The Ukulele Connection

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The first time I went to Hawaii, I got crazy from the sound of the ukulele. When I returned to Seattle, I’d decided that I was going to make that sound myself. I had no idea how this was going to happen, only that it was. I shopped, listlessly, for a real uke, and I failed to buy one for about a year. One spring afternoon, I was standing on a friend’s front porch — they were getting rid of as many of possessions as they could bear to part with. “Hey,” said my friend Anthony, “Do you want a ukulele?”

I left the house with Anthony’s father’s baritone uke, went home, and promptly taught myself to play “The Rainbow Connection.” I’d played the guitar some as a kid, it wasn’t that hard to pick up a few chords on the uke.  The week that I’d acquired that first uke, my friend Knox presented me with a flyer for the Seattle Ukulele Player’s Association (SUPA). Off I went with my ill-tuned baritone and barely passable skills. I stayed and I fell in love with how kind everybody was and where did all these people playing the uke come from, anyway? During that first session of SUPA, a local teacher handed out flyers for The First Annual Ukulele Conference, an immersion course in ukulele for beginners. I signed up and I went every single night. Sometime before the coursework started, though, I stumbled into a pawn shop and an hour and 30 dollars later, I stumbled out again with a beautiful vintage mahogany soprano ukulele, something I really had no business owning, given my utter lack of skill. “It’s only 30 dollars,” my husband said as we stood outside the shop. I was stalled in hesitation, after all, I did not know how to play, not really. “Buy the damn uke,” he said, and emptied the cash out of his wallet into my hands. Since then, the ukulele has come to almost define me, especially in my online life. Often, when I meet online friends for the first time, the first thing they ask is “Where’s the ukulele?”

As skills go, I’m an okay musician, I play with some facility though I don’t sing well. I’m not fishing for compliments, I’m just very aware of my abilities. I’ve taken a few workshops here and there, but mostly, I’ve learned by playing with the fine people of SUPA and little spin off groups from that effort. I’ve taught just a tiny bit — for a while, while we were in Austria, I gave weekly lessons to a 16 year old, Alex, who lived up the street from us. He wouldn’t speak English with me, I didn’t speak German to him because I didn’t know the words for ukulele related things, and we had a great time playing things like Wonderwall and Blitzkrieg Bop and some standards, too, like Dream a Little Dream of Me. We laughed a lot. His parents tried to pay me at first, but I refused. I got such joy out it, and besides, every evening I was there, they fed me really good food and opened a fine bottle of wine.

I’ve picked up, throughout the course of my travels, a few different ukes. I have an eight string Kamaka, it’s loud and bright and a little hard to play, and I got it for nowhere near what it’s worth from a German flamenco guitarist. I have a Pono that I bought at Scotty’s Music on the island of Kauai. We were in the store for a good long time while I played a dozen, maybe more, ukes, and narrowed it down to two. I was flattered to no end when the big Polynesian guy who handed me uke after uke said, surprised, “She’s pretty good, isn’t she?” to my husband.  I blushed and I bought the expensive instrument and in retrospect, I realize it may have been a tactic. I own a one of a kind hand built resonator uke, a real beauty that I bought from Sam Rosen’s Ukulele Gallery in Holualoa on the Big Island.  I have a little mango colored Flea that I bought from one of my neighbors, a guy I’d met at SUPA and have become fast friends with. The Flea travels with me, though it was a different uke I took to Antarctica, a tiny sopranino that was a gift from another member of SUPA, a woman named Maggie. That one now lives at sea, aboard the M/V Plancius. The most recent addition to my fleet is a Ko’Aloha long necked soprano, a gift from the Okami family, the folks who make those ukes. I don’t deserve it and also, I play it almost every day. It came with a note thanking me for spreading the love of the uke. I was overwhelmed. I am still overwhelmed and this last uke makes me want to be a better musician.

A friend in Honolulu, Tammi Hitchcock, gave me an uke she had kicking around her apartment, and because I had it in hand while on a Hawaii press trip, I played with Manu Boyd (a guy who’s kind of a big deal in Hawaiian music) at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center. He won’t remember me, I’m sure, but I remember him. I faked it through a song I did not know because this is what you do when people invite you to play with them; you do not say no, you say “Thank you!” and you try to learn.  I played solo for a small press group at the Keauhou Outrigger Hotel, a ukulele was placed in my hands, and later, the manager joked that I could come back every evening at 5:00, please, for happy hour. I played with Auntie Margie’s song circle at Anna Ranch on the Big Island, joining her group of older Hawaiians. I think they did not expect me to be able to play at all, and before we were swept along to our next destination, Auntie Margie kissed me and gave me her song book. It’s just a three ring binder of photocopies, but it’s a treasure to me. I’ve written about the uke twice for World Hum, my favorite travel site, and  I’m on the board of SUPA. I recently joined a band, I’m not quite ready to show you video clips yet, but they are real musicians who know how to read and arrange music — right now their chord transitions are making me crazy, but I’m going to get there.

There was nothing contrived or planned about any of this, I just kind of wanted to play the ukulele and said so out loud. Whoever is in charge of these things thought, “Yeah, that seems like something that oddball woman from Seattle should totally do.” Some time back I was sitting on a sidewalk bench in Honoka’a with Kris Bordessa (a fellow freelance writer and internet friend) and her son Brad, the guy who runs Live ‘Ukulele, one of the most popular uke sites on the web. We’d traded ukes, he was making my Flea sound amazing, I was making his Kamaka sound terrible, and we were all chatting about Pahala, a village I’d stayed in a few days before. There’s a music camp that takes place there, Brad had been for many previous years. I wanted to go, but I couldn’t quite see how that was going to happen. And this summer, while I was sitting in Austria, not far from where I’d taught Alex how to do that picking thing I’d learned from a big Hawaiian guy at a festival outside Tacoma, I got email from Kris asking me if I’d like to be a guest at Keoki Kahumoku’s Hawaiian Music Camp in Pahala that year. Did I want to come and write about what it’s like to be a uke camp? Did I ever.

I got to meet Keoki recently, he was giving a house concert in Bellevue, just a short drive from my home in Seattle. After he played two sets with his dad, George, we talked about music camp. I asked him which uke I should bring and what to expect. I have to attend choir every morning — everyone does, it’s the one thing that’s required. I’m okay with that, I could use some singing lessons. The rest of the time I’ll spend focused on learning how to play the uke. I don’t know what that means, but I like unraveling this long thread. I like playing all these sweet little moments back, they pull me out to those islands in the Pacific, back to that place that I’ve never lived but somehow feels like home. It started with that sound, the music of the ukulele.  I wanted so much to have that be a part of me. And now, as I pack for Hawaii, it seems as though I never really had much of a choice.

Hit play at your own risk. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.