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After years of rocking in the 1980s with the Del Fuegos, singer/songwriter Dan Zanes created his own band, the Dan Zanes Trio, in 1994. The group got started when Zanes was hanging out with producer Mitchell Froom in Lower Manhattan; after adding drummer Jerry Marotta, they began playing their sparse blues and folk-rock to small crowds in clubs like the CBGB Gallery. Produced by Froom, the trio's debut LP, Cool Down Time, a raw rock effort influenced by '60s-era R&B, appeared in 1995. In 2001 Zanes resurfaced with the children's folk-tinged Rocket Ship Beach, featuring "friends" Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, Donald Saaf, Rankin Don, and the Sandy Girls. Zanes continued his Dan Zanes & Friends children's series in 2002 with the release of Family Dance and Night Time. House Party followed in 2003, Sea Music and Parades and Panoramas: 25 Songs Collected by Carl Sandburg arrived in 2004, and Catch That Train! landed the following year. Zanes released Nueva York! in 2008, a collection of songs from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, followed by 76 Trombones, a collection of Broadway tunes, in 2009. In 2011 Zanes and friends released Little Nut Tree, a family-style mixed-bag set of typically upbeat tunes that came packaged in a children's durable board book.
from Wikipedia:
Dan Zanes and Friends is a popular children's music band with front man Dan Zanes.
History
When Dan Zanes and his wife had a baby, they moved to New York City. Zanes subsequently began playing music with a group of fathers that he had met in West Village playgrounds who were also there with their kids. These fathers playing music together eventually became The Wonderland String Band, which played at parks and parties and on a tape of songs that Zanes recorded at his home.
The tape was a hit locally—i.e. on the playgrounds where he and his daughter played—and Zanes realized that he liked making music that families could enjoy together, as opposed to music that is just for children or just for adults. So, he added a small number of women to his band ("I realized I was ignoring half my audience, he recalls"), renamed it the Rocket Ship Revue, and began making a full-length homemade album, enlisting the help of some people he had met when he was a Del Fuego--Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, and Simon Kirke, the drummer for Bad Company.
The album, Rocket Ship Beach, was also a hit. The New York Times Magazine called it "cool", and added, "Mostly, though, Zanes kids music works because it is not kids music; it's just music—-music that's unsanitized, unpasteurized, that's organic even." The second album, Family Dance (2001) is composed of dance songs from a wide variety of musical traditions and features Loudon Wainwright III and Rosanne Cash. The third recording, Night Time! (2002) is a little bit more mellow, maybe not bedtime music but at the very least dinner music; on it, Zanes collaborated with Aimee Mann, Lou Reed, John Doe, Dar Williams, and other established musicians.
The most recent album in the family series is House Party (2003), a rambunctious 20-song collection with a diverse instrumentation that, in addition to the usual guitars, banjos, upright bass and drums, includes such wild instruments as tuba, accordion, pump organ, djembe and saw. House Party was nominated for a Grammy in the Musical Album for Children category. Music video selections from the House Party album play during the Disney Channel's morning program suite known as Playhouse Disney.
