Dance Sing And Listen Again!＜限定盤＞

1964's Dance, Sing & Listen Again continued Bruce Haack and Esther Nelson's innovative children's music series. As with Dance, Sing & Listen, this album blends educational and entertaining songs, and acoustic and electronic instruments. For the most part, however, Haack's synthesizers play a more restrained part in the music than on the first album, though the oboe-like strains on "Jelly Dancers" and the electronic square dance of "Children's Hoe-Down" feature keyboards more prominently. Though Dance, Sing & Listen is one of Haack's more straightforward works, it does contain one of his strangest pieces: the vocal/electronic activity song "Machines," which imagines Nelson and Haack as different kinds of machines, making appropriately percussive and trilling mouth noises as electronic drums and sound effects play in the background. More in keeping with the album's general tone are songs like "What Can She Be," which features Nelson instructing the children to move like different animals, and "Rehearsal," in which Haack guides an orchestra through parts of a symphony; after each piece, they discuss how the music made them feel. But with all of Haack's work, straightforward is a relative term; even standard ideas like "Rehearsal" gain special quirks with his approach. After playing a moody, acoustic electronic piece, one child says the music made her feel sad, and "It made me see pictures of sad trees. And it made me think a lot." And Nelson's songs bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Lucia Pamela, a similarly minded children's entertainer who wrote songs and made coloring books about her experiences on the moon. Though Dance, Sing & Listen Again features the Dimension 5 artists at their least electronic, they sound every bit as eclectic and eccentric. ~ Heather Phares