Photo Credit: Diane Poole
Each fall for 10 years, folksinger-educator Lil’ Rev has organized a festival in Milwaukee to honor one of the humblest of stringed instruments. This year’s Great Lakes Ukulele Gathering will bring national and local performers together with workshops and booths displaying the work of ukulele-makers from around the Midwest.
The ukulele was born in Hawaii from a 19th-century marriage of Portuguese luthiers with native materials and melodies. The 1915 World Fair held in San Francisco, the Panama-Pacific Exposition, brought the instrument to the American mainland where it soon became trendy. Since then, its pop culture presence has waned and waxed; in the ’60s, Tiny Tim endowed the instrument with camp connotations. But what interested Rev and a nucleus of ukulele advocates as far back as the ’90s was its every-person association. It’s an unpretentious instrument: relatively easy to learn but with a wide expressive scope in trained hands.
“It’s very grassroots,” Rev says of the ukulele revival and the proliferation of clubs dedicated to the instrument. “It’s an organic way of using music to bring people together.”
Although he’s adverse to assuming too much credit, Rev was among the Johnny Appleseeds spreading the good news about the ukulele through year-by-year, coast-to-coast tours of music stores, folk festivals, cultural centers and living rooms. He has penned a dozen instruction books on the instrument for Hal Leonard, the world’s largest music publisher. Some have been translated into French and Spanish.
“It’s encouraging so many people of all ages to pick up an instrument and play music—from young hipsters to seniors,” Rev says of the ukulele revival. “It’s been popping up in recordings by everyone from Taylor Swift to Train.”
This year’s Ukulele Gathering has a Hawaiian theme honoring the instrument’s origins. The afternoon concert that follows a day of classes and sessions includes performances by the Lansing, Mich., trio Ukulele Kings; the Sheboygan Hokum Boys featuring Rev, guitarist Jim Ohlschmidt and bluesman Michael Lee Ammons; and a pair of native Hawaiians, Lanialoha Lee and Steven Kanahe Espaniola. The MC, Petey Mack, is a Memphis, Tenn.-based player and tireless social-media advocate of the ukulele.
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The Great Lakes Ukulele Gathering will be held at Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co., 224 W. Bruce St., on Sunday, Oct. 13. Doors open at 9 a.m., and the concert runs 4-6 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit anodynecoffee.com.
