I'm going to tell you a story about my high school days. For the first three years of high school (in the UK it's from age 11 - 16) music lessons were compulsory. Early one year our teacher (who can best be summed up with the words "Professor Umbridge") handed us all a sheet of music and asked us what the different symbols represented. When she got to me, she asked me to tell her what a note meant, I said I had no idea because I'd never read music before. (“Isn't that what you're supposed to be teaching me?” I wondered silently.) She told me not to be stupid, my mother clearly wouldn't have let me reach the age of 13 without this vital skill. “No,” I repeated, “I have never learned to read music.” That week was parent's evening and she repeated this to my mother in the way you would report a child caught telling a lie. My mother was unimpressed and backed me up, the teacher finally relented but from then on treated me the way you would treat something you found lurking under a rock, clearly anyone whose family didn't teach them to read music was someone she didn't want around. She never even tried to teach me to read it, instead I was left behind to muddle along while the rest of the class were criticised for not writing the next great symphony as a homework assignment.
I dropped music as fast as I could and finally managed to regain a love of it once I wasn't trying to mentally dissect it. Now I'm a huge fan of orchestral music, especially scores from the likes of John Williams, Carter Burwell, and Mark Snow. I don't want to pass on this complete lack of musical theory to our son so when I was offered the opportunity to review A Jazzy Day with him I was happy to oblige. A Jazzy Day is an iOS app aimed at preschoolers with the intention of teaching them about the different instruments that make up a jazz orchestra; the way they look, how they sound, and how they all work together. The game was created by The Melody Book using live musicians and original music so the pictures and sounds work together beautifully. It can be played in either English or Spanish, however you will need to go into your iOS device’s settings menu to make this change as it cannot be done inside the app.
A Jazzy Day takes the form of an interactive book which can either be read aloud by a man with a smooth New Orleans accent, or you can choose to read it yourself. The story follows an anthropomorphised male cat taking his two kittens to meet the all-animal jazz orchestra at the big band hall while subtle jazz plays constantly in the background. The instruments are introduced in logical groups beginning with the rhythm section and progressing through the horns. On each page tapping the instruments begins an animation where you see them played by a different animal. My favourite has to be the guitar playing squirrel—he just looks so totally lost in the groove. Eventually, the entire orchestra has been introduced and appears together on one page allowing you hear them all play together. At the end of the story you can take your photo with the two kittens using the front camera on your iOS device and the picture will save to the camera roll. You can choose to move forward and backward through the story as you choose, spend as long as you like on any given page listening to the instruments there (the vibraphone page is great as the instrument is fully playable) and there's also the option to jump directly to a specified page from the main menu.
Along with the main story there are two additional activities available. The "learn" button opens a screen filled with illustrations of the different instruments introduced in the story. Tapping them makes the app speak the instrument’s name out loud and plays a snippet of music so you can hear how it sounds. The game option gets you to answer various questions to test your knowledge of the instruments and their sounds, such as showing an illustrated picture of an instrument then asking you to find it among a large group of others. Most of these are quite simple, however expecting a preschooler to be able to notice the subtle difference between a tenor, alto, and baritone saxophone seems to be asking a little too much in my opinion. My two-year-old could consistently find the instruments that he saw but still cannot locate the correct saxophone except by luck. The other question the game asks is sound based where a snippet of an instrument playing will be heard and you have to select which instrument played it. Perhaps this is my complete ignorance of music coming through but I cannot tell the difference between a flute and a clarinet even now and as of today, my toddler just guesses when presented with these questions. However, I do hope they will start to teach him things I can't as he gets older.
My two-year-old refers to this app as “cat game” and has played it a lot in the time we’ve had it; his four- and nine-year-old cousins were also interested in it during a family trip and both sat and listened through the story at least twice that day. My son is most interested in the story and, impressively for him, will sit quietly and read through the full thing—even waiting for the narration on each page to finish before turning the page. I love the app as it manages to teach my son about a, let's face it, very noisy topic without becoming an irritating distraction in the room, although if you're not a fan of jazz music I imagine it could be mildly annoying at least. In fact the only change I'd make (after removing two of those three saxophones from the games), is to separate the visual and audio questions in the game and allow you to select one or the other, a very minor issue indeed. I would love to see more apps from The Melody Book introducing other styles of music and new instruments in the future. This game will not turn your child into a genius (I am no believer in The Mozart Effect) but hopefully it will begin a lifelong interest in music, lay down the first foundations of musical education for later life and be the first step towards your child wanting to play an instrument—something I still regret never doing.
A Jazzy Day is available in the iTunes App Store for $2.99. A copy of this app was provided free for this review.
