[Dixielandjazz] For the Ukulele Fans

[Stephen G Barbone]

A multi genre feast of Ukulele Music from classical to the sex  
pistols. Check them out on you tube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEdH1tNP51Q&feature=related
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfK-UzQ48JE&feature=related
or at
http://www.ukuleleorchestra.com/main/home.aspx

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

NY TIMES - September 30, 2009 - By Sarah Lyall
No Tiptoeing Through the Tulips

LONDON — If the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain exists partly to  
subvert expectations, then the first expectation it subverts is that  
it is going to be very, very bad.

“Relief is one of the major emotions of our audience,” declared Dave  
Suich, an orchestra member.

But the happy surprise of encountering something completely different  
from the Tiny Tim-style hamming or banjo-plucking embarrassment of  
your imagination doesn’t wholly explain the deep love the orchestra  
inspires, not just in Britain, but also in Europe and as far away as  
New Zealand and Japan. Previously the private passion of a large but  
sub rosa group of devotees, the orchestra hit mainstream popularity  
last month when it performed to a sold-out crowd at the BBC Proms  
music festival at the Royal Albert Hall here.

“They have grown into a much-loved institution,” The Observer of  
London wrote. In The Financial Times Laura Battle praised the  
orchestra members’ “consummate skill” and said that the “sophisticated  
sound they make — both percussive and melodic — is at once hilarious  
and heartfelt.” The Evening Standard said, “The country would plainly  
be a happier place if more of us played the ukulele.”

Part of the appeal is that the group — eight of them, all singing and  
playing the ukulele — extracts more than seems humanly possible from  
so small and so modest an instrument, with its four little strings.  
Part of it is the members’ deadpan sense of humor, in which they laugh  
at themselves as much as at the music.

There is also the unexpected delight of their repertory, a genre- 
bending array stretching from “The Ride of the Valkyries” to the Sex  
Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K,” which they perform as a friendly folk  
song, infusing even lines like “I am an Antichrist” with a cozy  
bonhomie. They do a cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,”  
which affords Mr. Suich an opportunity to release his long ponytail  
and fling his hair around, à la Cobain.

Ukuleles are mildly humorous and kind of cute, particularly when  
deployed by adults dressed in black tie. “The minute that eight people  
walk onstage with ukes, you’re winning already,” said Will Grove- 
White, an orchestra member.

Six of the group — Peter Brooke Turner, Kitty Lux, George Hinchliffe  
and Hester Goodman, in addition to Mssrs. Grove-White and Suich — met  
recently to discuss its philosophy and raison d’être. (Missing were  
Richie Williams, who was not feeling well, and Jonty Bankes, who was  
out of the country.)

They have been together, more or less, since 1985, and they spoke in a  
jumble, finishing one another’s sentences and undercutting one  
another’s remarks like the old friends they are.

“Don’t listen to him, he’s wearing brown shoes,” warned Mr. Brooke  
Turner, as Mr. Hinchliffe tried to make a serious, nonukulele-related  
point about the National Health Service. “In England that is a sign of  
untrustworthiness.”

They all generate ideas for new pieces and play around with novel ways  
of making them work. The idea is often to do things “that are not  
exactly normal,” Mr. Hinchliffe said, to get the ukuleles to produce  
noises that are nothing like ukulele noises at all.

“It’s good having this somewhat poxy instrument that can’t do much  
because there aren’t limitless options, and it forces you to think  
imaginatively about how to create sounds and rhythms,” Mr. Grove-White  
said.

They use their voices: whistling in a certain way, for instance, can  
approximate the sound of a wind instrument in a piece like the theme  
song from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Striking a ukulele to  
dampen the strings, and then moving the nonplucking hand up and down  
lightly can mimic the “wah-wah” sound of an electric guitar pedal in  
the theme song from “Shaft.” To poke fun of songs full of flamboyantly  
long notes, the orchestra plays rapid successions of short plucks with  
their strings.

“With heavy-metal riffs, when you pluck them out on the ukulele, they  
sound really weedy,” Mr. Grove-White said. “It’s a good way to mock  
pomposity.”

They do that often, and cheerfully. “One of the things that we feel  
about pop music is that while we’re very fond of it, very affectionate  
toward it, at the same time we recognize the ludicrousness and  
pretentiousness of it,” Mr. Hinchliffe said. “A lot of songs really  
are extremely ludicrous. In a way, it’s kind of interesting to observe  
that you can love something and find it risible at the same time.”

The band had its roots in Mr. Hinchliffe’s childhood in “the People’s  
Republic of South Yorkshire,” as he calls it, when his father brought  
home a ukulele-banjo, a cousin of the ukulele. “After a while I said  
to my father, ‘Could we get some strings for it?’ ” he recalled.

In 1985 he bought a ukulele for his friend and fellow musician Kitty  
Lux. “We were in a doo-wop band together,” Ms. Lux said. “It was  
called, I don’t remember, Something Something and the Acid Drops.”

Mr. Suich joined too, and the other members gravitated toward the  
group over the years, relieved to find like-minded ukulele adherents.

“People love them like puppies,” Mr. Suich said.

“They lift depression,” Mr. Grove-White said.

“It’s quite an empowering instrument,” Ms. Goodman said.

“You can do an entire world tour while carrying only hand luggage,”  
Mr. Hinchliffe said.

They have deliberately not sought record deals and earn most of their  
money from 150 or so live performances a year and from the albums they  
sell directly from www.ukuleleorchestra.com, their Web site. Recently  
they produced “Dreamspiel,” a ukulele opera with lyrics by the  
American playwright Michelle Carter, and collaborated with the British  
Film Institute to set snippets of old films to music in a show called  
“Ukulelescope.”

At the Proms the orchestra performed a cover of Wheatus’s “Teenage  
Dirtbag,” sung sweetly by Ms. Goodman and including an original line:  
“Come with me Tuesday/Bring your ukulele.” Ms. Lux sang a Prom  
favorite, “Jerusalem,” introducing it as a song “about a nuclear power  
station in the green, rolling English countryside.”

There was also a cover of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” performed by  
a suitably insane-sounding Mr. Grove-White, ranting nonsensically in  
something that was not quite French. “I started approximating his  
lyrics, but you get the feeling he made them up as well,” Mr. Grove- 
White said of David Byrne.

But the high point may have been when the band invited members of the  
audience to bring their own ukuleles and join in a group rendition of  
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” part of their aim to spread the joy of  
ukuleles among the populace. There were more than 1,000 audience  
ukuleles, by an official count, and even the obviously unschooled  
joined in by swaying and waving their ukuleles in the air, like  
blissed-out teenagers wielding lighters at a rock concert.

And there it was, a critical mass, or as Mr. Hinchliffe announced  
happily from the stage: “a fragment of Beethoven for 1,008 ukuleles.”