The ukulele renaissance
lukin2006
Posts: 9,087
TORONTO — They gathered at the Dominion pub on Wednesday night, like they do every week. A mixed bag of bankers, teachers, pilots, fire captains, lawyers, graphic designers, students and retirees, hipsters and squares, poured past the bar and in to a back room.
Eighty people crammed into a cramped space. At eight o’clock a countdown began. When it reached zero a blur of hands madly strummed, and the room burst to life in a crush of jangling notes, a joyous cacophony signaling that another ukulele night, at the Dominion, had begun.
“The uke is my happy pill,” said Debbie Fleming, one of the regulars. Old and young, talented and tone deaf, hip and square, it does not matter in this Queen Street East pub.
That feeling is catching. Suddenly, the little instrument that everybody forgot about is everywhere.
This weekend marks the New York Uke Fest, a three-day event featuring ukulele performers from Hawaii, Japan, France, South America and Australia, plus a host of workshops including the “Beatles Complete on Ukulele” and “Let’s Make Music Hawaiian Style.”
“It has been busy,” said organizer Jeff Novak, a 62-year-old city college employee by day and a budding ukulele fanatic. “I am a learner on the ukulele. I picked it up a year ago.”
Ukulele festivals have sprouted in Florida, Montana, Oregon, northern California, Thailand, Spain and New Zealand — to name a few.
Eddie Vedder, the Pearl Jam front man and brooding prince of Grunge, is releasing a solo album of ukulele songs, called Ukulele Songs, at the end of May.
You can hear the ukulele in commercial jingles (Rice Krispies, Cialis, Travelocity, eToys), at the Grammy awards (Train’s Hey Soul Sister), see it peeking out of cool kids’ backpacks and crowding in to North American bars and community centres for weekly jams.
Global ukulele sales are soaring, topping the 400,000 mark in 2010, according to one source. Hawaiian ukulele manufacturers are struggling to meet demand. Music shops in Brooklyn are sold out. Bette Midler presented President Barack Obama with a ukulele as a gift for his daughters.
“The ukulele has not yet reached the level of ubiquity that it enjoyed in the 1920s,” says Jim Tranquada, author of the upcoming book The Ukulele: A History. “Back then you could walk into any major department store in the United States and buy a ukulele. They were literally everywhere.”
The Great Ukulele Boom went bust in the 1930s, roared back to life in the Fifties before being condemned to death in the Sixties by four young lads from Liverpool.
John, Paul, George and Ringo, and the electric guitar, were cool. The ukulele? Not so much. Even less so by the end of the decade when an odd man with a falsetto voice and a ukulele tiptoed through the tulips and onto Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In and the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
“It’s not fair to blame Tiny Tim for the decline of the ukulele,” says Peter Luongo, an elementary school principal and head of the Langley Ensemble, a student ukulele orchestra from the B.C. town widely regarded among ukulele connoisseurs as the ukulele capital of Canada.
“Tiny Tim was a sincerely good player. But Rowan and Martin and Johnny Carson weren’t there to take the instrument seriously. They were there to make fun of it.”
The joke stuck. Within a few years, ukulele sales sank to historic lows, and were counted in the hundreds annually. Sheet music vanished from music shops and the instruments were banished to dusty corners of Grandma’s attic, a gimmicky piece of pop culture kitsch that had past its best before date.
But times change.
Mr. Luongo is a disciple of Chalmers Doane, a music educator, Order of Canada member and ukulele virtuoso who, in an era when the instrument was in retreat worldwide planted it in Halifax schools as the city’s music director.
“It makes no difference what instrument you choose — recorder, trumpet, piano, bass, guitar or mandolin,” Mr. Doane said in 1977. “None can compare with the ukulele as a means of music education.”
Langley embraced Mr. Doane’s vision. After suffering some bumps due to budget cuts in the 1990s, the ukulele is the instrument of instruction in 10 local schools while the Langley Ensemble, an all-star cast of student players, has had a standing summer gig at a Waikiki hotel for 16 years.
In Toronto, Mr. Doane’s daughter, Melanie, a Juno-award-winning indie pop star, has introduced the ukulele to a handful of schools. Just the other day, she led a group of elementary students at Withrow Public School in the city’s east end in a song or two at their spring concert. The place erupted.
“Today’s kids have never heard of Tiny Tim,” Mr. Luongo says. “There is no stigma. And, frankly, the ukulele is easy to learn.
“I could get you playing in 10 minutes. And when you hit your peak and you can’t get any better nobody yells at you.
“People pull the ukulele out to have fun.”
All a beginner really needs is an Internet connection. YouTube is awash with “How-to” videos. Ukuleles are also cheap — a passable instrument costs about $50 — and portable.
“The Internet has had a huge role in the popularization of the ukulele,” says Jim Tranquada. “It has enabled widely scattered members of a community who, in some cases don’t even realize they are a community and just thought they were this strange person who liked the ukulele, to go online and find bulletin boards, Web sites and videos offering lessons.”
For actual musicians the ukulele might just be the ultimate test in an age of over-produced, digitally polished sound.
“It is like a crayon, if you get an artist working with a crayon you are going to get the truth,” says Toronto documentary maker, Tony Coleman, who is screening The Mighty Uke, his award-winning ode to the ukulele, in New York this weekend.
“You will find out if a guy is an artist or not when all he has is a crayon.”
Jake Shimabakuro is the Leonardo of ukulele players. The 33-year-old Hawaiian exploded to prominence in 2006 after posting a video where he paid tribute to his hero, George Harrison (a closet ukulele fan), with a ukulele version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."
It is astonishing. We recommend it, as might the 8-plus-million other people who have viewed the clip. Mr. Shimabakuro has since recorded with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, performed for the Queen and appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Not to be laughed at, but to amaze.
The ukulele is on the march, though not without resistance.
“We are already seeing some push back,” says Jim Tranquada. “It has reached the point where people are beginning to resent it, and where folks who have been playing for years are beginning to feel that the whole thing has gotten out of control.
“People are making rude remarks online. I have seen a logo for: No Hipsters with Ukueles. You ask my 17-year-old son and he will tell you there is nothing cool about a ukulele.”
And yet, on Wednesday night at the Dominion, 80 ukuleles merrily jangled away, just as they had the week before. Everybody was smiling. They could not stop. What could be cooler that that?
“You can’t play a ukulele and not smile,” says Ms. Fleming.
National Post
<!-- e --><a href="mailto:joconnor@nationalpost.com">joconnor@nationalpost.com</a><!-- e -->
Eighty people crammed into a cramped space. At eight o’clock a countdown began. When it reached zero a blur of hands madly strummed, and the room burst to life in a crush of jangling notes, a joyous cacophony signaling that another ukulele night, at the Dominion, had begun.
“The uke is my happy pill,” said Debbie Fleming, one of the regulars. Old and young, talented and tone deaf, hip and square, it does not matter in this Queen Street East pub.
That feeling is catching. Suddenly, the little instrument that everybody forgot about is everywhere.
This weekend marks the New York Uke Fest, a three-day event featuring ukulele performers from Hawaii, Japan, France, South America and Australia, plus a host of workshops including the “Beatles Complete on Ukulele” and “Let’s Make Music Hawaiian Style.”
“It has been busy,” said organizer Jeff Novak, a 62-year-old city college employee by day and a budding ukulele fanatic. “I am a learner on the ukulele. I picked it up a year ago.”
Ukulele festivals have sprouted in Florida, Montana, Oregon, northern California, Thailand, Spain and New Zealand — to name a few.
Eddie Vedder, the Pearl Jam front man and brooding prince of Grunge, is releasing a solo album of ukulele songs, called Ukulele Songs, at the end of May.
You can hear the ukulele in commercial jingles (Rice Krispies, Cialis, Travelocity, eToys), at the Grammy awards (Train’s Hey Soul Sister), see it peeking out of cool kids’ backpacks and crowding in to North American bars and community centres for weekly jams.
Global ukulele sales are soaring, topping the 400,000 mark in 2010, according to one source. Hawaiian ukulele manufacturers are struggling to meet demand. Music shops in Brooklyn are sold out. Bette Midler presented President Barack Obama with a ukulele as a gift for his daughters.
“The ukulele has not yet reached the level of ubiquity that it enjoyed in the 1920s,” says Jim Tranquada, author of the upcoming book The Ukulele: A History. “Back then you could walk into any major department store in the United States and buy a ukulele. They were literally everywhere.”
The Great Ukulele Boom went bust in the 1930s, roared back to life in the Fifties before being condemned to death in the Sixties by four young lads from Liverpool.
John, Paul, George and Ringo, and the electric guitar, were cool. The ukulele? Not so much. Even less so by the end of the decade when an odd man with a falsetto voice and a ukulele tiptoed through the tulips and onto Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In and the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
“It’s not fair to blame Tiny Tim for the decline of the ukulele,” says Peter Luongo, an elementary school principal and head of the Langley Ensemble, a student ukulele orchestra from the B.C. town widely regarded among ukulele connoisseurs as the ukulele capital of Canada.
“Tiny Tim was a sincerely good player. But Rowan and Martin and Johnny Carson weren’t there to take the instrument seriously. They were there to make fun of it.”
The joke stuck. Within a few years, ukulele sales sank to historic lows, and were counted in the hundreds annually. Sheet music vanished from music shops and the instruments were banished to dusty corners of Grandma’s attic, a gimmicky piece of pop culture kitsch that had past its best before date.
But times change.
Mr. Luongo is a disciple of Chalmers Doane, a music educator, Order of Canada member and ukulele virtuoso who, in an era when the instrument was in retreat worldwide planted it in Halifax schools as the city’s music director.
“It makes no difference what instrument you choose — recorder, trumpet, piano, bass, guitar or mandolin,” Mr. Doane said in 1977. “None can compare with the ukulele as a means of music education.”
Langley embraced Mr. Doane’s vision. After suffering some bumps due to budget cuts in the 1990s, the ukulele is the instrument of instruction in 10 local schools while the Langley Ensemble, an all-star cast of student players, has had a standing summer gig at a Waikiki hotel for 16 years.
In Toronto, Mr. Doane’s daughter, Melanie, a Juno-award-winning indie pop star, has introduced the ukulele to a handful of schools. Just the other day, she led a group of elementary students at Withrow Public School in the city’s east end in a song or two at their spring concert. The place erupted.
“Today’s kids have never heard of Tiny Tim,” Mr. Luongo says. “There is no stigma. And, frankly, the ukulele is easy to learn.
“I could get you playing in 10 minutes. And when you hit your peak and you can’t get any better nobody yells at you.
“People pull the ukulele out to have fun.”
All a beginner really needs is an Internet connection. YouTube is awash with “How-to” videos. Ukuleles are also cheap — a passable instrument costs about $50 — and portable.
“The Internet has had a huge role in the popularization of the ukulele,” says Jim Tranquada. “It has enabled widely scattered members of a community who, in some cases don’t even realize they are a community and just thought they were this strange person who liked the ukulele, to go online and find bulletin boards, Web sites and videos offering lessons.”
For actual musicians the ukulele might just be the ultimate test in an age of over-produced, digitally polished sound.
“It is like a crayon, if you get an artist working with a crayon you are going to get the truth,” says Toronto documentary maker, Tony Coleman, who is screening The Mighty Uke, his award-winning ode to the ukulele, in New York this weekend.
“You will find out if a guy is an artist or not when all he has is a crayon.”
Jake Shimabakuro is the Leonardo of ukulele players. The 33-year-old Hawaiian exploded to prominence in 2006 after posting a video where he paid tribute to his hero, George Harrison (a closet ukulele fan), with a ukulele version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."
It is astonishing. We recommend it, as might the 8-plus-million other people who have viewed the clip. Mr. Shimabakuro has since recorded with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, performed for the Queen and appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Not to be laughed at, but to amaze.
The ukulele is on the march, though not without resistance.
“We are already seeing some push back,” says Jim Tranquada. “It has reached the point where people are beginning to resent it, and where folks who have been playing for years are beginning to feel that the whole thing has gotten out of control.
“People are making rude remarks online. I have seen a logo for: No Hipsters with Ukueles. You ask my 17-year-old son and he will tell you there is nothing cool about a ukulele.”
And yet, on Wednesday night at the Dominion, 80 ukuleles merrily jangled away, just as they had the week before. Everybody was smiling. They could not stop. What could be cooler that that?
“You can’t play a ukulele and not smile,” says Ms. Fleming.
National Post
<!-- e --><a href="mailto:joconnor@nationalpost.com">joconnor@nationalpost.com</a><!-- e -->
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