Who is Dean?
Dean grew up in Canada picking wild blueberries and spacing out in the woods. He always loved music, growing up listening to his brother’s, sister’s and parents’ records (Beatles, Bach, Miriam Makeba, Belafonte, etc.) and improvising on the piano and pots and pans.
After playing trombone and keyboards in lots of cool and unusual bands (Perfect Thyroid, Harmonica Virgins, For Sale By Owner Orchestra, Sonando) over the years, in 1999 Dean started the band Dog on Fleas to make music for kids. After producing and recording a few of the Fleas records other kids musicians started wanting his production skills, leading to recording over 85 albums for kids.
Other fun facts about Dean:
Dean has co-produced 4 fundraising albums for Spare the Rock Records starting with Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti featuring Pete Seeger (recorded by Pete’s fireplace), They Might Be Giants, Dan Zanes, Bonga and more, raising over $100,000 for the Haitian People’s Support Project to help with the devastating earthquake of 2010. The latest record Let All the Children Boogie is an album of Bowie covers benefiting the It Gets Better Project, featuring Rhett Miller, Ted Leo, Jon Langford and Sally Timms et al. http://sparetherock.com/wordpress/releases/
Dean played at the UN with Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, Juma Sultan and others. He has traveled to Europe with George Clinton. He criss-crossed the US for 14 years with Arm of the Sea Theatre, an environmental large scale puppet theatre company. Dean has worked with multi-media/shadow/experimental theater group The Cave Dogs for over 20 years, funded by the Henson Foundation, Franklin Furnace, NEA. They have traveled to Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, South Africa with his music, but sadly without him. http://cavedogs.org/productions/