The Guest from Portland II
A little late, perhaps, but I would like to report on another "cross-border" ukulele meeting we had at the end of August.
Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Mike, Neal and Alex. We talked and played music together for a long time; they are the subject of the blog post "The Guest from Portland". I was delighted to receive an email in July this year saying that Mike and the others would be visiting Hungary again and would be happy to meet me.
We arranged the meeting for the end of August and started playing almost like a well-rehearsed little duo. Mike gave me a ukulele songbook called Portland Ukulele Association Songbook #2:
It is a collection of songs that presents lyrics and chords in a very practical format and is easy to navigate:
For each song, everything you need is visible on the same page: the lyrics, the chords placed between the lines, and along the side, fingering diagrams for every chord for soprano, concert and tenor ukulele, plus separate diagrams for baritone.
We played a great many songs from the book (fortunately I knew quite a few of them too). To your great disappointment, no sound recording was made of our performance (unlike last year's meeting), but we did take a couple of photos:
Mike with his ukulele
My concert ukulele on the left and Mike's koa Kala soprano on the right
Like two siblings: the grain and workmanship are very similar
Then we started strumming...
...and we kept strumming...
...now how does that F-sharp-minor-G-major-B7-half-diminished thing go again...??
...we still had not figured it out by evening ) (Did Mike actually fall asleep??)
The ukuleles and us
Mike's Kala soprano ukulele, made of koa, really did look very similar to my Lanikai and sounded very good as well. I had never come across this model in Hungary before. I liked it very much, and it went straight onto my "I want to carry one of these with me everywhere" list.
Mike's T-shirt advertises the film "Mighty Uke", which IMDb describes as follows: "Mighty Uke travels the world to discover why so many people of different nations, cultures, ages and musical tastes are turning to the ukulele to express themselves, connect with the past, and with each other." Unfortunately I have not seen the film yet, but I am very curious about it. As far as I know, the filmmakers did not visit Hungary, but perhaps if there is ever a second part, we might make it into that one .
