Dan Zane's, former lead singer of the legendary roots rock band the Del Fuegos, returns with his new label, Festival Five Records, that is "kid friendly". You read right. Family Dance is the follow-up record to Rocket Ship Beatch and it offering up irresistible grooves of folk, rock, fiddle tunes, dancehall and more. Featuring guest appearances by: Loudon Wainwright III, Barbara Brousal, Rosanne Cash and others. At a moment when mainstream music is clogged with a surfeit of stale, formulaic songs and huge egos, Dan Zanes has found the Drano. Family Dance, his second kids' record (after the fab Rocket Ship Beach), again comes through with big-name helpers--Sandra Bernhard, Rosanne Cash, and Loudon Wainwright III among them--but instead of assembling a mixed bag of self-important numbers, Zanes, who produced and plays on all but one of 15 tracks, maintains a cohesive vibe that's low-key and playful. Yet here's a disc that's all over the map, genre-wise. Gruffster Rankin' Don, a.k.a. Father Goose, rasta-raps his way through "The Hokey Pokey" and "Skip to My Lou," the Sandy Girls carry us off to a colorful Caribbean village for "Linstead Market," Cash folks up "Fooba Wooba John," and Leadbelly's "Rock Island Line" makes a stop in Memphis bluesland. Zanes's originals--"Jump Up," "Wonder Wheel," and "Thrift Shop," performed as a duet with Bernhard--manage to be wholesome, happy, and hip all at once, no mean feat. But it's the music making on Family Dance that impresses most of all. Fiddles, beatboxes, mandolins, tubas, banjos, and concertina elbow their way onto these tracks, and they're balanced by Zanes's arrangements and backup singer Barbara Brousal's graceful voice and guitar work. Kids 2 and up will be likewise captivated by the chunky board-book packaging, again with original artwork. --Tammy La Gorce
