Went out to 57th & 7th today (CARNEGIE HALL) and saw Helen’s Carnegie Hall debut. She did really great!! Then we went to Congee Village down near Chinatown (Delancey St and Allen St) and I treated her family to a nice late-nite dinner. It was the least I could do for them, I’m so glad that they came up to support her and see her perform. (It’s been four years since they’ve seen her play!)

Howzit! I’m coming to you from NYC where ABC is being featured at the first-ever New York Ukulele Festival. Last night, we played to a packed theater - the Main Stage at the Festival and performed a set of all kinds of music. There were probably a couple hundred people at that show. Overall I think we had a really great performance. We opened up with "Spain," featuring Abe’s uke cadenza and lots of great solos. Then we did some ABC originals - "Cane Road Blues," "Bittersweet Melon Song," some standards - "Days of Wine and Roses" - and some other stuff, like Martin Denny’s "Tiki." It was the debut of my new bass, the Czech-Ease, and I think it was met to great acclaim. Everybody was asking me about it and complimenting me on it! I definitely think I made the right choice in buying it, especially when it came to carrying it on the subway, throwing it in a regular (!) cab, and bringing it in to a tiny Korean restaurant for an after-show dinner. … These are all scenarios that WOULDN’T be possible with a regular upright bass. We played our second set on the Hawaiian stage and did a bunch of local-style Hawaiian jams. Also on that set, I borrowed a BASS UKE from maker Owen Holt, and it did pretty well. A very nice-looking instrument, at the very least!

Tonight, I’m going to see Helen’s Carnegie Hall recital debut with the New York Amadeus Quartet and pianist Chiharu Sai - an all-Mozart program. Tomorrow, we go back to the Uke Festival and perform some more stuff! 

By the way, there’s something wrong with the clock on this blog. So, just subtract 4 hours from the time stated, and you’ll know when I’m posting.

Is there even a timezone 4 hours ahead of Boston? Isn’t that in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere?? 

Damn. I have NO IDEA where my ABC aloha shirt is. I don’t even know when is the last time I used it. Maybe in Florida.

It’s 2:30am here in Boston and I’m packing my stuff to go down to NYC for the NY UKE FEST. Abe flew up yesterday and is already there with Michelle. I guess I’m pretty excited, I’m looking forward to playing again with Abe and Yohei (Nakamura, our guitarist), and also to seeing some friends in the city that I haven’t seen in a long time. I am also picking up my newly-ordered CzechEase bass, which is an upright bass that’s been specially designed for traveling. I guess you can say that I’ve been growing weary of playing electric bass, even as much as I’ve been trying to get my chops up. It just doesn’t have the same feel to it (duh), and I can’t seem to feel the same about playing it. But at the same time, I loathe having to take my 19th century German bass into rowdy bars, clubs, and other compromising situations (like the Commuter Rail!!) . I’m hoping that having a bass specifically for those kinds of gigs will help to ease things a bit, and also allow me to take gigs that I’d otherwise have to turn down. Don’t worry, I’ll still be doing all my practicing and classical work on "George." I guess I need another name for this dude, hmm…

Another VERY exciting aspect of this trip is that Helen will be making her Carnegie Hall recital debut on Saturday! It’s with a quartet that she’s been working with, the NY Amadeus String Quartet. I guess they only play Mozart, but hey, if you play it well… ! I’m bringing down one of my nicer suits to wear to her performance. I want to impress her folks as well as my favorite young lady

Anyways, hope to see some of you who read this (well, all ONE of you) at my gigs this weekend. We’re playing on the 28th and 30th, but tickets are $35 (!!) and I don’t get any comps, so I understand if you can’t make it.

ALOHA!

Last night was the first time I started taking orchestra work after a looooong hiatus. I didn’t really do any orch gigs in Pittsburgh last year because I didn’t have a car, and was always out of town anyway. And only a few times my senior year at NEC did I do some sub work, because for the most part, my teacher (Todd Seeber) put a blanket restriction against gigs on all of us in his studio… the idea being, we’d have our whole lives to take gigs, so why not stay at school and practice instead.

So, yesterday I went out to sub in the Parkway Concert Orchestra, which is a chamber-sized amateur/community orchestra out in Norwood/Dedham, MA. The rep was pretty standard/consistent with what I’ve seen other groups of this type do - an easy overture (Die Fledermaus), some stylized dances (from Bartered Bride - not the Overture to that one, though!), some pops (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, April in Paris, etc.), a couple of movements of pieces with soloists (Saint-Saens’ "Introduction, Rondo & Capriccio" with violin soloist Daisy Joo & some Mozart piano concerto with I don’t know who). I’m the only bass player, but believe it or not, last night the conductor kept telling me to play softer! Wow. I didn’t think I was playing LOUDLY, just with a nice full sound.

Next week, I go to New Bedford, MA to sub with the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra as Principal Bass. And I’m taking along a friend from Todd’s studio, Charles Clements, who’s probably way better than me!!!  

"Sweet Pikake Serenade" is the closing tune on the WAITIKI album, an original that I wrote in memory of exotica’s great vibraphonist, Mr. Arthur Lyman.

I did consciously write this song with Mr. Lyman in mind; I tried to imagine myself as a keiki again, watching him play solo vibraphone at Waialae Country Club. And so as I composed, I thought to myself, "Can I imagine Mr. Lyman playing this," and by keeping that as my intention, I hoped to create something with real authenticity.

But just as important to me is creating music for my audiences to enjoy; that people who consider themselves "tikiphiles" can feel a real connectedness to the music, the tiki culture, and (as you said) that feeling of "the exotic and the mysterious." Because without the support and enthusiasm of all of them, composing and performing such music would be a moot point.

"Bwana, Bwana A" is an old Arthur Lyman tune, and quite frankly, the very first exotica recording I ever heard. It opens his album "Music Of Hawaii," which I think is a CD compilation of his earlier recordings. When I moved to Boston in 1999, my first inclination was to start a Hawaii Club at New England Conservatory, where I was going to school. (Many colleges across the nation have Hawaii Clubs that help transplanted students from Hawaii to network and get settled living on the Mainland). Because I was the only student in the entire conservatory from Hawaii, my Club’s mission was to share and promote traditional Hawaiian culture with those who’d never visited the Islands. Long story short, it worked. Our club at its peak had 458 members (more than half the school).

I was shopping at Tower Records in Boston, looking for Hawaiian music to share with my club members. I stumbled across the Lyman recording and only picked it up because it had a picture of Mr. Lyman as a young man (I’d only known him as an older fellow, since he was a friend of my grandfather’s) wearing polyester pants from the 70s! (On the album cover, Mr. Lyman is the one in the lime green pants with his arm resting on the tiki). Anyways, I popped the CD in my CD player and "Bwana" came on, and I was like "what the hell is this," so I skipped to the next track, had a similar reaction, and I kept skipping tracks until I reached the end and realized the whole album was filled with these nutty birdcalls and monkey noises and drums and stuff. Because even from all those years growing up and seeing him play, I had only heard him playing ballads and old Hawaiian melodies as a solo vibes player at a posh country club — I had no idea that he had even played with a band, let alone was responsible for the popularity of exotica, etc. I’ve been told since that when Mr. Lyman had his own group, they used to open their shows with "Bwana" - and thus it’s fitting that WAITIKI opens each of its shows with our version, and that we also use the song as the opening for our "Charred Mammal Flesh: Exotic Music for BBQ" album.

A side note: when WAITIKI performs live shows with our dancers, The Waitiki Wahine, the girls come running from either side of the stage and do fast Tahitian dancing during the drum beat in "Bwana."

Overarching Creative Approach to the Music of WAITIKI

In general, there are three things that are at the very front of my conscience as I work to prepare WAITIKI for performances, and also in the production of our album Charred Mammal Flesh.

First, the re-creation of the mystique and feeling of the "unknown" that I think is what really makes the early Denny and Lyman albums shine. From the standpoint of the composer, I think the sense of "unknown" is the result of very well-crafted music that truly incorporates elements from various traditions and forms, but takes these elements out of context; it’s the out-of-contextness that makes listeners feel that they have stumbled across something entirely different, mysterious, and unknown. In other words, that even though the music is a conglomeration of different sounds, there is enough cohesion that things don’t sound random, but also enough improvisation that the connections between these elements doesn’t sound contrived or academic.

Secondly, the notion that, when we listen to early exotica, it is as if we are viewing long-lost worlds through what I call "windows of sound." By nature, the music of exotica is programmatic. Beginning with Les Baxter’s use of song titles like "Quiet Village," Denny’s "Voodoo Love," and Kit Ebersbach’s "All Quiet Flows The Don," listeners may find themselves listening along a suggested agenda. (By contrast, jazz tunes -those without lyrics- often have titles that mean little to the musical nature of the composition, for example Lenny Tristano’s "317 E. 32nd St" or Charlie Parker’s "Anthropology"). In fact, as is the case with Charlie Parker, he would change titles for his songs frequently, and it is known that many of his compositions had multiple titles. That is not the case with the music that I write for WAITIKI — each and every song is tied to a specific story, dream, memory, or other reference that I have in my head. For this very reason, I chose to include blurbs about the tunes in the album liner notes. These blurbs are meant to help suggest scenes for those "windows of sound" that the music is filling - but NOT dictate specific/concrete visual imagery, which I leave to the imaginations of those sipping maitais and listening to the album.

And thirdly: that with all the thought that goes into my conceptualization of WAITIKI, the issue of main importance is that the AUDIENCE HAS FUN, and that listeners find themselves transported to a distant, imaginary, land — far from whatever tiki bar, concrete city, living room, etc. they are in. Which is one reason why the album has many flavors of the exotic on it: From the classic Denny ("Manila" and "Primativa") to the twisted ("Satyritar" and "Insomniac Food"), the programmatic ("March of Chief MauMau" and "Fuzzy Mammoth Breath"), to songs that I hope one day may also be considered to be standards of modern exotica ("Cave of Uldo," "Sweet Pikake Serenade," and "Dew Drop Inn . . ."), and the others (not to mention everyone’s favorite song about pandas and punctuation, "Pan-XOTIK-Da," ala the Lynne Truss book); I really hope that folks who have little or no experience with exotica can find something enjoyable. Which is also a reinforcement of my opinion that the exotica genre really does have a multiplicity of entry points, references, and subgenres.

Went to the 12th Annual BU Lu`au last night. I think it’s the 7th one that I’ve been to. They had some really great hula numbers, and their Tahitian & Poi Balls was awesome! I did the Spam Musubi eating contest, if only to eat one! My friend Kara was sitting on my table, and she did the Tahitian contest -you know, the one where they have the audience come up and try, after the club girls go- and she won!! (Of course, she one professional dancer, so *duh*…) Also sitting at my table was Kara’s Kamehameha classmate Joanna, and she outright won the Pidgin Speaking contest. The food was actually really good last night, I think BU Catering is finally getting the hang of our cuisine. They had: Chinese Chicken Salad (not bad, but def not as good as Yong Sing), Lomi Lomi Salmon (yeah!), Shoyu Chicken (mmm!), rice (actually edible this year), kalua pig (da winnah!), and haupia (double yeah!). Unfortunately no live music, at least not any to really speak here of, but there’s always next year… GOOD JOB EVERYBODY!!