Live at the Belly Up: Jake Shirabukuro (San Diego State University, Belly Up Tavern, KPBS-TV, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles, a friend and I watched a Live at the Belly Up eupside featuring Jake Shirabukuro, a Hawai’ian of Japanese ancestry who has become a ukulele virtuoso. Fortunately, the show was a new one, copyrighted 2022, instead of a rerun from pre-COVID times. It was also an extraordinary performance. Using a larger than usual ukulele and plugging it in via an inside pickup similar to those used to amplify an acoustic guitar (as opposed to the body-mounted pickups of a true electric guitar), Shirabukuro gets an amazingly full sound: once you hear him, you’ll never think of the ukulele as just a toy instrument again. I was struck by some of Shirabukuro’s pronunciations: he pronounces his own last name “She-ra-BOO-ku-ro,” with the accent in the middle, and the name of the state he’s from as “Havai’i,” with a German-style “v” sound for the “w.”

Jake Shirabukuro turned out to be an absolutely fabulous musician with a rare sense of artistry as well as virtuosity; Charles lamented after the show that someone that good is playing “a novelty instrument,” and I pointed out that Shirabukuro is working hard to make sure we don’t think of the ukulele as a novelty instrument. Charles replied, “If he were a pianist or a guitarist that good, he’d have a much bigger career and wouldn’t have to play places like the Belly Up.” Shirabukuro played an eclectic set of 12 songs, including some haunting Beatles covers (“In My Life” – which he played as part of a four-song medley that also included Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and two songs I didn’t recognize – along with “Something” and “Eleanor Rigby”), what I think was a version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (though he transformed it so radically I couldn’t be sure) and some rather quirky originals, many of which had numerical tlties. He opened with “Ukulele 5-0” and later on in the evening he played “1-4-5” (referring, I presume, to the succession of three chords – the tonic, subdominant and dominant – at the root of virtually all Western music) and “6/8” (almost certainly a time signature).

Shirabukuro also played an original called “Piano Forte” which he composed for two ukuleles, one representing the left-hand part of a piano piece and one the right-hand part. To perform the work solo he recorded his own performance and played it back on a tape loop, so the first half was the left-hand part alone and the second half was him accompanying himself, playing the left-hand part on the record he’d just made while adding the right-hand part “live.” Shirabukuro also played one of my favorite pieces, the beautiful Japanese folk song “Sakura” (which I have heard before in versions by Harry Belafonte and Yoko Ono – Yoko’s version was from the week of February 14-18, 1972 in which she and John Lennon co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show and brought in various people as guest stars, including Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale and rock icon Chuck Berry). Shirabukuro explained that the song was written for the koto, a sort of 13-stringed Japanese zither with a haunting effect, and his challenge was to figure out how to play it on the ukulele without losing the percussive sound of the koto.

For the last five of his 11 pieces he was joined by Jason Wildhoff on electric bass, and the two instruments actually blended surprisingly well – at least in part because, as Shirabukuro explained in one of his interview segments (which were more frequent than usual – they occurred between every song, which normally would drive me up the wall but this time Shirabukuro’s act was so off-beat and unique I was grateful for the running commentary from him on what he was doing and why), the range of the electric bass begins just where the range of the ukulele ends. The last two pieces on the program were “Orange World” and “Kwiko,” in the latter of which I suspected Shirabukuro was once again using tape-loops and delay, and some of his playing was absolutely spectacular and reminiscent of flamenco guitar. All in all it was a fascinating program and a welcome return to Live at the Belly Up after they had to stop producing new shows and do reruns instead because of COVID-19 restrictions.