Blink and you've missed it
This was the fastest passing week of the whole trip so far. I feel it’s only just been Sunday and I’m back at the Writing Group at Ala Moana to write about my week again. Although puzzled why that is, I have a few theories, but I’ll get to them later.
So, after you’ve heard from me last time, I met UkuLenny for a chat and a hangout in the evening. Many of you have met him at the concert with Abe Lagrimas and Cynthia Lin last year in Frankfurt or at GNUF. Hopefully he’ll make it over to Europe again soon.
The next day I interviewed two wonderful players, one after the other. Mika Kane and Rio Saito both represent a younger generation of Hawaiian players (although Rio has lived in Japan most his live). Mika is the first person to graduate from UH Manoa as a music major with ukulele and I first met him 2019 when he had just done so. He’s a wonderful player and has really come to develop his own style over the past years. Rio and I meet for the first time in Italy in 2018 when he was just 16 years old. He recently graduated as a Jazz major with ukulele from a University in Japan. It was a real joy to have lengthy chats with both of them.
And I really have to thank Rio for his patience: we had had a date for 9am at Hale Manoa, but the room I had booked was open to one side (wonderful view…). However, apparently on Monday morning all of Oahu’s lawnmowers meet up at UH to make the loudest noise you can imagine. We ended up doing the interview at Lincoln Hall, in between lawnmower sessions. We were done by noon, with what usually takes about 1.5 hrs.
As I’ve been gathering data with these interviews the time has come to really get into the cataloguing stage of the project. This entails editing videos of single techniques or strums, usually at normal speed and then various slow-mo speeds, from two perspectives. After that I analyze the motion and put all the attributes of the technique together with its name, artist and UCN (unique catalogue number) into an Excel sheet. This has been growing substantially over the past week and that’s probably one of the reasons why this week feels like it has gone in a flash. The work is repetitive but extremely fascinating (to me anyways), so I get really drawn in.
Another reason for the swift passing of this week might have been that Thursday was Thanksgiving. Already my second Thanksgiving in the US (the first one was 2001 while I went to University in the States), I was invited by new friends that live in a part of Honolulu that has even a more stunning few of Diamond Head than Hale Manoa. Unfortunately, there were no pictures taken, as it was a private affair and a good chance to just hang out with a bunch of different people. Good food and good conversation was had all around.
After Thanksgiving there’s Black Friday and I went to the mall to see Bryan Tolentino and later Brittni Paiva perform. It was totally worth it, but, man, the crowds were just insane. As Black Friday is the main shopping day of the year it seems like literally everybody’s out and about. I wanted to see Benny Chong, Byron Yasui and Rio Saito at a different venue about 5 mins away by car in the later afternoon, but couldn’t find parking for over half an hour. Crazy! I managed to catch a few minutes of the very last piece they played in their set, which I enjoyed tremendously. And it was nice to chat a bit afterwards.
And that’s pretty much it! I’ve spent the whole day working on the catalogue yesterday and will continue to do so. In terms of interviews, I’m almost done and am hoping to get through the entire catalogue while I’m here and hopefully write about it too. However, there are only two weeks left and I start feeling my departure approaching already. Until then, I’ll keep you posted, though!
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