Music
BLAZING UKULELES
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Tiny Tim's strummable toys are suddenly hot collectibles -- and they're making some seriously fun music. |
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THERE'S A UKULELE IN YOUR FUTURE ,if Jumpin' Jim Beloff has his way.
No way, you say. Not a ukulele. Not that diminutive, gut-strung, pop-culture punchline. Tiny Tim. Letterman-sweatered crooners plink-a-plinking Tin Pan Alley songs. White sand beaches under pineapple moons, grass-skirted wahines swaying gracefully to the liquid whine of steel guitars over mucho earnest plinkage. "Tiny Bubbles," "Ukulele Lady," "My Little Grass Shack," "Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me." Arthur Godfrey. "TV Pal" plastic ukes. All of it.
The uke's resolute unhipness seems to be one of the pillars upon which our civilization is founded. "Give me your banjo players, your violists, your wretched huddled masses sawing out 'Lady of Spain,'" says the common wisdom, "for even they -- yea, even the accordionists -- are hipper than ukulele players."
But that notion ignores the uke's massive popularity during the 1920s and the '50s -- so popular, Beloff says, that he reckons there's about one degree of separation between any of us and a uke player.
Still, the notion lingers. And this cheerful 43-year-old, a Connecticut native who lives in Los Angeles, has made it his mission to remind us of our history and to condemn us to repeat it by proving that ukes are musical and fun.
"I'm determined to end the six-string tyranny of guitars," Beloff says in a telephone interview. "Like many people my age, I played guitar in the '60s and '70s, and I was as connected to the guitar as anyone could be -- I wrote songs on it, took it with me on trips."
But as life got busy, Beloff found he had less time for the instrument. Then, sometime around the beginning of 1992, he found a nice old tenor uke at the Pasadena Rose Bowl flea market. This one was made by C.F. Martin, and it was built as beautifully as a Martin guitar. Beloff was well and truly hooked.
"Within a week, all I was playing was the uke," he says. "Being a guitar-lover and a fan of James Taylor and altered chords, I found that you could do all that on the uke. In fact, I found it better for songwriting. Going from six to four strings is somehow liberating. I think of a ukulele like I think of a barbershop quartet -- you can say everything you need to with four voices. You don't need a choir."
Understand that Beloff and many in the uke world have gone well beyond plinking to far more musical realms that include chord solos and the lyrical single-string jazz melodies of people such as Lyle Ritz and Herb Ohta, known in the uke world as "Ohta-san." Although if you scratch most uke enthusiasts, you'll likely also discover an abiding love for Tin Pan Alley songsmithing and a fondness for the odd campfire song, too.
But in those early days of uke-phoria, Beloff was sure he was all alone.
"I figured that there were maybe five people in the world who shared my passion, but I wrote my first uke songbook eight years ago and found there were a lot of uke enthusiasts out there. I just finished my sixth, 'Jumpin' Jim's 60s Uke-in,' a songbook of '60s tunes arranged for the uke."
Beloff was definitely wrong about the number of fellow travelers out there. Judge for yourself when you note that the new book has a foreword by former Beatle -- and enthusiast -- George Harrison. And there are enough mere mortals buying the songbooks and "The Ukulele, a Visual History" that Beloff quit his job at Billboard a couple of years back to devote his full time to Flea Market Music, which he runs with his wife, Liz.
"Now we're even making ukuleles," he says. "It was hard to get beginners turned on about ukes when the low-end good ones were $300 and the low-buck imports cost between $40 and $70 but were hit-and-miss as far as playability."
And the days of getting lucky and finding a Martin -- or a Weymann, a Regal or a Kamaka -- at a flea market for $20 are definitely over. Nowadays, Martins command prices equal to their model numbers -- a model 5K is worth about $5,000.
Enter the Fluke, which was designed by Beloff's brother-in-law and is produced in Connecticut. It's been described as looking like a mandolin for the Jetsons and comes in four bright colors: mango, plum, pineapple or ukealyptus.
Those lurid colors and the triangular design are appropriate, Beloff says. "Unlike other instruments, ukes got fiddled with a lot. They were built with circular bodies, bell-shaped, triangular -- even shaped like airplanes. So we tapped into that sense of fun and also were inspired by new designs such as the new Beetle and the iMac."
Over the years, three groups of uke enthusiasts have emerged. The first group is those players who are coming back to the instrument they played in their youth.
"I know of at least three groups here in L.A. that are mostly senior citizens," Beloff says. "They sit in these vast circles with their fake books open in front of them, and all play along to the old songs."
Then there's what he calls the lapsed guitarist, the former guitarist now in midlife who has little time but a lot of desire.
"If you already play guitar," Beloff says, "the transition will take you about half an hour, because the intervals are the same as for the top four strings of a guitar -- all the chord shapes transfer. A C chord takes one finger, an F chord takes two fingers and G7th takes three, and that's enough chords to play a couple of thousand songs."
That ease of playing is a powerful lure for the third group of players, novices who are finally taking up an instrument. The uke also is unintimidating. Pick up a guitar and you feel the need to make serious music. Pick up a uke and the overwhelming urge is to have fun.
All that makes it the perfect way to entice kids into strumming along with Mom, too. And its size makes it sturdier than a guitar and the perfect travel companion. Beloff reports that some of his customers even play their ukes in traffic -- presumably in those Los Angeles traffic jams.
"We've been living in this world for a while now," he says, "and I'm still amazed at the passion for this little instrument."
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JOHN FOYSTON
