Ukulele fever and the charms of slack-key guitar

The Inugural Occidental Ukulele Festival is this Saturday, April 25, followed by a workshop and concert by a master of slack-key guitar

Aloha! We know it’s cold and rainy out, but if you close your eyes, you can feel the warm island breezes and hear the tropical strains of ukulele and slack-key guitar music, wafting across the foggy coastal ridges.

Occidental Center for the Arts is hosting the first-ever Occidental Ukulele Festival this Saturday, April 25, followed by a workshop and performance by renowned Hawaii slack-key guitar master, vocalist and storyteller George Kahumoku.

The day-long ukulele festival is the brainchild of Jerri Miller, a veteran ukulele player and founder of the West County Uke Club, which now has about 100 members.

Miller explained that the ukulele evolved in Hawaii after Portuguese immigrants introduced the braguinha—a traditional, small, four-stringed instrument from Madeira—to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1800s.

Miller, whose mother was from Hawaii, said she formed the club because “I was tired of traveling to the Bay Area to play with other ukulele enthusiasts and was looking for a place to play closer to home. Barbara at the Union Hotel offered the Pizzeria for us to play. It was a great mix, as we would meet and play and the patrons seemed to appreciate the music.”

She’s hoping the festival will help spread the gospel of ukulele, which she feels is an underappreciated instrument.

“One of my goals is to help integrate the ukulele into the broader music scene, where many instruments play well together,” she said. “It’s a very versatile instrument. Unfortunately, many people still equate it with the music of Tiny Tim!”

The uke is famously easy to learn. “You learn a few basic chords, and you can play with others,” Miller said. “To play as well as Jake Shimabakuro takes years of practice.”

Musicians of all experience levels are welcome at the Occidental Ukulele Festival. There will be workshops and jams, local ukulele clubs’ networking, an open mic, and strum-alongs. Festival workshops include Simple Strumming with Craig Shaw, Intermediate Ukulele with Gary Sugiyama, Playing Chord Melodies with John Mentras, and Double Stops Workshop with Sheridan Malone. The festival caps off with a slack-key workshop with George Kahumoku at 6 pm (there is a separate fee for this) and an evening concert with George from 7 pm to 8:30 pm.

A Hawaiian master comes to Occidental

Our Occidental columnist Darcy Reinier interviewed slack-key guitar master George Kahumoku, and here’s what she learned:

George Kahumoku likes to create a relationship with his audience and students, making them feel like part of a family, a tradition going back to his formative years on a farm in Kealia, Kona on the big island of Hawaii where his grandfather was the Kahu or chief in their village.

The extended family and community would gather to celebrate the rites-of-passage events in life—such as births, one-year-old birthdays, weddings, housewarmings, canoe-launchings, and deaths. Each celebration requires a pig, which is the centerpiece of the luau or pa’ina, meaning a gathering around food to share Aloha and build community. Then there’s an after party to eat all the leftover food. These celebrations always included music and dancing.

George grew up in a musical family with 26 cousins and learned to play slack-key guitar from his great-grandpa and his father George Sr. At around age 11, George was washing cars for a used car lot and was heard playing slack-key guitar on his break by someone at the club next door. He was recruited to play and discovered that playing music was more lucrative than washing cars.

In addition to farming and playing music, George got a scholarship to study fine art and attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley. He worked at a foundry and did ceramics. He still sketches, writes stories and songs, and builds houses for his extended family.

He returned to the big island and later to Maui and performed in Kaanapali and Napili where he promoted other Hawaiian musicians.

George also credits the composer and performer George Winston for helping to popularize Hawaiian music. In 2006, George Kahumoku and other Hawaiian musicians won a Grammy for Best Hawaiian Music Album. In the spirit of giving back to his community, George taught motivation and art at high school and has worked with at-risk kids, teaching them to grow food and cook. He also taught guitar and ukulele at the University of Hawaii-Maui and founded the Institute of Hawaiian Music.

Slack-key style (kī hō‘alu) has an interesting history. According to Kahumoku, in the late 1800s, George Vancouver brought Mexican vaqueros to the islands to herd cattle. Like the mariachis of today, they had the bass guitarrón, the 6-string rhythm guitar, and the 4-string tenor guitar to play the melody. Kahumoku said they left some of these guitars behind but did not teach the Hawaiians how to tune them so Hawaiians learned to play using open tuning and to play all the parts on one guitar. (Open tuning is a method of tuning a guitar so that the unfretted (open) strings form a full chord.)

George sees playing music as a source of healing and promotes teaching children as young as 3 years old to play the ukulele. George and his wife Nancy, many of their children, and grandchildren now live in Watsonville, California. Thanks in part to his tutelage, the nearby town of Santa Cruz boasts about 3,000 ukulele players, and he said that Occidental is well on its way to becoming a ukulele mecca to the north. To learn more, visit www.Kahumoku.com

For more information and to purchase tickets, go to the upcoming events page of the Occidental Center for the Arts (OCA) website. Tickets for the Ukulele Festival are $55.20. The evening concert is included in the festival ticket, or you can purchase concert tickets separately for $39.19. The Slack-Key Workshop with George Kahumoku is a separate registration and costs $35. (You’ll see the sign up for the slack key workshop once you click on the ticket button on the ukulele festival page.) OCA members receive a discount on all of these events. Occidental Center for the Arts is located at 3850 Doris Murphy Court, Occidental.

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Join the West County Ukulele Club

Are you a ukulele enthusiast? Join the West County Ukulele Club monthly group to share songs and have fun! Bring your own instrument. Contact group leader Jerri Miller with any questions. The group meets in the auditorium at Occidental Center for the Arts, 3850 Doris Murphy Court, Occidental, on the third Thursday of each month from 4-6 pm.

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