed since the birth of Putumayo, sales have also increased dramatically. According to Krauss, album sales in 1993 were $300,000, while a decade later the company reported a whopping 10 million in sales. Today, the colorful Putumayo albums are being distributed in over 50 countries and the entire collection surpasses the 150 mark.
Putumayo also boasts a compilation of music from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The Puerto Rico collection, though, is not as representative of our music pantheon as are the other two, for the label was unable to obtain copyrights for many of the island’s major salsa acts such as Ismael Rivera and Héctor Lavoe, among many others. Still, it features music by the well-known names Eddie Palmieri, Andrés Jiménez, Ismael Miranda and Modesto Cepeda.
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