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Now I've always thought of the ukulele as a bit of a joke instrument played by comedians and children, but our next guest has completely changed my mind. The Hawaiian-Japanese ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro shot to international fame when his cover of the George Harrison's song While My Guitar Gently Weeps went viral on YouTube, getting 14 million hits. Yet just ten years before, he dropped out of school and in the darker moments of his life, he says the instrument saved him. He's now acclaimed for playing jazz, funk, rock and even classical music on the ukulele and is about to release his new album Travels. Jake brought his instrument to the Outlook studio and I asked him how he first got interested in playing it.
Well, I was born and raised in Hawaii and I was basically surrounded by the instrument. You know, the modern ukulele was pretty much invented there, you know, it was the Portuguese immigrants who brought over the braguinha, and they learned how to play it. My mom played it. All my aunts and uncles played. You know, so I naturally picked it up at a very young age.
Did your mom sit you down and show you how to do it?
Oh yeah. She sat me down and taught me three chords. So the first three chords I learned were these three chords. And I just fell in love with it. I started out playing a lot of traditional Hawaiian music but later on, you know, especially if I were to play a song and a lot of times if I just played the chords, you had no idea what song I was playing. So I had to learn to play melody. |
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发表于 2016-11-17 18:51:55