[Dixielandjazz] Ukulele Crazy

[Stephen G Barbone]

Hey Ginny:

Time to dust off that Ukulele? Note this from the below article:

"The trend, building for a decade and now reaching a saturation point,  
is being fueled by a mix of Hollywood directors, corporate  
advertisers, professional musicians looking for a new sound and  
amateurs who have discovered how easy the uke is to use. Their aims  
may be completely different — selling deodorant and cars versus  
thrumming in a Brooklyn bar — but they are united in recognizing that  
the ukulele offers a folksy, hands-on kind of musical humility that’s  
hard to find in an age in thrall to “American Idol” and Guitar Hero."

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Ukulele Crazy

NY TIMES - April 15, 2011 - By BEN SISARIO


LIKE everybody else, Eddie Vedder was shocked by what the ukulele  
could do.

It was the late 1990s and Mr. Vedder was in Hawaii, decompressing  
after a tour with his band, Pearl Jam, when one of those modest, four- 
stringed instruments caught his eye in an out-of-the-way drugstore. He  
bought it, sat down on a nearby case of beer, and picked out a few  
melodies. It felt good.

“And then a couple of tourists came by and threw 50 cents in the  
ukulele case,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something going  
on here.’ ”

Mr. Vedder’s new solo album, “Ukulele Songs” (Monkeywrench), will be  
released May 31. (“Truth in advertising,” he says of the title.) But  
in the years since his first beer-case serenade, the ukulele’s  
fortunes have changed. Not long ago it was an endangered species,  
usually encountered as cheap exotica or a comic prop. Now it permeates  
the culture to an extent that it hasn’t in more than half a century,  
turning up in Top 10 pop songs and fashionable indie-rock bands, in  
television commercials by the hundred and YouTube videos by the  
thousand. There definitely is something going on here.



“It symbolizes everything that the grand polished machine of the music  
industry is not,” said Amanda Palmer, a singer formerly with the punk- 
cabaret group Dresden Dolls.

A few years ago, as a one-off concert gag, Ms. Palmer strummed a uke  
as she sang Radiohead’s “Creep,” accompanying herself on a $19 model  
she had bought the day before. But the performance turned out to be so  
starkly intense it could not remain a joke. So she began taking a  
ukulele everywhere, and before long she had recorded a full album:  
“Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical  
Ukulele,” released last year.

That Ms. Palmer absorbed the basics in a day — her usual instrument is  
the piano — indicates one of the ukulele’s great advantages: it’s so  
easy to learn that it’s said to be almost impossible to play it badly.  
Even when slightly off key, it serves as a blank canvas that can  
accent the character of any voice. And in the right hands, it can  
strip a song to its skeletal core.

“Nobody picks up the ukulele who is later going to go back and Auto- 
Tune their vocals,” said Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, whose  
1999 triple album, “69 Love Songs,” featured the ukulele extensively  
and was a landmark in its revival. “It definitely sounds untrained,  
and therefore goes with untrained vocal styles.”

Mr. Vedder has a tidy summation of its advantages: “Less strings, more  
melody.”

The ukulele craze of the 2000s is only the latest in its long history.  
A descendant of a four-stringed instrument called the machête that  
Portuguese laborers brought to Hawaii in the 19th century, the ukulele  
first made a mainland splash in 1915, at the Panama-Pacific  
International Exposition in San Francisco. It had waves of mass  
popularity in the 1920s and the ’50s, but by 1968, when Tiny Tim’s  
“Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” became a novelty hit (No. 17 on the  
pop charts) — and condemned the instrument to punch line status for  
years — it was already fading.

Its journey back from oblivion began in the mid-1990s, led by a  
revival among musicians in Hawaii, and since then it has followed  
parallel paths in independent and corporate culture. In 1999 a spare  
and wistful version of “Over the Rainbow” by Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole was  
used in a commercial for eToys, and sparked a ukulele ad frenzy. The  
recording has been licensed more than 100 times to sell food,  
software, paint, bank services, lottery tickets and plenty else, and  
it shows no sign of slowing down.

It’s not hard to see the attraction. The light, carefree strum that  
has become the instrument’s sonic stereotype invokes innocence,  
sincerity and childlike wonder, as well as nostalgia for a pre-rock  
’n’ roll era. It doesn’t hurt that the sound also conforms to  
ingrained notions of Hawaii as a consumer-friendly earthly paradise.

Those connotations can be narrative gold for visual storytellers, and  
for advertisers they offer instant humanization.

“Everyone is sticking the tinkling sound of ukulele under their  
commercial,” said Jim Beloff, who wrote “The Ukulele: A Visual  
History.” “It’s shorthand for lightness of tone. It says, ‘We’re good  
guys at heart.’ ”

At the same time that Hollywood and corporate America began turning to  
the ukulele, a grass-roots uke revival gathered steam. Local strumming  
societies emerged around the country, aided by the Internet. And,  
following the Magnetic Fields’ lead, the instrument began popping up  
throughout the indie-rock world: Mirah, Beirut, Dent May, Noah and the  
Whale, Buke and Gass, Tune-Yards, even a Neutral Milk Hotel tribute  
band called Neutral Uke Hotel. From there it spread to the mainstream.

The ukulele is all over Train’s 2009 song “Hey, Soul Sister,” for  
example, which reached No. 3, won a Grammy Award and was featured on  
“Glee.” (And let’s not forget the Beatles factor: Paul McCartney paid  
tribute to the ukulele-loving George Harrison at the 2002 “Concert for  
George”; four years later Jake Shimabukuro’s virtuoso “While My Guitar  
Gently Weeps” became aYouTube hit.)

As Ms. Palmer sees it, the ukulele is the zeitgeist instrument for the  
D.I.Y. age. “This is the age of the democratization of music,” she  
says. “Anyone can be a musician. And in a recession, when you have a  
$20 instrument and there’s a big musical renaissance, anyone will want  
to join in.”

Sales of the instrument, meanwhile, have surged. Sammy Ash, chief  
operating officer of the Sam Ash music stores, said he sold more  
ukuleles last December than in the entire previous decade, along with  
lots of accessories. “We sell a Metallica ukulele book,” Mr. Ash said,  
“and we sell a lot of them.”

Perhaps some of those Metallica uke skills will be on display at the  
New York Uke Fest from May 5 to 7, with concerts and workshops  
including slide guitar technique and lei making (nyukefest.com).

For most of its history the ukulele has tended to be defined by its  
limitations: it lacks the resonance of the guitar, the bark and twang  
of the banjo, and one result is a narrow range of performance styles.  
In some ways that’s the ukulele’s strength, a simple, effective strum  
that anyone can learn. But — aside from the dazzling performances of  
masters like Mr. Shimabukuro — is that all there is?

Mr. Vedder’s album is halfway between the standard uke style and  
something more idiosyncratic. Respecting one of the instrument’s  
unwritten rules, he plays antique songs like “Dream a Little Dream of  
Me” and “Tonight You Belong to Me” (you may remember Steve Martin and  
Bernadette Peters singing that one in “The Jerk”). And he exploits the  
sentimentality of the instrument for all it’s worth, singing lines  
like “For every wish upon a star that goes unanswered in the dark/ 
There is a dream I’ve dreamt about you.” But on songs like “Can’t  
Keep,” he seems to be trying to cram an angst-y Pearl Jam song through  
the tiny instrument, attacking the strings.

Merrill Garbus of the band Tune-Yards, whose second album,  
“Whokill” (4AD), is scheduled to be released Tuesday, is more  
experimental. Ms. Garbus creates loops of sound using drums, ukulele  
and her own voice, weaving the elements together over reggae beats and  
African-influenced vocal melodies.

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t hear the ukulele on a first listen.  
Through various electronic manipulations she has made it sound like a  
synthesizer, or a distorted electric guitar, or simply short blasts of  
noise. But listen carefully and you’ll hear the tell-tale plink-plink  
of a ukulele.

“I definitely made it my goal to make the ukulele sound not like the  
ukulele,” Ms. Garbus said. “I’ve been amplifying the ukulele through a  
pick-up and then overdriving it in a really great tube amp, so the  
texture became not the stereotypical strum of the ukulele. It has  
these gnarly edges to it.”

Or, as Mr. Vedder explained: “My inspiration was to wrestle with the  
thing, to give it something different from the way it’s been played  
before. Can I make this happy little instrument as depressed as I am?”