Music Minute: ¡Muévete! Songs for a Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body - José-Luis Orozco

Orozco’s new album, ¡Muévete! Songs for a Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body, promotes fitness for children ages 1 to 7. It is the perfect complement to his Grammy-nominated Smithsonian Folkways album, ¡Come Bien! Eat Right!, which promotes good eating habits and offers a complete picture of healthy living for young children. The album will be available from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on April 17, 2020, and it is available for pre-orders now.
 
These 18 bilingual tracks (9 in Spanish and 9 in English) include old favorites such as “La Raspa” and the lullaby “Los Pollitos” (Baby Chicks), along with new creations such as the jumping song “Popcorn” (Palomitas de Maíz) and the balancing song “Domingo Flamingo.”¡Muévete! is a collaboration with Grammy-winning Chicano musician-producer Quetzal Flores and features some of L.A.’s finest instrumentalists, who bring Orozco’s songs to life. It is an engaging and downright fun album that fosters language skills while teaching kids how easy it is to move their bodies to music.
 
José-Luis Orozco is America’s premier Spanish-English bilingual children’s music artist with a career spanning 50 years. He is a musical marvel — constantly writing new songs, setting new words in English and Spanish to old songs, performing for hundreds of thousands of children each year, and delighting audiences of all ages with his charming wit and endearing antics—but he is much more.  As a seasoned educator with a master’s degree in multicultural education, he teaches a wide gamut of age-appropriate skills, such as counting, language, naming parts of the body, good nutrition, history, and folk traditions—all in a spirit of fun and joie de vivre. “I’ve been able to combine music and education, and that’s what I do all over the country,” Orozco says. “Every single year, I travel about 125,000 miles; it’s like going around the world five times every year, reaching hundreds of thousands of kids, and families, and teachers.”

Demand has only grown for Orozco’s talents in recent years, as Latinx youth make up more and more of the school population, now comprising more than one out of four students at the elementary level. Says Orozco, “In a bilingual setting, the English speakers will learn Spanish and Latin American traditions, and the more children understand each other, the more they learn about other cultures, the better world that they’ll have when they grow up… Many English-speaking parents now want their kids to learn Spanish because they’ve learned that Spanish is a practical language in the United States, and if I can bring it with music, with dance, with movement, and with fun, everybody wins.”