The Return of the
Jumping Fleas!

~Ian Lendler
Sunday, November 25, 2007

It is, admittedly, a long way from Hawaii. Twenty-four hundred miles, to
be exact. But if you were to sail from the postcard beaches of Honolulu
to Berkeley, you wouldn't know they shared the same ocean. Landing on
the shores of Berkeley, you would encounter a dispiriting swath of
highways and warehouses dumped there by a society that no longer needs
the sea.

Among those warehouses, however, you would find one
building filled with evidence that the two cities are, in fact,
long-distance next-door neighbors. In West Berkeley's Sawtooth
Building, a faint smell of Hawaii lingers in the air. This is the
workshop of Mike DaSilva, one of America's premier ukulele-makers, and
the sawdust on his workshop floor is koa wood, imported from Oahu. In
the rafters, his pet parakeet flaps and squawks above the 30 or 40
people sitting below, chatting amiably and tuning their ukuleles. Or
trying to.

This is the sixth meeting of the
Berkeley Ukulele Club, and many members began playing only a few weeks
ago, so tuning is a skill not yet fully mastered. Some of them picked
up the ukulele on a whim. Some are here because a friend convinced them
it would be fun. Few are aware that by playing the ukulele, they're
joining a tradition that has deep roots in the place-memory of the bay,
harking back to a time when the ocean's presence defined this shipping
port that was known as the Gateway to Hawaii.

Thousands of Knights
Templar from across the country were convening on San Francisco for
their Triennial Conclave. On Aug. 16, they joined the city's elite in
the court of the Palace Hotel, packing in as tightly as decorum would
allow to witness what no one in America had ever heard before -
Hawaiian music.

"Thunders of applause" greeted the performers,
wrote The San Francisco Chronicle, declaring them "prime favorites with
the populace." The music the Royal Hawaiian Band introduced to the
mainland that night proved as infectious as the band members.

Mike DaSilva
learned that when he started the Berkeley club. "I expected 20 people
because I personally knew 20 people, but then 50 people showed up."

Fortunately,
he has plenty of space to accommodate them. In 2004, as a hobby,
DaSilva made his first ukulele, in his garage. Now he turns out 10 a
month in his 2,500-square-foot workshop. He may expand even further
soon, because we are living in the midst of a global ukulele revival
(you may now laugh amongst yourselves).

In Britain, there's a nationwide shortage
of the instrument. American luthiers claim they can't keep up with
demand, even if they double production. San Francisco's Museum of Craft
and Folk Art recently mounted a retrospective on the instrument. And
it's now possible to go on a ukulele bender around the Bay Area and
attend a class/jam session every day of the week. In fact, this article
itself will only further fan the flames of ukulele fever until,
presumably, gangs of uke-wielding youths will roam the streets
terrorizing old ladies with their crazed, up-tempo rhythms.

At this point, it would be reasonable to ask, "What the hell is going on?"

"It's so unassuming" is
DaSilva's explanation. "People can buy one as a joke, but they soon
find out how expressive it is. If you were to design something for a
fad, then the ukulele would be it."

Hawaiians were the first to
be swept away by the ukulele's charms. The Hawaiian word "ukulele"
means either "jumping flea" (to describe the player's hand movements)
or "the gift that came" because the instrument came to Hawaii in 1879
with sugarcane workers from the Portuguese island of Madeira, off the
coast of Morocco. Within a week, the Hawaiian Gazette observed those
workers "delighting the people with nightly street concerts ...
[performing on] a cross between a guitar and banjo." Within a decade,
this unassuming guitar-banjo had ingrained itself into Hawaiian culture.

After
the U.S. government overthrew the Hawaiian royalty in 1893, the white
businessmen who profited from the revolution decided to drum up tourism
by marketing Hawaii's "exotic" culture to mainland Americans.

Uni on her Uke!

The
most successful effort was the 1912 Broadway play "Bird of Paradise."
Financed by Claus Spreckels, a German sugar baron who ruled Hawaii by
fiat from his offices in San Francisco, the play was a smash hit. The
plot detailed the romantic troubles between a white man and a beautiful
Hawaiian who (1) is an island princess (2) and lives on an island with
an angry volcano that (3) can be appeased only by the sacrifice of ...
an island princess (It sounds trite now, but "Bird of Paradise" was
responsible for popularizing the idea of female volcano sacrifice).

While not a terribly accurate portrayal of Hawaiian culture or volcanic geology, the play did showcase
what the New York Times described as "the weirdly sensuous music of the
island people." Subsequent touring productions spread the
ukulele-and-steel-guitar sound across America. In the South, the steel
guitar was quickly converted into a staple instrument of bluegrass and
country music.

"Bird of Paradise" was a national awakening of
consciousness about Hawaiian music," explains John King, a historian,
musician and author of "The Classical Ukulele." "And what the PPIE did
was consolidate that awareness."

"The PPIE" is how devotees
refer to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. And it has
many devotees. Just nine years after the great earthquake and fire
effectively leveled San Francisco, the city mounted what is considered
the greatest of all world's fairs. Among the marvels was a 435-foot
Tower of Jewels covered with 100,000 gems, the Romanesque Palace of
Fine Arts and a telephone line that ran clear across the country so New
Yorkers could hear the Pacific Ocean. Against this spectacular
backdrop, the humble ukulele became one of the expo's most unexpected
hits.

The idyllic surroundings for the expo's Hawaiian Quintet
had something to do with it. At the tropical Hawaiian Gardens exhibit,
"the canaries have heard the music so long that at certain places they
take up the tune and sing an accompaniment," wrote Laura Ingalls
Wilder, author of "Little House on the Prairie," who was one of the
PPIE's 17 million visitors.

The band's signature song, "On the
Beach at Waikiki," became a national hit. And over the expo's six
months, the Hawaiian concession stand sold thousands of ukuleles to
tourists who returned to their hometowns with these exotic instruments
and visions of island paradise in their heads.

"The PPIE was the watershed event when the ukulele came onto the radar screen of the nation," says King.

This
craze was quickly exploited by a different set of islanders - the
hitmakers of Manhattan's Tin Pan Alley. These songwriters wrote
hapa-haole (half-white) songs, which combined English lyrics with
faux-Hawaiian words. Throughout the 1910s, the ukulele rode a wave of
pure silliness with Lewis Carroll-esque songs like "Oh, How She Could
Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo," "The Honolulu Hickie Boola Boo" and the
slightly off-message "Stingo Stungo."

Hawaiian music
eventually gave way to hot jazz in the 1920s, but the ukulele's giddy
sound transferred seamlessly. It became a staple on college campuses
and in speakeasy jazz bands. As with Hawaii, the ukulele had firmly
ingrained itself into American culture.

On a sleepy street tucked
into the base of San Bruno Mountain in South San Francisco, a steady
stream of cars pull up to an unassuming house. This is the home of
Hiram Bell, 53, and judging by the dazed grins on the people who leave,
you might imagine that Bell was the purveyor of a particularly fine,
high-grade pharmaceutical. Instead, you would find him and his visitors
engaged in a far more legal activity - ukulele lessons.

Bell
wasn't always this busy. When he moved to San Francisco from Oahu in
1979, he hoped to find work teaching piano and guitar. Unfortunately,
students were scarce so instead he found himself working on the
shipping floor of a chocolate factory.

He never considered
teaching the ukulele. When Bell first arrived stateside, he encountered
something that he never knew existed. "There's a stigmatism about it on
the mainland that doesn't exist in Hawaii. People here just remember
Tiny Tim playing 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips.' "

So how did the ukulele go from being the life of the party to a wallflower curiosity?

In
the 1950s, the ukulele's popularity was sky-high because of that marvel
of the modern age - plastic. Promoted by Arthur Godfrey, a
ukulele-strumming TV personality, 9 million plastic ukuleles were sold
as toys to the fledgling Baby Boom generation.

But when those
kids became teenagers, and their minds turned to teenage pursuits like
getting high, getting laid and most of all, getting on their parents'
nerves. Guitar-driven rock 'n' roll offered all those possibilities.
The ukulele - with its image as an instrument for kids, Hawaiian
tourists and Jazz Age flapping - did not. Closets and garages across
America became ukulele burial grounds.

In the ensuing decades,
the ukulele became less an instrument than a quirky affectation, played
only by birthday clowns and the kid in college who took too much LSD
and started dressing like a 1920s grifter. But the news of the
ukulele's demise never reached Hawaii.

"Where I grew up," says Bell, "a ukulele was sitting in the corner of everyone's house, and everyone would be strumming it."

Bell's
hometown, Oahu's Palolo Valley, is to the ukulele what the Dominican
Republic is to baseball. He grew up alongside musicians who were
pushing the instrument in new directions, like jazz, reggae and rock.
One of those musicians was Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, the zaftig Bob Marley
of Hawaii, better known as Iz.

As much as anything, it was
Iz's haunting 1993 version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" that sparked
the current revival. Disseminated by movies, commercials and wedding
DJs, the song's memorable arrangement - just voice and ukulele -
entered popular consciousness in the late 1990s. "That song did a lot
to help the ukulele world," acknowledges Bell.

As the song's
popularity increased, Bell added the ukulele to the list of instruments
he taught. Suddenly, he found more students. Lots more. And Bell became
the happiest Hawaiian ever to walk away from a chocolate factory.

With a few exceptions, the
members of the Berkeley Ukulele Club have more salt than pepper in
their hair. The same holds true for all the uke clubs around the bay as
Baby Boomers nearing retirement search for ways to enjoy their
new-found free time. But why the ukulele? Why not the zither or guitar?

"It's only got four strings," explains club member Doug
Beckstein, 57. A decade ago, Doug was diagnosed with colon cancer. The
chemotherapy was successful, but it left him with what he calls "chemo
brain," a loss of motor-skill memory that can result from irradiation.

"I
wanted to play an instrument to help exercise my brain," says Doug.
"I'd played guitar for 20 years, but after the chemo, I couldn't
remember any of it. I had to start all over."

Like most ukulele
converts, Doug did the math: Four strings are easier to learn than six.
A quick learning curve has always been the ukulele's greatest
attraction. That's why Boomers are returning to their closets and
unearthing those ukuleles from their youth. And they're discovering the
instrument has therapeutic powers.

"It physically makes you feel better when you play it," says Doug. "When you pick up a ukulele, people start laughing."

Many
members of the club (none of whom seem overtly New Age-y) attest to the
instrument's physical effect: "It's relaxing," "It makes me happy," "It
feels like being in a spa."

Another club member, Carol
Siegal, 48, is evidence of the ukulele's ability to inspire addictively
good feelings. Though she's been playing only a year, Carol is already
a card-carrying uke fanatic. Literally. Her business card announces her
as "Uke Gal." Her license plate reads: "Huulaa." And her explanation of
the ukulele's charm is simple: "It's social. You play the piano alone,
but when you play the ukulele, everyone starts singing and laughing."

There's
that word again. In the literature of the ukulele - sales brochures and
instruction books - the words "laughter" and "smile" are a compulsory
element. The temptation would be to write this off as cheap
salesmanship, but frankly, it's true.

Miss Tippy Canoe

Over
the course of a boisterous evening with the ukulele club, you get the
distinct impression that the ukulele serves the same purpose as alcohol
in a karaoke bar, a license to lose inhibitions. People sing with
abandon. They jump onstage to teach the group new riffs. Bouts of
rhythmic hand-clapping erupt. At one point, a bongo drum is involved.
And a roomful of respectable middle-aged men and women is transformed
into a kindergarten finger-painting class - messy, anarchic and fun.

If the ukulele's revival were
just another pit stop on the Baby Boomers' march toward death, like
arthroscopic knee surgery or driving an RV to Arizona, you'd be
forgiven for thinking that they'll take its popularity to the grave
with them. But they aren't the only ones rummaging through America's
closets.

"My ex-boyfriend was a flea marketeer," says Tippy
Canoe, 36, lead singer/uke player for Tippy Canoe and the Paddlemen.
"He started bringing ukuleles home."

Before she became a uke
chanteuse named after President William Henry Harrison's campaign
slogan, Michele Kappel, 36, was a drummer in the garage-pop band Kirby
Grips. That was six years ago. Nowadays, Tippy has trouble trying to
describe her current music: "Americana," "retro-pop" and "ukulele
doo-wop country '20s jazz pop" are a few of her suggestions.

Part
of the problem is that Tippy isn't playing traditional ukulele music.
She's never even been to one of the Hawaiian amateur clubs. "I know
there's a strong Hawaiian scene in the bay, but I don't really know
much about it."

She hasn't had to. San Francisco has developed
an alternative ukulele scene where people play '40s burlesque, '50s
country, '60s pop, any decade, every style. Because among the young,
single and drinking demographic, the ukulele has become downright hip.

Overseas,
the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, which covers the Sex Pistols
and Nirvana, has hit the pop charts. And YouTube has made a phenomenon
out of Hawaii's Van Halen, Jake Shimabukuro, 31, whose version of the
Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" has been viewed more than 2
million times.

TO READ FULL ARTICLE VISIT:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/25/CMEQT4UH0.DTL&type=printable

This article appeared on page P - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle