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HAWAII UNPLUGGED

Forget Tiny Tim. Think Jimi Hendrix. Neo-traditionalists and young upstart players are uke-ing it out, rescuing the once-ridiculed ukulele from tropical kitsch.

Text: DOUGLAS ANTHONY COOPER

1 | 2 | 3 | SEP '04

Very few objects have had to bear such a weight of irony as the wee ukulele. Let’s face it. Which musician would you rather hang out with in purgatory: Muddy Waters or Tiny Tim? Of course, we have Hawaii to blame for this four-stringed pipsqueak. Less well known, however, is that Hawaii is responsible for a couple more illustrious instruments. The earliest blues players borrowed slide guitar from Hawaiian twang. And the first electric guitar was, in fact, a jury-rigged Hawaiian lap steel. In other words, without Hawaii we might have been spared Tiny Tim, but we would never have had Muddy Waters.

In the interest of ethnomusicology, I decide to island hop through the former kingdom of Hawaii. (It still has a royal palace, by the way, and, more importantly, the former royal family was seriously into the uke.) I begin, as most do, with wild Waikiki, the tourist strip in Honolulu on the island of Oahu.

Immediately, I encounter a peculiar reversal of opinion when it comes to all things picked and strummed. Here the ukulele (pronounced OO-ke-LE-lee) is no joke. Steel guitar, on the other hand, is considered an embarrassment. The sound is linked to the period of commercialization, when "Hawaii" began to signify little more than "fruity pink drink." Also, it stands for what Hawaiians do consider a joke: redneck country music on the mainland.

The cool kids here slouch around not with a Fender Strat, but a Kamaka uke. "Kamaka" is a sacred name, the Hawaiian equivalent of "Martin" or "Gibson." Chris Kamaka, a soft-spoken, gracious man, guides me through the workshop where his family has for generations crafted the world’s most refined ukuleles. He shows me where the koa is dried and cut, bent and glued, and inlaid with complex marquetry. He explains how the instruments are tuned, by tap toning with a finger to determine when the wood resonates at the right frequency. Extraordinarily, most of the men who have traditionally done this at Kamaka are deaf. Chris says they "feel the vibrations." Who am I to question this miracle? The Kamaka uke is the Stradivarius of tiny guitars.

The ukulele has generally been strummed in simple patterns, taking back seat to the voice. A treble instrument makes perfect sense when you encounter the falsetto practised by traditional male singers. Tradition is being crunched underfoot, however, by a young player named Jake Shimabukuro. Jake, to the consternation of many elders, likes to play face-melting rock solos and complex jazz. He plays giant pop venues in Japan, where girls treat him like a Beatle. A number of people I encounter call him the Hendrix of the ukulele; in my opinion, he’s more like Al Di Meola. (He’s even cut a record with Al’s astonishing bass player, Stanley Clarke.) One of the many stories regarding the origin and meaning of the word "ukulele" is that it means "jumping fleas." Nobody knows why, but the word definitely describes what Jake’s fingers look like in action.

All remaining doubts regarding the serious cultural heft of the ukulele are laid to rest in the archives of the Bishop Museum. The most important repository of natural and historical Polynesian artifacts in the Pacific has an awe-inspiring collection of vintage ukes. I convince collections manager Betty Lou Kam to unlock the secret climate-controlled room where the good stuff is kept. The shelves cradle exquisite historical instruments, including ukuleles made by the early, great Hawaiian luthiers: Manuel Nunes and Augusto Dias. And here, wrapped carefully in plastic, is the ukulele played by Queen Liliuokalani (1838–1917), who, along with her siblings, wrote a number of Hawaii’s most popular songs.

Humbled, I make a devotional visit to King Street Cemetery to visit the grave of Manuel Nunes. His tombstone reads "The Inventor of the Ukulele." Controversy surrounds the question of whether the uke was "invented" here, whether it was imported to Hawaii by the Portuguese or whether it was a brand new genre of guitar derived from the Old World braguinha. What’s certain is that Nunes and Dias built the first ukuleles in Hawaii, after arriving from Portugal in 1879, and that Manuel Nunes passed on the craft to a significant apprentice: Chris Kamaka’s grandfather, Samuel.

Having spent some time in the cemetery quietly contemplating this old mystery, I yearn to escape the towering blare of Waikiki. A short flight away is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, green and sparsely populated, where it is illegal to build anything higher than a palm tree. There I am introduced to Hawaii’s other venerated instrumental tradition: slack key guitar.

1 | 2 | 3 | SEP '04