Recess! Media

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That’s Justin Roberts with “More than Just a Minute,” from a new CD from Rounder Records called Hear and Gone in Sixty Seconds. The challenge that was given to a diverse group of performers was to come with songs for young people that would only take a minute, give or take a couple of seconds. Now that’s a pretty tall, or shall I say a pretty short order, but the results are remarkable. Sometimes a minute is truly more than a minute. Take, for example, this send-up on the vocabulary demands of talking about music from Beethoven’s Wig:

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There are familiar voices here — Ella Jenkins, Joanie Bartels, Marcy Marxer, Fred Penner, Tom Paxton, David Holt, and Bill Harley — with dozens of songs stretch out in a rainbow of familiar styles, from blues to blue grass, from samba to rap to plain ‘ol rock. And around the corner of each minute is something to delight and amaze. It’s the sheer giddy fun, like walking a tightrope over a pool of ice cream. You really don’tmind if you fall in, but there’s something about putting one foot in front of the other and keeping your balance all the way to the end — as Peter Alsop does with his “Peaceful Feet” — and then enjoying your cone:

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