Just an idea. It rhymes. It catches on.
How do we combine guitar and ukulele? One after another? Or together? At Derek Gripper’s African Music Workshop both instruments were welcomed in the same room. Everyone played together. It was one sound field.
I keep a growing mailing list of ukulele students, peers, and others who are hugely interested in the instrument and everything about playing music together. However, I’m never sure that my emails actually reach those on my mailing list because sometimes Google Groups hangs up on me. So here goes the latest.
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After several consecutive busy weeks, I looked forward to today — a Sunday with no appointments. A day to assemble my book.
My morning began with my usual routine of switching on my iPhone.
There was one voicemail message.
One of many ways to lead a group of performers is the so-called “call and response,” which is actually a compositional technique. The leader “calls” by singing and/or playing a musical phrase. The “other” (be it students, audience, or someone else) responds with another musical phrase.
I am forever grateful to my parents for the gift of a music education. I remember my mother tirelessly driving a great distance to my piano teacher’s home off-base on Okinawa. In the hot and humid afternoon, she took a nap in the car while I sat for my one-hour lesson with my piano teacher. In addition to piano, Mrs Betsy Hermann taught me music theory by writing music notation by hand. At age 14, armed with the vocabulary of music, I started composing and arranging music.
When you become aware that you are at the centre of those that want to know what’s going on and those who want others to know about their events, what do you do?
There is a certain responsibility that comes with knowing what’s going on. Joe Burros started a website for guitarists in New England last June after years of sending out email blasts of upcoming concerts and workshops to his mailing list. When I first learned of this service he provides to classical guitarists and aficionados, I was deeply grateful. I had no idea there were so many interesting events for classical guitarists and their supporters. Until then, I learned of such events through word of mouth.
Is there an equivalent for ukulele enthusiasts?
One of the most often asked questions by my ukulele students is “how do you know which strum pattern to use?”
There are many possibilities which I show in my video. Deciding which is the most appropriate depends on the mood, tempo, genre, and other factors.
Was I tempting fate by launching my first website on the Ides of March twenty years ago today? Just two years prior, I composed “Ides of March” after experiencing driving through a flood in Houston. It was so horrific that I had to rush back to my loft apartment to write the lyrics and the music in one go.
What propelled me to launch my first website? What has happened since?
Tonight we will be playing and singing songs from Ireland at the local library and going to a nearby pub afterwards — in Historic Lower Mills, a unique part of Boston, Massachusetts. One of these Irish songs is “Ride On” — a three-chord song I learned in the Hanwell Ukulele Group (HUG) in London. In teaching this song to my group here in Boston, I suddenly realised that I needed to listen to the original to get the feel of it.
Once upon a time, five teenage girls formed a band to compete in a talent show at their high school on Okinawa. Their band performed “Our Lips Are Sealed.”
They wore shiny purple blouses and sleek black slacks. They put on dark sunglasses the way movie stars tried to appear incognito. They chewed black Japanese bubble gum until it popped from their purple-stained lips.