The magic of the ukulele

The fourth annual Melbourne Ukulele Festival (affectionately called MUF) is in less than a week. Since this is such a fantastic festival, and my little band the Urban Ukes are playing there, I thought it timely to blog about ukuleles and how they make me rather happy.

Heres the cute poster I made for the event:

Me and the Uke

I picked up the ukulele a few years ago after I got quite sick and needed a positive bed-friendly distraction. My first ukulele was a lovely warm 6 stringed tenor Lanikai, and it's still my favourite. It led to a lot of songwriting and open mics, and then meeting the Melbourne Ukulele Collective (MUK) and playing at their monthly open mic night. There I met the very talented uker, John Ferguson, and we've been playing together ever since. The whole being sick/music thing triggered a bit of a strange metamorphosis in me, and I decided to stop my day job, take a break, and reconfigure my compass in a more permanently creative direction. I have never really looked back. I took a year to study music at NMIT (and even blogged about it here), where I met Tom Jacka, who jumped on board with the double bass. Urban Ukes is now a fully rounded little musical outfit and awesome fun. We do lovely little gigs, mostly around Melbourne, and functions too. If you want to keep up with our news, we have a facebook page!

Why ukulele is the bomb

The ukulele is a pretty special little instrument. Its portable, cheap, easy to learn, and doesn't require any freakish finger stretches to do nice chords. These advantages might partly explain the fanatical plague that has swept the globe in the past few years: replacing the recorder as the class instrument in primary schools, ukulele collectives and festivals popping up everywhere, dominating YouTube channels, inspiring an entire album by Eddie Vedder.

Interestingly, it's not the first time people have gone mad for the ukulele - there was a bit of a craze in the 1920's jazz scene. But mass production and spreading of the word through the web has made this one entirely epic. Its interesting that it comes at a time when vintage, and DIY and all those nostalgic things have most definitely come back into the mainstream.

Even if the boom is just a fleeting fashion thing, it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that it's made music more accessible and less intimidating, so more people are making and sharing it (not just listening) and that is just splendid! I am also quite stoked that kids will be playing an instrument in school that they can sing along to. Recorder always felt so restrained. Except maybe for this guy.

You should play too!

If you feel like jumping on the friendly ukulele wagon, a good place to start is the ukulele hunt website and of course if you're in or around Melbourne, new people are always welcome to come along to the MUK beginners and open mic nights.

Newstead Live 2013 - On the fringe of beautiful chaos

The flags are finally up and flying, adorning the long main streets of our pretty little town. Over the next 24 hours, music lovers will roll in from far and wide, setting up cosy camp under whatever shade they can muster to fend off the dry summer heat. 

From the verandah, the sounds are of a town putting on the final touches while the visitors assemble their temporary homes. The crunching of gravel under tyres and thumping of car doors, the aluminium clanking of tent poles accompanied by melodic camping chatter, the booming ‘test one, two’ over the PA, guys yelling to one another about equipment, the hammering of pegs. There’s a distinct festival buzz in the air.

A handful of tents are eagerly pinned along the wide rim of the football oval. Others, mostly performers, are clustered together in neighbourly rows in the horse paddocks by the lane. A few visitors seeking solitude might already have ventured further afield, across the banks of the barely trickling Loddon River, and pitched under the whispering gums of the racecourse.

Rent-a-loos and garbage bins magically materialize - tucked discreetly among the magnificent elm trees that line the nature strip. The arrival of food vans is announced by an urgent and vocal hunt for power outlets.

Over the last seven years, the locals have grown to love this time of year, when the vibrant central Victorian township truly comes to life. As Australia Day weekend swings around, the Newstead Live music festival explodes with a colourful crew of wordsmiths, singers, artists, dancers and players, and the result is captivating.

As it gets into full swing, poetry readings lull us awake each morning from the Troubadour stage - a spatter of slow enthusiastic claps assuring us that a few early risers have made it. The mysterious jangling of Morris dancers (mum’s favourite cultural spectacle) tickles the air down the main street, drawing you in like a siren’s call. There is colour everywhere – banners, capes, top hats, flags, signs pointing this way and that. I spot three oak trees proudly dressed in colourful crochet. The craft bombers have been at their stealthy nightworks again.

Market stalls fill the primary school grounds in a wide circle, offering authentic Thai food, face-painting, lovely vintage cakes and jams by the equally lovely and vintage ladies of the historical society, the sausage sizzle, lucky dip, and the notoriously contentious meat raffle. A kid dressed in complete pirate costume hurls past me, swinging her full sized plastic sword and ‘aaarhging’ enthusiastically. I wonder whether I’ll spot any evidence that cow poo lotto – the fundraising genius of farming towns – made it this year?

As temperatures soar, the adoreably entrepreneurial kids from the blue weatherboard house set up shop. With wide gappy grins, a wobbly fold-out table and cardboard signs reading ‘HoMemADe LEmOnaED oNly 50c’, they’re sold out by midday. Dogs bark at the violins as they chase circles around one another. Kids chase the dogs. Parents keep one watchful eye on the kids as they flip through the program.

Rival impromptu bands materialise on opposite street corners of the pub and the café. Musicians perch on hay bales wrapped in dusty twine, or tattered instrument cases. Clutching a ukulele, I ask if anyone knows what the tune is. “C…F…G” a double bass player mouths widely at me, while the guy on the bright yellow plastic trombone (a ‘p-bone’ he later clarifies) gives me an encouraging eyebrow nudge to join in. The sound and tempo morphs along with the mood of the day and late into the night, as a parade of harps, guitars, harmonicas, fiddles and accordions join the fray.

After three solid days of performances and workshops at each of the festival's eight venues, everyone is exhausted. The festival might be small but it packs a lot of punch. Having never committed to a genre, each year is sufficiently different from the last to leave you wondering, and there are always surprises. It can also be a bit hit-and-miss, but it's alwaysgreat to see local and fledgling acts on the program too.

The sun beats down on us as we wedge our things into the boot, wave goodbye to the parents, and kick up a cloud of dust in their driveway on the way out. Settling into the journey, I smile at the irony of our need to return to the city for a rest. By the looks on everyone’s happy but weary faces on the way out of town, the festival has worked its magic. I imagine that after all the tents are packed away, trucks are loaded and flags rolled up, little Newstead will happily return to its normal slumber, until next year. 

My top 3 picks for 2013:

1. Half an hour of the intensely poetic music of young Werribee lad Jack Gramski (‘like Bob Dylan, but he can sing’), who I predict will be cramming venues as his intense but charming steam-punk brand of folk develops. Oh and here's a video I took of 'The Jack Gramski theme song'.

2. A blues guitar workshop in my mum’s art studio by humble master Nick Charles who quashed the reputation of the capo as a musicians tool of shame and demystified what he called the ‘black forest’ of the upper fretboard, making the jump from ukulele to guitar seem not so scary after all.

3. Stumbling on the incredibly versatile, melodic and personal tunes and tales of Tassie girl Monique Brumby, who is a total charm.

Finders keepers

This weekend, Docklands shed 4 played host to the creative jungle of the Finders Keepers Market.

Despite awkward pedestrian access from the city centre out to this corrugated tin monstrosity, I ended up making friends with some lovely creative fanatics from Ringwood along the way. So, we navigated together, which essentially involved following an edgy looking girl wearing red velvet pants, and arrived safely.

And boy, was it worth the walk!

Lovingly assembled junk jewellery cried out to me from their mounts on old singer sewing machines, tea boxes and tree branches. Owls, clocks, foxes, telephones and rabbits in particular, were out in force. Crafters gazed out from their stalls onto a mass of people, sporting their felt hats, recycled record pendants, hand knitted scarves, spruking notebooks covered in old lounge upholstery, zines made from recycled newspaper, cutlery earrings. So much handmade genius! It was as if you were wandering about inside the stomach of a big fat Etsy monster that had vacuum swallowed all of Melbourne's top crafty people.

Some of my favourites included the vintagey fabric fashionings of okt-ober dee, Betty Jo's cute and quirky lino-cut jewellry, and the stationery lover's equivalent to Colombian cocaine in Bespoke letterpress boutique. I also loved the knitted wares of the stall pictured below, but I lost their little card! I hope I can find it.

As a paperholic, a highlight for me was how the clever lads and lasses of the Paper Convention Collective (right) managed to transpose this giant grey hollow with a beautiful rainbow fountain of paper pyramids strung above the stage and scattered throughout the market. Many many hours of cups of tea and paper cuts, no doubt!

And finally, just to cap off a perfect day, I was overjoyed to discover that a friend of mine had secretly lined up to play a set of his beautiful music. Lok Tan's mix of beats and tunes went down a treat. Oh I do hope this is just the beginning of many more live appearances!