[Dixielandjazz] The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

[Allan Brown]

Thanks for that Steve,

My brother caught them playing here in the UK just last week. He said it was a fantastic evening, with the highlight being the audience sing-a-long to "Anarchy in the UK" - sung joyfully by many folk that would have been shocked and appalled when the original song came out. My brother described it as "the perfect subversive English sing-a-long".

My personal favourite is their rendition of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights". I loved the original but I love this even more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF0VaBxb27w&feature=related

Last week down the road from me, the sleepy town of Worthing held their annual ukulele festival which had a great line up. Unfortunately I couldn't make it, but will definitely keep the diary free for next year's offering. Their website has some good free on-line ukulele simple songbooks that the club have put together for their players that I recommend downloading, there's a song for every occasion.

http://www.wukulele.com/

There seems to have been a great ukulele revival here in the UK over the last few years.  Jumping aboard the bandwagon, I've abandoned the guitar in favour of the uke, it's the perfect portable good vibe instrument. 

Cheers,

Allan





On 4 Nov 2010, at 15:49, Stephen G Barbone wrote:

> Apparently the UO of GB wowed them in NYC on Nov 2. Ya gotta love the tune selection and the stage antics.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve Barbone
> www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
> 
> Cutting Up, Rocking Out and Jamming on Ukuleles
> NY TIMES - By ALLAN KOZINN - November 4 2010
> 
> 
> The most revelatory moment in the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s concert at Zankel Hall on Tuesday evening probably came during its performance of “Psycho Killer,” the Talking Heads song, when you realized that David Byrne had missed the boat by not recording the tune with an ensemble of singing ukulele players. Or maybe it was during the group’s gracefully sung, delicately plucked account of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” an idiosyncratic reading of an offbeat selection, even before it morphed into a handful of songs from entirely different universes: among them Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life,” the theme song from “Born Free” and the Who’s “Substitute.”
> 
> Come to think of it, another Who song, “Pinball Wizard” — a natural for a ukulele ensemble, you might think, given the rapidly strummed introduction on the Who’s recording — yielded a greater surprise. Instead of playing the introduction, or any instrumental accompaniment, ensemble members put down their ukuleles and sang a richly harmonized a cappella backing to George Hinchliffe’s vaudevillian lead vocal.
> 
> Now in its 25th year, Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is really only an octet, and on Tuesday it was smaller still: with one player ill, the group performed as a septet. It was none the worse for that. Its musicians play ukuleles of different sizes and pitches, from soprano to bass, though Jonty Bankes’s electric bass ukulele looks a lot like a conventional bass guitar with a vaguely ukulelelike shape.
> 
> Physical comedy (at one point five players crowded together to play one uke), pun-filled banter between songs and stacks of fleeting musical allusions within each piece keep the orchestra’s show lively. Amid the gags — there are lots of yuks in ukes apparently — the band offered some finely nuanced playing, with beautifully shaped single-string solos by Mr. Hinchliffe and David Suich.
> 
> Perhaps because the ukulele has long been treated as a four-string mini-guitar for amateurs, only a handful of ukulelists have achieved much renown, most notably George Formby in Britain and Tiny Tim in the United States. But the instrument has a dedicated constituency. George Harrison was a devoted ukulelist: he periodically turned up, uke in hand, at meetings of the George Formby Society, and he is seen strumming the instrument in “The Beatles Anthology.” Younger musicians have taken to it as well. Julia Nunes, a 21-year-old player from upstate New York, has a huge following on YouTube, where her inventive version of the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup” has had nearly two million plays.
> 
> These British comedian harmonists are drawn mostly to rock oldies: their program included antiquities like Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” and the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” — which they performed as a cheerful campfire song, complete with swaying — and comparatively recent songs like Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Lyrics were occasionally tweaked: in a version of Isaac Hayes’s soul classic “Shaft” the line “What’s the most important part of a coal mine, apart from coal” was added just before the refrain.
> 
> The set also touched on jazz, blues and comic spins on a few classical pieces, including a whistled version of the Badinerie from Bach’s B minor Orchestral Suite, all cleverly arranged and played with humor, energy and virtuosity
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