Pied piper with a calypso twist

STRANGE things can happen in a New York City subway station. For the Trinidad-born musician Asheba, the 42nd Street E Train platform was the place where he became “blessed with spirit of children’s music.” While he was performing there in the early 1990s, a little girl named Sparkle asked if he knew “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Asheba did not, and had her to sing it for him. He recast the well-known nursery rhyme with a Caribbean rhythm, and it later wound up the title track of his first CD, “Go Itsy.”

“It was the best thing that happened in my life musically,” he says from his home in Oakland. Although his subway performances also resulted in Asheba being featured in a Las Vegas stage show, it is playing for children and families where he found his true calling.

Asheba believes his bucolic Trinidad upbringing contributed to his being a pied piper with the kids. “The connection between me and children definitely comes from my love of animals and nature,” he says, adding “if you love animals and trees, wind and breeze and water, I think that opens the door easier with a child.”

Children’s music and nature also connects with his current association with the Putumayo Kids label. Their latest release, “Animal Playground,” collects a lively, globe-spanning menagerie of animal tunes with Asheba’s calypso-flavored version of “No More Monkeys” appearing as both a song and the disc’s bonus video.

Stephanie Mayers, Putumayo Kids’ events and marketing coordinator, describes Asheba as their perfect ambassador. Last year, the label featured him for its Reggae Playground tour and invited him back for a new tour, Animal Playground. Mayers praises his upbeat, multicultural approach “to educate and entertain, which is Putumayo Kids’ mission too.”

For the Animal Playground shows, Asheba will feature his popular “No More Monkeys” and “Go Itsy” tunes as well as other wildlife numbers such as “I Wish I Can Fly” (about an impatient caterpillar who wants to be a butterfly) and “Magahmoto” (about a stray dog wandering around town) and “Papa Bois” (the traditional Trinidad story-song about the father of the trees). Although Asheba enjoys making up original songs (his name means “creative one”), he also likes to cross-pollinate traditional tunes with his Caribbean roots, such as spicing up “Ladybugs’ Picnic” with some dance-hall reggae.

Asheba extols the calypso classic “Day-O” as his model tune.

“It’s a folk song that everybody could like,” no matter their age, he says. “When you lose the gift of being childlike, you lose one of the greatest gifts of being human.”

weekend@latimes.com

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Asheba

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: 11 a.m. Sunday.

* Cost: Adults, $8 ($6 members); children 2 and older, $6 ($4).

Info: (866) 468-3399; https://skirball.org.

* Also 6 p.m. Tuesday, with Rhythm Child: Kidspace Museum, 480 N. Arroyo Blvd., Pasadena. $15 ($13.50 members). (626) 449-9144; www.kidspacemuseum.org.