Opinion

Of course, no one knows for sure what the future will bring to the ukulele and the people who love to play it and listen to it. But after more than 50 years of playing (and defending!) it every day I have a few guesses I’d like to put forth.

For some reason the ukulele seems to accompany advances in communication in general. Its first craze coincided with the advent of radio and movies and it was often featured in both media in their earliest days. The second craze helped usher in the earliest days of television. Now here we are in the digital era of the wireless Internet and the globalization of fast communication — and the ukulele is in its midst, big time.

So where does it go from here?

In looking at its history up to this day, we see that the ukulele is not only gaining favor with people who did not play a musical instrument before, but it also has been “discovered” by established, successful musicians, especially guitarists, who have added it to their arsenal. And, finally, music teachers are abandoning recorders and using ukuleles instead to illustrate harmony, rhythm and melody. And to have fun.

Modern man-made materials have found their way into ukulele construction. Sure, Mario Maccaferri in the 1950s built ukuleles from

THE FUTURE OF THE UKULELETHE FUTURE OF THE UKULELE

plastics, and the Harmony company made fingerboards for ukuleles from plastic, but today’s offerings — from Ovation, Fluke and others — use stronger, pebbled-toned high tech plastics for ukulele bodies and carbon fiber for neck reinforcement.

Wood, of course, still rules, as it should. When I was looking for a new guitar 40 years or so ago, John Dopyera, the inventor of the Dobro Guitar, told me to avoid buying a guitar with a plastic finish. “They sound good today, but they will never sound any better,” he told me. “A natural finish that allows the wood to breath will sound better and better as it ages.”

I think that is a clue to what’s ahead for the ukulele.

The Internet and the ukulele are not the only things on this planet that are growing in awareness. The corruption of war-mongering governments, the desecration of the planet and its forests, seas, skies and lands and ecosystems, the corruption of voting and the selling of nations and governments to the highest bidder, the hoarding of wealth by a handful of rich ne’er-do-wells, the contamination of the world’s food supply and health care delivery systems are all having a stronger presence in the frontal lobes of people everywhere. The ukulele is in the midst of all it.

For many decades the news media has been able to spoon feed the masses with untruths and half truths without any quality control. But the digital era has people talking to one another without interference from corporate media. And, because of the ukulele’s worldwide popularity, people are making their own music and giving it away

freely in jams and parties and weddings and reunions and convalescent homes and schools.

The time is approaching when those who may not have our best interests at heart will not have the ability to push their idea of what music is at us. They will be ignored because we will be making our own music.

In my years of playing I’ve done a bit of touring and I have always been amazed at how intelligent and concerned people everywhere are about the various plagues that confront us today. That concern is strong and universal — until someone turns on the television set at which point the discussion is dropped and the conversation takes on the parameters of the talking furniture.

The ukulele may well bring an end to that usurpation of the common good. One good solar flare could knock out mass media in an afternoon. The only news will once again be the wandering minstrel, a wooden ukulele with a natural finish in his and her hands, playing on street corners sharing the news and concerns from folks they’ve just seen and heard.

The charming reentrant voice of the ukulele makes it a powerful tool one can use to put forth urgency without rancor, insight without badgering, truth without self-righteousness, beauty without pomp, justice without violence.

The present day ukulele craze is rife with allusions to peace and justice and making the world a better place. Such sentiments show up often in The Mighty Uke movie and in group’s names such Uke for Peace, Ukes for Sanity, Peace Ukes, Ukulele Underground, and the

ubiquitous slogans like “Uke can change the world”, “Play ukes, not war games”, et al. Numerous ukulele clubs devote time and money to providing ukuleles to children. A prime example is Paul Moore who teaches Israeli and Palestinian children to play ukuleles together.

Peace is in the making, and the ukulele is there. This, I believe is the primary future of the ukulele. And why not? It’s a natural extension of the native Hawaiian attitude of Aloha Spirit.

Just as in years past, when the ukulele morphed into banjo-ukes, tiples, taropatches and other derivatives, I believe that some players will migrate to the ancestors of the ukulele, namely the braguinha and the rajão which will further facilitate the world music fusion phenomenon of which the ukulele is a central part.