Miss Nelson & Bruce

Ostensibly, Bruce Haack made records for children, but as a friend said, "I would only play his stuff for a kid I really hated." Mystic, inventor, composer, dance instructor, Canadian, Haack was roughly akin to a psychedelic Buffalo Bob and occupied a universe purely of his own invention. His albums--recorded with his partner Miss Nelson and released in the '60s and '70s on his own Dimension 5 label--aren't your standard PBS fare. In fact, they're about as avant-garde as music for the Sesame Street set gets. Haack's use of primitive synthesizers wouldn't have sounded out of place on an early Neu album and his application of musique concrète techniques have a charming functionality that such abstraction often lacks. His mad-scientist concoctions come off a bit stiff at times, but this is certainly some of the wildest "edutainment" ever waxed. There's a brooding, almost creepy quality to many of the compositions, and their subject matter is utterly absurd, even by children's standards. But the world that Haack conjures is nothing if not liberating, and Dimension 5's is likely to set a child's imagination reeling. Haack understood that children comprise the most open-minded audience of all, and his work probably fell on more sympathetic ears than that of his eccentric peers who mined other genres. Captain Beefheart should've had it so good. --Matt Hanks (Amazon)