By DCist Contributor Danielle Ohl
Jeff Bradford just couldn’t get his son to sleep.
He’d spent almost 20 years on the road touring with different rock bands and sleeping in the most unlikely of places.
Still, in 2010, when he and his wife had their first son, all his slumbering expertise couldn’t prepare him to go from rocking the house to rocking the cradle. He tested tried and true classical music, helpful videos and books, but nothing put his son to sleep until he tried rock music.
“I called [my bandmate] one night with a crazy idea that we should go to the studio and record lullaby music,” said Bradford. ”He thought I was crazy, which I am, but it turned out really great.”
Bradford and then bandmate Tim Phillips created a lullaby version of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” and thus, Jammy Jams was born. And with it, a way for babies to fall asleep and parents to keep their sanity.
“We really recorded it because I was going crazy playing music for my son,” Bradford said. “The only thing that worked was the music I made, so of course I made some more.”
Based out of Bradford’s studio in Bethseda, the Jammy Jams label creates covers of popular songs within a certain genre—be it pop, hip-hop, alternative—with a bit of a twist. Each composition is not only a cover, but a transposition into a completely new soundscape, similar to the Rockabye Baby platform. Bradford and Phillips strip the screaming guitars from Black Sabbath and the bouncy synth from Wham!, but the songs integrity still remains—only in, well, baby form.
“Since we do cover popular songs, it wasn’t so much about ‘well now we need to write songs that the kids will like’” said Phillips. “It was ‘Now we need to learn to do our version of songs that parents like.’”
“And,” he added, “make it accessible and practical for both the baby and the parents,”
While Jammy Jams is relatively out-thereconcept, both Bradford and Phillips didn’t have too much trouble transitioning from shredding to soothing. The two are products of a music-obsessed history. They grew up using it as an outlet in high school. They were members of various bands throughout their lives. They have been involved in making music for most of their lives, and thus have the acumen to compose, mix, and produce lullabies as well as any typical genre.
The two use unconventional instruments to perfect their signature sound. Much like any other band, they like to leave their mark on the music they make. Relying on toy piano, xylophone, and a few toy blocks here and there gives Jammy Jams a distinctive, sparse, but twinkly, flair. The songs are surprisingly recognizable—The Clash is as bad-ass as ever, even with a vibraphone treatment.
After finding sounds that the pair felt were “most pleasant,” they used these details on every song. As Phillips said, “We kind of put our own stamp on it.”
There are currently 20 Jammy Jams albums available online and also at Dawn Price Baby stores throughout the Washington area. Each album is grouped by theme, be it eighties hits, nineties alternative, or headbanging rock.
Mike Hilton, Jammy Jams’ artistic director of sorts, launches a new animal character to accompany each collection. The characters reflect the music genres they represent and have names, background stories and, in the case of one very hipster beaver, a vinyl collection.
“One of the thought processes behind a lot of the design of Jammy Jams is that we want to create a sort of Jammy Jams world,” Hilton said. “We wanted to have a backstory for all that and then apply those to various records and genres.”
The characters appear as artwork on each album as well as on the Jammy Jams website. To go with Benji the Beaver, there is Belfry the Bat, an artistic nocturnal type with a new wave penchant; Lobie the Lion, a longhaired denim-clad east-coast transplant who loves life on the Sunset Strip; DJ the Bear, the original Jammy Jams character who enjoys urban life and the hip-hop music it sprouted; and several others. Even more are in the works, according to Hilton. Eventually the characters might take on lives of their own through books or animated stories.
For now, the Jammy Jams team is working on another pop album, due later this month, an appearance at MommyCon to be hosted in Washington, and perhaps some partnerships with pediatricians.
Because their audience is literally growing every day, Jammy Jams has the luxury of not necessarily needing to change with little listeners. But according to Bradford, the team is constantly pursuing new ideas, new trends, and of course, new music—all for the love of nap time.
