Preview The Mighty Uke: The Amazing Comeback of a Musical Underdog
Tom Goodhand chats to Canadian film maker Tony Coleman about his ukulele documentary and the virtuoso uke player who's helping to take the film on tour across the UK
Preview: The Mighty Uke: The Amazing Comeback of a Musical Underdog
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"These events, my goodness. It’s crazy, it’s fantastic," says filmmaker Tony Coleman, the man behind The Mighty Uke. "For the last year and a half we’ve been touring North America, sometimes we get a hundred people out with their ukuleles, sometimes we get 500. In San Francisco we had over 600 people with ukulele. I tell people it is both profound and absurd."
We speak to Tony Coleman as he calls into the UK. He’s taking his film, The Mighty Uke across mainland Europe before returning to do 12 showings in the UK over two weeks in November and December.
"What happened originally," he explains, "was we were just going to make a short film about the revival of the ukulele, but once we got started, we got interest from Canadian broadcaster, but they wanted a feature-length doc, so off we went. I was kind of scared at the beginning, because, y’know, are people going to be able to handle an hour and a half of ukulele music, but to our surprise and delight it doesn’t feel that way at all."
The film charts the rise in popularity of the diminutive musical instrument (if you’ve not seen one before, think a small guitar but with four strings) and took Coleman and his fellow film maker Margaret Meagher from Canada around the world.
So what inspired Coleman to make this film? " I used to tour as a musician a lot when I was younger, and my big sister had a ukulele and I always thought it was the corniest thing around, I’d make fun of her," he says. "She passed away about 15 years ago and I inherited that ukulele and that changed a lot for me. Once I started playing it, I realised, ‘oh hang on a sec this isn’t about being cool this is about being me’. That was really neat, y’know. And also at the same time that it was about being me, it was goofy, it was irreverent, it didn’t take itself seriously. So there were all kind of great things about it. It’s like the anti-poser instrument, although now it’s become so popular that it might be actually becoming a posery instrument."
And to what does Coleman credit its rise in popularity? "I think the biggest thing might be guitar fatigue. I think people were finding that when they picked up a guitar they had to be Jimi Hendrix, or they had to be Jimmy Page. But you pick up a uke and you only have to be you. That’s one. But then the other big one, and I think this is the one that will keep the ukulele around now for a while, it’s as an educational tool. I’m surprised that it didn’t happen earlier, but it didn’t happen in Canada in the 70s where the ukulele became the instrument of first music instruction, but it makes all kinds of sense. I mean, the saxophone, you could buy a hundred ukuleles for the price of a saxophone, and it’s better to learn on. Also, it’s not as tortuous for families and teachers.
"And the reason I think it’s become so popular here is because you have a long tradition here of sitting around the piano in the pub singing songs and I think that disappeared for a while, but I think the uke is a way to bring that back. When we were here filming three years ago we went to a pub in Taunton, where this group meets every week and it felt like Vera Lynn around the piano in 1947, y’know. So I think that that’s a big reason why it’s caught on here."
Their ukulele world tour took them to a few surprising places. But the two most unusual places it took them to were Tel Aviv and Tokyo. "In this suburb of Tel Aviv there’s a group called the Ukuleles For Peace," says Coleman. "It’s a group of Arab and Jewish school children who have a band and they play ukuleles and they sing songs and I was kind of surprised that they were singing old timey songs from the 20s, neither side having any history or knowledge of what they were doing. It allowed them to be on common ground, that was neat. There’s a fella, a British ex-pat who moved to Israel, his name is Paul Moore and he’s a junk musician and a jazz player. He figured that either he would have to leave Israel or do something about the intifada, and being a ukulele player and slightly wacky, he thought ‘hey the ukulele could bring peace to the Middle East’. So that was a really neat experience.
"And then in Japan, we were in a place called Yoyogi park which is in the centre of Tokyo, and every Sunday there is a group called ukulele afternoon and there’s thousands of them. They’ve been meeting for 20 years in Tokyo central park, they played ‘Hava Nagila’ for us on their ukuleles. A group of Japanese people playing ‘Hava Nagila’. It was, again, both profound and absurd."
The film comes to the Hyde Park Picture House on 8th December and, like the rest of the UK tour will be more than just a film screening. After the film is shown, virtuoso ukulele player James Hill will perform a set of uke songs, before leading the audience in a ukulele strum-along.
"James grew up in a community where the ukulele was the first instrument of music instruction and he’s become an amazing virtuoso and we just hit it off," says Coleman. "You have to have a bit of warped sense of humour to want to make a documentary about the ukulele and you have to have a bit of a warped personality to actually be a virtuoso. So we hit it off.
"He can play anything from playing Bach on the ukulele to playing ‘Down By The Riverside’ on the ukulele and everything inbetween. The really neat thing about him is that he really is a virtuoso and at the top of his form, but he’s completely comfortable jamming with a whole bunch of people who’ve never even picked up the instrument before. You don’t get Pavarotti leading a choir of school kids – you know what I mean?
"So James Hill performs his set, then says, ‘ok who’s brought their ukes? Come on out.’ Then what we do is we project the chords and the lyrics on the big screen of the theatre. They’re very easy songs, too we’ll probably do ‘When The Saints Come Marching In’, ‘Down By The Riverside’ – these are the songs that are almost in our DNA. We don’t know where we learned them, but we know them. And it’s a pretty neat thing. I did not grow up in a religious household, but for me it’s kind of like going to church but without the religion. The Church of the Ukulele!"
The Mighty Uke comes to the Hyde Park Picture House on 8th December. Audience members are encouraged to bring their own ukulele
Posted on Wednesday 16th November 2011
Hyde Park Picture House
Brudenell Road, Hyde Park, Leeds, LS6 1JD
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