By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
usic our children listens to is good, safe and largely inoffensive. At the same time, we want to know that every time it gets popped into the CD player we won’t have the uncontrollable urge to wrap the minivan around an electric pole.
If New Jersey soccer mom Doni Zasloff Thomas, a.k.a. children’s singer Mama Doni, strikes any kind of balance between the two, you should expect some auto shop repair bills. But then again, give Mama Doni’s Shabbat Shaboom an extra listen. You may get hooked.
Thomas’s career launched a few years back when she was asked to be the music director at her own kids’ Hebrew school. Now, three albums later, Mama Doni and her band have garnered a following up and down the Eastern seaboard and her tunes, much as I hate to admit it, are catchy.
The style — or styles, as the case may be — can best be described as electronic with a dash of folksy. Her repertoire ranges from an homage to watered-down grape juice that sounds like watered-down Kraftwerk to electrified doo-wop to the countrified, steel-guitar tinged “Jewish Cowgirl.” And you have to say this about Mama Doni: She’s so, so, so happy and talks so, so, so fast in the album’s interludes that you can’t help but get happy, too.
Traditionalists will appreciate Mama Doni’s nods to kashrut and ritual. You get the sense that her rendition of “Friday Night” would be quite different from Rebecca Black’s (ask your kids). And she’s never afraid to use a heaping helping of Yiddish when a bit of English would do. Sorry, Sephardim. Those whose Judaism is a bit more free-spirited may find the tradition off-putting, if not just a bit too Jersey girl for their tastes.
But here’s a guarantee. Your kids (at least the ones younger than Bat Mitzvah age) are going to love it. Especially your daughters. Just don’t let the schmaltz get you.
Available at Amazon.com, CDBaby.com and on iTunes. Free Hanukkah downloads at mamadoni.com.