Mar 05
Uke Make Me Feel
This Saturday at 2pm at the Bella Union Bar in Trades Hall I will perform my song, “You Make Me Feel” with the Uke4Kids Ensemble as part of the Melbourne Ukulele Festival. The details are HERE.
This is a great honour for me and I would like to thank Uke4Kids, especially their organzers Yanai and Dassana. Yanai is a very talented musician, teacher and songwriter, and he conducts the group and arranges their songs. It is an immense compliment to me that he added one of my tunes to his program.
I love the ukulele. I bought my first one in 1985 with $24 of my own money and it is that very ukulele that I used over 25 years later to record You Make Me Feel for 2011’s “The Man Who Broke His Own Heart” album. There is a comfort and warmth to the plink plunkiness of a ukulele’s fishing line strings that infuses a song with charm and honesty. It is not an instrument one can hide behind. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the ukulele is the door to the heart.
I cannot speak highly enough of the Uke4Kids program, which goes out to schools to teach ukulele to groups of primary school students. If it had been around in my time I would have cheerfully thrown my recorder in the bin and begged my parents to allow me to play the ukulele instead. The recorder is a spectacularly useless instrument to teach to children, especially as an introduction to making music. Cheap school recorders sound like shrill tuneless prizes pulled from cheap Christmas crackers and when humourless music teachers force this dour instrument onto young people it must kill the joy of music inside them, like dropping a government building on a unicorn. The ukulele is the antidote to this. Ukuleles are cheap and come in an array of fashion colours. Some have dots and stars on them. And there is room to put stickers on them. Or draw on them. Or whatever. But the main thing the ukulele has all over the recorder is that children can play a ukulele to accompany themselves while they sing. Most children don’t want to play music, they want to play songs. The ukulele allows them to become tiny troubadours – they can learn songs off the radio and play them and sing them and they will be recognizable. Or they can write their own songs and play them. This is very empowering.
When I was about 7, someone gave me an old guitar and I taught myself how to play it. My hands were too small to make the shapes necessary for the harder chords so I took the bottom two strings off the guitar. This essentially turned it into a giant ukulele as the intervals and finger positions are the same. And the simplicity – four strings and four fingers – opens up more achievable music to someone who is starting out. The ukulele can be percussively strummed or thoughtfully soloed upon. And it is the gateway to the skills needed to play the guitar. The only thing a recorder is the gateway to is making a decent noise on that whistle that comes with your lifejacket should you happen to find yourself in a plane crash.
On Saturday I rehearsed with a group of about 15 Uke4Kids students. They played my song, and a bunch of others from Guns ‘n’ Roses to They Might Be Giants. And they achieved that rarest of rare feats when teaching music to children: they were both entertained and entertaining.
Uke4Kids perform at the Melbourne Ukulele Festival (with me on guest vocals)