Posts Tagged ‘ukulele’

  1. The 2014 Season Gets Set to Begin

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    April 9, 2014 by admin

    Aloha, New York. It’s a beautiful day today, if still under 60 degrees, and tomorrow promises to be a beauty. I took out my Lanakai tenor uke yesterday, tuned it up using low-G tuning, then rounded down to F-sharp to accommodate my voice. The Lanakai is my “outside” uke, with deep, resonant tones that carry outside the confines of Bethesda Fountain, past the azalea and rose bushes, up the grassy slopes and over the lake, where boaters bob all summer. My “inside” uke is a Kamaka soprano, on which this winter I’ve been practicing some new tunes for the 2014 season.

    This will be my 8th season in the park. I started shortly after retiring from a corporate sales job. “What will you do with yourself?” well-meaning friends asked. When I answered that I’d play the ukulele in the park, they thought I was kidding. Perhaps I was, a little, but once I overcame my stage-fright, I realized that making music, especially that joyful plink-a-plink of the ukulele, was world’s more satisfying than golf, for example. Year after year I learned the craft of street musician, came to know a cadre of dedicated performers, suffered indignities at the hands of the Central Park Conservancy, and blissfully strummed out The Hukilau Song for those intrepid tourists who donned a paper lei and danced the hula beside the fountain’s splashing water, beneath the bright blue sky.

    The fun starts tomorrow, and will go on until it gets too cold. I’ll tell you all about it.

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