"Gideon has done it again: taken us on a whirlwind ride into his imaginative world where genres collide and morph into something new - something that is all his own. " - Patty Larkin "Ukrainian Pajama Party is a whimsical take on Freudmann's trademark blend of bluesy, jazzy pop and light classical-style music. Freudmann plays both an acoustic and an electric cello on Pajama Party, in contrast to his last outing, 1999's all-electric Hologram Crackers. Here, he also has a number of guest musicians on everything from clarinets to steel drums. Many of the titles of the tunes on this album are jokes or wordplays, like "Camel Sutra," "Fellini's Martini," "Melodious Thunk," "Natasha's Galoshes," "Drunken Bugs" and "bugsondrugs." (No bugs were actually harmed in the making of the CD, I trust.) The tunes themselves often mirror their titles somehow: "Drunken Bugs" features all kinds of funny noises made by the cello, guitar and bass that indeed bring to mind inebriated insects. "Camel Sutra" is a short, driving tune with Middle Eastern overtones. "Fellini's Martini" is a quickstep waltz with a cinematic melody that could be the third cousin of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze." The "Sybil Overture" has a multiple personality, an ever-shifting blend of blues, jazz and classical themes and techniques. "Old Jalopy" is a great little old-timey tune featuring banjo, mandolin and guitar, with Freudmann playing the bass line on his cello, and lovely fiddle work by Ruthie Dornfeld. Still, Freudmann is a mighty entertaining musician with an apparently endless store of amusing musical ideas. And you never know from one song to the next whether he'll be strumming his cello like a guitar, plucking it like a bass, or wringing all kinds of odd sounds out of it with a bow. This is the kind of album that the parents of young children could play to amuse the little ones, and enjoy listening to themselves. Ukrainian Pajama Party also contains a CD-ROM feature, an animated video set to the title track. " "No instrument is as mellow as the cello, and cellist/composer Gideon Freudmann's Ukrainian Pajama Party would be the perfect soundtrack for an October afternoon, sipping herb tea in your fez and velvet smoking jacket and poring over R. Crumb comics. As the title suggests, there's a wacky Eastern European feel to the music. "Freudmann has a well-developed sense of that weird and melancholy old-timey humor that is the life-blood of all great folk and popular music from Howling Wolf to Beck. Gideon expresses that humor best in musical terms: in the strangely strange but oddly normal interplay of cello and steel drums on the opening track, for example, and the sparse, formal rhythms that move his music now like insects on a leaf and now like Chaplin's drunk dancing with a coat-tree. Gideon also knows that brevity is the soul of wit. None of these tiny, perfect, bug-like compositions outwears its welcome. Au contraire: two words that encapsulate exactly what Gideon is all about, contrariness. "Let's be grateful for an artist like Gideon, and celebrate the this CD that is truly worth checking out. It's a rare trick to make instrumental music that's funny and moving and addictive. Only A Mother, Thelonious Monk, Captain Beefheart now and then, how many can really do this trick? Ukrainian Pajama Party will perfectly fill a vacancy that you didn't know you had in your collection: a gap in the middle of all that serious U2, Patti Smith, and Moby-type music that can only be filled by curious, mildly melancholy, acoustically generated cartoon soundtracks from another dimension. Put it over there between Michael Hurley's Hi Fi Snock Uptown and Dan Hicks's Where's the Money." - Pop Matters