KINDIE ROCK
THE OOT N’ OOTS ARE DEFINITELY A FAMILY AFFAIR
Forget Brostep, Chiptune and 8 bit. Kindie rock is the music scene you need to know about. At least if you are age 10 and under. Blending adult singer-songwriter lyricism, heavy musical chops and content aimed at children, the genre is exploding across North America.
Think of it as kids’ music that won’t drive parents around the bend.
Okanagan-based quintet The Oot n’ Oots are one of a handful of Canadian kindie rock torchbearers.
Fronted by 11-year-old vocalist Ruth Cipes, the band is a full-on family affair. Ruth’s dad Ezra (vocals, guitar) and a trio of uncles — Ari (vocals, guitar), Gabe (vocals, bass), and Matthew (vocals, drums) — comprise the crew. It’s second album, titled Electric Jellyfish Boogaloo, arrived in May. Their 2016 debut, Songs and Tales from the Great Blue Whale, was nominated for Children’s Artist of the Year at the 2017 Western Canadian Music Awards.
Like most artists in the kindie rock genre, this isn’t the Cipes’ first swipe at musical life. Gabe and Ezra were fixtures on the Vancouver scene back in the day in their band. The Way Out opened for acts as varied as The English Beat and Bif Naked and the siblings did instrumental sessions with many artists, including Tegan and Sara. When the family business beckoned, the musicians returned to Kelowna to work at Summerhill Pyramid Winery. But they didn’t hang up their instruments permanently.
The Oot n’ Oots came about because the itch to play again proved too hard not to scratch.
“It’s important for us to have a creative project to do that isn’t high stakes, and enables us to get together, relax, have a good time and joke around,” said Ezra Cipes. “A while after moving back, I really got depressed because I wasn’t playing music in any form at all and, I think, it’s a very direct vibrational action that influences the world. We’ve gone from a country and western bar band to assorted other groups before arriving with this project.”
What brought the players to the Oot n’ Oots was tied into that sense of spreading good vibrations around the world. As they had families, grew gardens and worked hard, the music changed.
“It got silly, fun and really good vibe-y,” he said. “It wasn’t really intentioned as children’s music, it just got into that. Especially after my daughter started singing and doing open mics and stuff, she tied it all together.”
Ruth barely appeared on the first album. From the doowop backing vocals on the opening wah-wah pedal-driven shuffle Dust Pan to the snarling lead vocal on the hard-rocking ode to culinary preferences, I Like it Saucy, and channelling her inner Loretta Lynn on Saturday’s a Sadder Day, she is all over Electric Jellyfish Boogaloo.
“In performance, she can get up in front of an audience and is really dynamic,” he said. “But the studio is different and I had to really work hard to wrangle some of those performances out of her, which wasn’t fun or keeping it light. Towards the end of the process, which began when she was nine, she really started to come into her own and it keeps on happening.”
The Oot n’ Oots have been regionally-based, touring and playing across Western Canada. But the burgeoning kindie rock scene and the high quality of the Electric Jellyfish Boogaloo has the phone ringing more than before.
Bill Childs, whose Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child | Indie music for indie kids podcast has been a real champion of the Oot n’ Oots songs since a mutual friend put in a request to Childs’ show to play the band. This lead to the group submitting their album to the annual Fids & Kamily awards for possible consideration. Fids & Kamily celebrates kindie rock.
“We’ve been regional, touring and playing across Western Canada, but we’ve connected with people in the U.S. and Australia where the scene is really happening now, so who knows,” said Ezra. “Honestly, it’s the coolest music scene I’ve ever been a part of, accessible, passionate and filled with great people. It’s also filled with wonderful, super creative artists doing really great work.”
Among the big names in the scene are familiar ones such as Dan Zanes and They Might Be Giants and nineties pop crooner Lisa Loeb. Dig deeper, and you get such inspiring artists as “kid-hop” rapper Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, whose Mozartistic may be the only rap rhymes about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever laid down, complete with full orchestra playing snippets of the composer’s symphonies. This is not talking down to the audience at all.
“We don’t really write or arrange with a super young audience under consideration, actually,” he said. “We just write things that entertain us and make us laugh which we want to be G-rated so everyone can get into it. There is quality control there, for sure.”
There is a payoff for the players. They get to perform to an appreciative audience on their own terms, rather than in some dank club with indifferent ownership and crowds.
“Fundamentally, we are a rock ‘n’ roll band and don’t really do the classic Raffi-style audience interaction sing alongs, save for only a few instances,” said Cipes. “The thing for the audience to do is to get into it on their own terms, if they want to dance it’s cool, if they want to shoe gaze, that’s cool too. It’s usually teens and adults who are the first ones to get hooked and get into it.”
Since not everyone can be at the festival or family day where the kindie rock is raging, the Oot n’ Oots — like most of their contemporaries — make a fair number of zany videos. These tend to deliver the music in the spirit of fun that Cipes continuously mentions. The family all appears to have acting chops and the clips look very professional. Cipes insists that, like making records, it has been a gradual process.
“The first video we made was Too Many Cookies with our friend Claire, who had just graduated high school and taken a video editing course,” he said. “We scripted it, shot it all in one day and she went home and edited it that night and sent it to us the next morning, whereas Dust Pan we did ourselves with a friend who is a performing arts professor at UBC Okanagan. It would be nice to have a little bit of a budget to bring it up to the next level.”
The Oot n’ Oots seem well positioned to get to the next level. The band has set new goals to find an avenue to establish a national reach and to follow that up with touring. As long as it’s fun, that is.
It wasn’t really intentioned as children’s music, it just got into that.” Ezra Cipes