McCabe's Holiday Show Video

Many of the Westside Ukulele Ensemblers are also taking a class with Steven Rose at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California. This is the end-of-year holiday concert. December 16, 2012.

Sweet Hollywaiians at Boulevard Music in Culver City

Here on the Westside we are lucky to have two very ukulele-friendly music shops/venues, McCabe's in Santa Monica and Boulevard Music in Culver City. In addition to selling ukuleles, both shops offer instruction and often feature ukulele performances.

Friday night, the Sweet Hollywaiians played at Boulevard Music. All the way from Osaka, Japan, the Hollywaiians are a string band of multi-instrumentalists playing both covers and originals of 1920s-1940s era music. The show was fantastic, as I expected it would be - I had seen them perform once before at a ukulele festival in Hawaii and knew it would be a great show. If you missed Friday's show, you still have a chance to catch them tonight at Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo.

I first learned of the Hollywaiians several years ago, when my uke instructor told me about the Japanese-issue Ukulele Mozart CD and accompanying book of tab. While the book is long out of print (I am lucky enough to have a photocopy!), the songs can be downloaded from Amazon at the above link. The songs are performed by Kenji Kondo and Tomotaka Matsui, and both are amazing players. I got curious and Googled both, and it turned out both are also in bands. Mr. Matsui's band is the Hollywaiians.

Westside Ukes Media Takeover

As a member of the Westside Ukulele Ensemble, I have been exposed to a lot of great ukulele music. As a film editor, one of the small perks is being able to choose music to be used in the projects that I work on. I recently had the opportunity to do so for the ABC TV series Castle, which airs Monday nights at 10PM.  The song is "Longing to Belong," by Eddie Vedder. This lovely ukulele song will be featured in the episode that will air on 10/15/2012. You can hear the song here.

One of our members is also a cellist, and she was kind enough to bring her cello to the last rehearsal, and accompanied us on "Eleanor Rigby."  It was sublime. Now, I am hoping to see if I can get her to accompany me on "Longing to Belong," which also features a cello!

That's one great thing about being part of theis group of people, most of whom are in the Venice, Santa Monica, or Mar Vista area. We get to find all kinds of connections with each other, through the ukulele!