Uke Beauty

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday April 22, 2005

SAMANTHA SELINGER-MORRIS

UKULELE LAND #2

Where Harp Irish Pub, 900 Princes Highway, Tempe

When Tonight at 8

How much $10

More information

9559 6300

Just a midget guitar? Wash your mouth out, say Ukulele Land's musos. By SAMANTHA SELINGER-MORRIS.

It isn't just the dinky, plinky sound of the ukulele that has made it the metaphorical punching bag for musicians across the decades.

Dubbed the "midget guitar" by those who scorn it, the tiny Hawaiian instrument has long been guilty of crime by association. Sure, Marilyn Monroe might have played one in Some Like It Hot, but that brief moment of sexiness has long been overshadowed by the ukulele's pairing with socially awkward strummers from Pat Boone to Tiny Tim.

All that is set to change, says Byron Bay ukulele player Azo Bell.

"It's not like the banjo or the trombone, which a lot of people hate," he says. "More and more people are getting interested in it."

Bell is among 10 acts that will perform at tonight's Ukulele Land #2 festival. Billed as "the biggest annual ukulele event in Australia", the festival is arguably the only Oz event celebrating the maligned four-stringed instrument.

Nevertheless, it's now in its second year: the first Ukulele Land was part of last year's Live Bait festival. It has attracted ukulele musicians from across Australia, including an 81-year-old ukulele veteran, Charles Altmann.

Bell attributes the slow increase in the instrument's popularity to the resurgence of acoustic music.

"There's been a bit of a reaction against the [sound] overproduction that happened in the '80s and '90s, and people are using acoustic instruments more," he says.

Rose Turtle Ertler, the festival's organiser and a player in her own right, says the instrument's appeal lies in its "underdog" status.

"It's not a big show-off instrument like the guitar," she says. "It doesn't have that arrogance. I really like that."

Known as the "electrik ukulele lady" because of her penchant for plugging her instrument into effects pedals, the 35-year-old Melburnian pushes the idea that the ukulele, far from having a limited repertoire of sounds, can be played to suit numerous music genres.

"I can make it sound like a crunchy electric guitar, or you can put lots of delay on it, make it sound like an angelic harp, or pitch it really high to make it sound really scary," she says.

Bell is equally excited.

"Recently I've been exploring the nasty sounds of the ukulele," he says. "It's a big palette. You can get a lot of close voicings on the ukulele that you can't get on guitar.

"You can play semi-tones [to make it sound like] a fist going down on the piano."

It all sounds a bit ultra-serious, but then Ertler tells me the name of her second solo CD, which reassures me that she does, indeed, take her goal of rocking the ukulele's image with a mountain of salt. The CD's name? Tryhard Trailer Trash.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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