Putumayo Kids Reggae Playground Children's CD - A Review

Putumayo has put together a wonderful collection of music that exudes elation and cultural togetherness. This compact disc features 12 musicians of different origin from around the word, some origins include, Brazil, Mauritius, Indonesia, France, Hawaii, and Jamaica, these artists uniquely and beautifully put their own cultural spin on buoyant reggae oriented music.

This cd a fantastic cd to purchase for children of all ages, it's full of beautiful kid friendly dance tunes. This cd is absolutely beautiful. Two stand out tracks that every kid is sure to love include; Johnny Dread's heavily influenced, bubbly tune "Rootsman Dread" and Judy Mowatt's (of Bob Marley's famous back up singers the I-threes) extremely upbeat and heavily influenced reggae tune, "Dance." The cons of this cd are; there are about 4 tracks that are in 4 different languages; French, Portuguese, Creole-Caribbean language, and an Indonesian language. Which will all prove difficult to understand for the person who does not normally speak those languages, nonetheless the four songs make incredible dance tunes, another con about Putumayo's Reggae Playground is that some of the songs don't exactly have that reggae feel, that the title of the cd suggests, but they are still very enjoyable and danceable.

The great thing about this cd is that it is marketed towards kids but it can be very appealing to the adult ear because of the uniqueness of the songs, and the reggae tinged dance beats Putumayo Reggae Playground is not the conventional bouncy hippety hop children's music, the beats are slightly mature but extremely kid friendly.

My personal favorites include; the Brazilian, Kal Dos Santos' "As Meninas Dos Meus Olhos," Which features the backing vocals of children, my other favorite is from the child star, Mauritian artist, Jessica, who sings the song "Ying Yang" in her beautiful Creole language, over the combination of Sega (popular music in Mauritius) and reggae music, her voice is very impressive, sweet, rich , and beautiful on this song.