Live at the Belly Up: Jake Shirabukuro (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, KPBS-TV, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Once The End of the Line was over, my husband Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up performance featuring virtuoso ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro. According to his interstital interviews, he was born in Honolulu, Hawai’i (he pronounces the state’s name “Havai’i”), his mother taught him ukulele at age 12, and he was so taken with it he decided to make the instrument his career. Since he had no singing voice, he specializes in working up an act consisting largely of familiar songs from the standard pop and rock repertoilres and adat=pting them, stunningly, as ukulele showpieces. Shimabukuro said he adopted an unusual practice strategy; in order to learn how to phrase like a singer, he would take a deep breath, play and then stop playing when he ran out of breath and had to exhale. He interspersed his program between originals, many of them with numerical titles – “Ukulele 5-0,” “1-2-3,” “6/8” – with ukulele arrangements of pop/rock standards.

His second piece on the program, after “Ukulele 5-0,” was a medley of John Lennon’s song “In My Life” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” with possibly one or two other songs thrown in the mix. Later he performed two other Beatles songs, George Harrison’s “Something” and Paul McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby,” as well as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and the traditional Japanese folk song “Sakura.” I first heard “Sakura” on the early-1960’s album Streets I Have Walked by Harry Belafonte, with a guest performer on koto,the traditional Japanese instrument on which the song is traditionally played. Later it turned up on one of the Mike Douglas Show guest appearances by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1972, in which Ono both sang and played koto on “Sakura” – thereby tying her music more closely to Japanese tradition and showing her rather screechy high notes are actually part of the music of her native land.

For the second half of the program he was joined by a friend he met in Hawa’i, electric bassist Jackson Wildhoff, and as Shirabukuro explained in his interview, adding a bass extended the range of pitches and also gave him access to low notes that aren’t available on the ukulele. The two blended beautifully and it also occurred to me that playing with just one other musician probably gave Wildhoff moire of an opportunity to shine that he’d have playing “normal” bass guitar in a rock band. On one original, “Piano Forte,” Shirabukuro attempted to simulate a two-handed piano player by using a tape loop, first recording the left-hand piano part on his ukulele and then playing that part back wh ile adding the right-hand part “live,” to stunning effect. Later on in the program Shirabukuro and Wildhoff did “Orange World” and “Kimika,” two original instrumentals that actually had names instead of numbers. The program was an unexpected and unusual treat, and judging from Shirabukuro’s long, slender figures he probably could have been an excellent guitarist or pianist – but instead he’s chosen to remain on the ukulele and he’s an amazing, first-rate musician on what’s often unfairly dismissed as a toy instrument (as were accordion and harmonica for years).