Explore the Wonders of Music and Dance with Elmo, Abby Cadabby and Count von Count

Music by Three-Time GRAMMY® Award-Winning Band Ozomatli Gets Preschoolers Up and Moving!

BURBANK, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announces Sesame Street: Elmo’s Musical Monsterpiece, an action-filled console and handheld video game encouraging preschoolers to sing, dance, and learn through a series of fun musical games. Based on “Sesame Street,” the award-winning children’s television series, the learning game will be available for Wii™ and Nintendo DS™ in June 2012.

“In Sesame Street: Elmo’s Musical Monsterpiece, parents can inspire an understanding of music and dance in a kid-friendly environment with their favorite Sesame Street characters,” said Samantha Ryan, Senior Vice President, Production and Development, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. “We worked closely with the early childhood development experts at Sesame Workshop to create fun interactive activities that help kids foster a love for music.”

“Sesame Street: Elmo’s Musical Monsterpiece gets children up and dancing and encourages music creation,” said Rosemarie Truglio, Ph.D., Vice President of Education & Research, Sesame Workshop. “The game also explores emotional expression through music and dance, introduces instrument names and sounds, and helps children to practice early math skills through music.”

All of the music in the game is performed by Ozomatli, and includes some original songs by the popular Los Angeles-based band, whose music is a combination of hip-hop, salsa, dancehall, cumbia, samba, funk, merengue, Jamaican ragga, and Indian raga influences. The upbeat score will appeal to kids and parents alike.

Developed by Griptonite Games, Inc., the games are entertaining and intuitive, enabling preschoolers to play by themselves with minimal involvement while offering ways for parents to help. The game features a “Parent’s Page” where parents can review games their child has played, and review curriculum goals. Parents can also customize up to three profiles, set limits for number of games played and more.

Sesame Street: Elmo’s Musical Monsterpiece is the latest in a series of Sesame Street video games from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment that includes Sesame Street: Ready, Set, Grover! for Wii and Nintendo DS which promotes healthy habits for life, and Sesame Street: Elmo’s A-to-Zoo Adventure and Sesame Street: Cookie’s Counting Carnival which encourage early literacy and math skills, respectively on Wii, Nintendo DS and PC.

Families can continue the Sesame Street experience with Sesame Street: Elmo’s Magic Numbers available on DVD on July 10, 2012. Kids can join Elmo, Big Bird, Zoe and Rosita as they learn the importance behind counting, numbers and early math skills.

For more information on Sesame Street: Elmo’s Musical Monsterpiece, please visit www.SesameStreetVideogames.com.

About Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, a division of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, is a premier worldwide publisher, developer, licensor and distributor of entertainment content for the interactive space across all current and future platforms, including console, handheld and PC-based gaming for both internal and third party game titles.

About Sesame Workshop
Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit educational organization that revolutionized children’s television programming with the landmark Sesame Street. The Workshop produces local Sesame Street programs, seen in over 140 countries, and other acclaimed shows to help bridge the literacy gap including The Electric Company. Beyond television, the Workshop produces content for multiple media platforms on a wide range of issues including literacy, health and military deployment. Initiatives meet specific needs to help young children and families develop critical skills, acquire healthy habits and build emotional strength to prepare them for lifelong learning. Learn more at www.sesameworkshop.org.

About Griptonite Games
Griptonite Games is the leading developer of high quality, fun games for handheld platforms. Located in Kirkland, WA, the studio employs over 100 people who are passionate about making handheld games. The studio has shipped over 50 titles across most of the major handheld platforms including GBC, GBA and DS, and is currently developing games for DS, PSP, iPhone and iPod Touch. Griptonite is a Foundation 9 Entertainment Studio. For more information, please visit: www.griptonite.com

Sesame Street: Elmo’s Musical Monsterpiece software © 2012 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. “Sesame Street” and all associated characters and elements © 2012 Sesame Workshop. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

WB GAMES LOGO, WB SHIELD: ™ & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
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Contacts
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Mark Margolis
818-977-1787
mark.margolis@warnerbros.com
or
360 Public Relations
Caitlin Melnick
617-585-5775
cmelnick@360publicrelations.com

We’re in the studio working hard to finish the Ozokidz album!

Below is a sneak peek! Check out our youtube page for more vidoes!

Posted by Dan Walsh on Thursday, December 1, 2011

My love of Ozomatli is well documented. As I sit and wait patiently for the formal release of an Ozokids album, they are kind enough to tease us with just enough to tide me over. First it was the Happy Feet 2 Video game Soundtrack and now it’s 4 songs on the just released PBS Kids Rocks! album. For the record, they’re the best four songs on the album, not that I’m biased or anything.

Ozomatli is not the only band on the album. Children’s music staples They Might Be Giants, The Wheepies, Rebecca Frezza and others are all featured on the album. In addition, the album features songs produced in-house by ‘PBS Kids’. Those songs, while fine, don’t stand out like the tracks from established artists on the album.

Lots of different topics are covered on this album: Camouflage, Gravity, Vowels, Pronouns, Weather, Seeds and lots of others.

Every track is barely :60 seconds long. So expect to see a lot of these in between shows on PBS and Sprout.

Check out the Ozomatli song Opposable Thumbs.

Track list for the album
1. Opposable Thumbs – Ozomatli
2. Five Senses – Ozomatli
3. Camouflage – Pbskids
4. Navigation – The Weepies
5. Matter – Steve Songs
6. Jump, Jump, Jump – Rebecca Freeza Big Truck
7. Gravity Always Brings Me Down – The Weepies
8. Nocturnal, Diurnal – Pbskids
9. Weather – Pbskids
10. Seeds – Pbskids
11. The Three R’s – Pbskids
12. Practice – Ozomatli
13. Pronouns – Ozomatli
14. Vowels – Steve Songs
15. Share a Story – They Might Be Giants

The song is now available on itunes and amazon!

www.dadnabbit.com/ozomatli

Ozomatli wowed the Larmer Tree crowd!
by Romany, July 23rd 2011

Ozomatli were definitely our highlight at Larmer Tree on the Friday.

The crowds on the Main Lawns were a heaving mass oozing energy and love for the LA band during their headline performance. It didn’t matter if you knew their songs or not (although lots did) – the guys were on fire and had the audience in the palm of their hand. It was raining, and quite heavy at times, yet nothing seemed to dampen the crowd’s spirits. In LA speak – they were AWESOME!

Earlier that afternoon, they played a fantastic 45 minute oZoKiDz show to a packed out Big Top… leaving kids buzzing and dancing and grinning from ear to ear… and from all the parents all I could hear was ‘Wow – that was amazing!’

They span round with the kids, played insanely catchy tunes, wore a few silly hats and enlisted the help of lots of little ones with their tambourines and drums. The music was infectious! They are a very talented group of musicians who clearly adore kids and love to have a bit of fun.

We were chuffed to be able to catch up with them backstage before the show. The interview was mainly done by a very shy and nervous Teya (aged 8 ) with a little bit of help from me, her mum. Watch the clip below to see what the guys have to say about music, inspiring kids and festivals. A word of warning though… the music you are about to hear will stick in your brain like nothing else!!

www.festivalkids.com/ozomatli

Ozokidz will be at the Pavilion Stage May 21st from 3:25-4PM.

Visit pachangafest.com for more details!

By: Judy Cantor-Navas
The Saturday crowd at the Echoplex in Los Angeles was getting antsy as it waited for Ozomatli to hit the stage for a recent show.

When the bilingual band finally appeared, it received an enthusiastic reception from audience members, who shook tambourines and maracas that they had purchased at the merch table.

The clock had just struck 12-as in noon.Who’d want to hit a club at midday? Excited 3- and 4-year-olds, along with dancing parents, who were holding babies wearing noise-canceling headphones.

Children’s music in Spanish has become increasingly plentiful in the United States as a tool for bilingual learning, often sung by non-Spanish speakers, and most often accompanied by distinctly Latin beats like salsa.

Now, as a bilingual hipster crowd that for the past decade supported the growth of the Latin alternative movement become parents, artists who come under the diverse heading of “Latin alternative” are getting into the kids’ music game with family concerts and new children’s albums. Call it “Latin kindie.”

For Ozomatli, an L.A. band known for its mix of hip-hop, rock, Latin rhythms and social activism, the idea to perform music for young audiences was inspired by a poorly attended concert at the House of Blues in Chicago.

Ozomatli bassist Wil-Dog Abers recalls that the band literally couldn’t give away tickets, having offered free admission to the show to local fans through Facebook.

“People were saying, ‘We’d love to but we can’t get a babysitter,’ “ Abers says. “We asked each other, ‘Should we get day care on site?’ And then we thought, ‘Let’s do a kids’ album.’ “

New York-based Pistolera also took a cue from fans who were bringing their kids to shows. “Piñata Party,” the band’s first album as Moona Luna, its family-focused alter ego, dropped March 15 on the NewSound Kids label.

“It’s really a reflection of my own experience as a mother,” Pistolera/Moona Luna frontwoman Sandra Velasquez says of the bilingual songs on the album. “In my household we speak both languages, and that’s the reality of a lot of Latinos in the USA and people who listen to our music.”

Spanish duo the Pinker Tones, both recent dads, found themselves performing at a 10-year-old’s birthday party in January after running a fan contest on their website.

Recognizing the band’s potential for family appeal, Target asked the Nacional Records act to contribute a song to the retail chain’s free, download-only 2010 holiday album, “The Christmas Gig.” And after performing at Sonar Kids, an offshoot of the successful Sonar dance music festival in their native Barcelona, the Pinker Tones are now recording a children’s album for Nacional.

Ozomatli is also in the studio, recording an EP to sell at the band’s upcoming schedule of “Ozokidz” shows, which have met with unexpectedly quick but welcome success.

“We’re always looking for new ways to make a living, because you can’t just depend on one thing any more,” Ozomatli percussionist Jiro Yamaguchi says. “If Ozokidz becomes a lucrative thing, it’s absolutely something that we’re looking at to help sustain us as a business.”

Read full article at www.billboard.biz

Ozomatli, a band known for its wide variety of musical styles and dance-ablity, can now add “kid-friendly” to their list of musical accomplishments.

The band will appear as Ozokids at a matinee show at the House of Blues on Sunday. Longtime fans will be able to share one of their favotire musical experience with their children — but, don’t worry, you don’t have to have a kid to get in; just being a kid at heart works, too.

The doors open at 2:30 p.m., and there will be plenty of entertainmentfor all ages, but mostly for the little fans, including magicians, face painters and balloon-animal makers.

Tickets are $12.50 in advance and $15 at the door.

Source: Ozokidz Play to All Ages | NBC San Diego

For more information visit our tour dates section

oZoKidZ” – A special family friendly set geared towards performing for children and adults alike

March 5th at The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills
All Ages! Children under 2 do not require a ticket
Doors: 2:00 PM, Show: 3:00 PM
Tickets: $15 | Family 4 Pack – 4 tickets for $40

To visit Jen’s List, visit www.Jenslist.com/newsletter

Come out to our Ozokidz show at the House of Blues in San Diego next Sunday March 6th!

Doors open at 2PM and there will be face paintings, clowns, and other activities for everyone while you wait for the show at 3PM!

Tell a friend!

For more show information visit, www.houseofblues.com/ozokidz