The Cairns Ukulele Festival will be held in beautiful Cairns, FNQ from 25 to 28 August 2016. For the full programme, visit cairnsukulelefestival.net.
Can you talk a bit
about the prominence of the ukulele in Hawaii.
Craig: It really is amazing. Growing up in Hawaii, having
the ukulele everywhere you went, I never imagined I’d be doing this for a
living, travelling the world and visiting these amazing places because of this
tiny little instrument. So it’s amazing to see how much it’s really taken off.
Sarah, what was your
entry into playing the ukulele?
Sarah: I moved out to San Diego, CA, and some friends of
mine told me about this event that would happen at a pizza parlour – there were
forty or more uke players that would get together and play Hawaiian music. I’m
originally from Birmingham, Alabama – the opposite side of the country – and I
had never seen anything like this. So my friends take me and I am just amazed
at the feeling in the room, how happy everyone is, and the music itself
transported me to this wonderful place. I had to play the uke then and there,
so I started playing.
Craig, before you
left Hawaii to go to college, you were playing the cello before that and then
you decided to play the ukulele. Is it now your favourite instrument?
Craig: By far. It is definitely the most social instrument
I’ve ever played. And that’s actually one of the things that connected Sarah
and I when we first met doing the ukulele – she grew up playing the violin and
I grew up playing the cello. We had that and a lot of other things in common as
well.
You say it’s such a
social instrument – it does seems that people are happy hearing it and happy
playing it.
Craig: It’s funny – you walk into a uke group and everyone
wants to share the feeling they have when they play. If they’re trying to teach
people how to play songs – you don’t see a lot of guitarists being as open
about it, it’s more showing off [laughs].
Sarah: The other thing, too, that we really love seeing in
the social aspect of the uke is that it brings generations together. For
example, we were in Bend, Oregon doing a festival there and there were folks
who were grandparents bringing their grandkids to the festival, and they were
sitting and playing songs together and it gave them a really wonderful
connection too.
You met at the Cairns
Festival – Craig, I know you’ve been going for a few years but Sarah, was that
your first festival?
Sarah: Yes, it was. That was 2013.
Craig, when was your
first festival?
Craig: It was the second year, 2011, and I’ve been at every
one after that.
And did you think at
the time, Why am I going halfway around
the world for a festival? Did it seem like a strange proposition?
Craig: It was such an important part of my life in the sense
where I was kind of on the fence about pursuing music full time. And Gaby’s
invitation to the Cairns Festival that first year was the turning point. After
that festival I decided this was going to be amazing, I was going to go all out
and have that leap of faith. And after that festival I was able to travel to
all these other festivals around the world and this was the start of a lot of
things for me career wise, and it will always hold this dear place in my heart
because of it. It really is something special. The people who come out to this
one are just so incredibly hospitable, and the great thing too that the last time
the festival was on, two years ago, I actually bought the ring that I asked
Sarah to marry me. We have to go back to that jeweller, this small
hole-in-the-wall jewellery store and I’m going to make sure he knows.
And Sarah, when you
were first invited in 2013, what did you think of going so far for a festival?
Sarah: I was so excited I couldn’t think straight. The fact
that this little ukulele player would be asked to travel all the way to the
other side of the world, I just was beside myself with excitement.
One thing I’m
interested in from a technical point of view is that Cairns is tropical – the
festival will be on in our winter but it will still be warm there. Does it have
an effect on the instruments?
Craig: Luckily the instruments we’ll be bringing down will
be made in Hawaii and so they’re used to the heat and humidity. It’s usually
the really dry areas that have issues for our instruments.
That’s why you have
to constantly tune them – they’re living creatures, in a way.
Sarah: They are. They expand, they contract.
You’re on the
festival bill separately, so are you playing some separate shows?
Craig: Most of the things we’ve done the past two years are
actually together, but we’ll have more of a focus on the jazz standards that
Sarah has been known for – we call it ‘BC’, Before Craig.
[Both laugh]
Craig: We’ll be doing everything together but just a
different focus in some of the sets.
Sarah: And the great thing too is that the folks who have
seen Craig and I perform there before are really going to enjoy seeing us doing
things together, because it’s something they’ve never had a chance to see. They
didn’t get a chance to see Craig play standards with me and they’ll get to see
them this year, which will be really cool. And they’ll get to hear some of the
stuff that we have written together, more of the modern stuff we’ve been
working on. It’ll be a lot of fun.
Before I did some
research I didn’t realise that the ukulele can be used for a variety of styles
of music, like jazz. It’s obviously a very adaptable instrument.
Sarah: Very much so. I think you could play any style of
music you ever dreamed of on the uke and if you do enough hanging out on
Youtube you’ll find heavy metal and dub step on the ukulele. You can play
classical music – John King is the perfect example. You can really do anything
on it because it’s a musical instrument.
What is it, do you
think, about the ukulele that makes it so adaptable and attracts so many
different types of musicians to it?
Craig: It’s one of the things, I think, with the four
strings: it’s a lot easier to pick up and play, so you can do a lot of fun
stuff right away. When you look at some of the more intricate things it does
get harder and harder, but it has that accessibility that makes it instantly fun,
instantly useable.
Sarah: Music feels attainable with it even if you’ve never
played before.
So you’d recommend it
as a good first instrument for someone?
Sarah: Oh yeah!
Craig: There’s a reason why so many schools had been
adopting the ukulele as the primary intro to music instrument now. Compared to
guitar or recorder …[both laugh]
A lot of parents
might prefer to hear an ukulele rather than a recorder at home.
Sarah: Yes. I think that’s another reason why the uke is
catching on: the parents prefer hearing it [laughs].
As I saw in Honolulu,
there are so many beautiful ones.
Craig: And it’s so much harder to make a beautiful ukulele
than guitar because you have so much less room to work with.
Just going back to
the accessibility of the instrument: I’ve seen footage of you two playing and
it often sounds like classical guitar – so those four strings don’t really
limit the amount of sound you can get out of it.
Craig: Part of figuring out how to make those four strings
create the unique sound you want, that’s half the fun. Even if you go back to
our old videos from three years ago, four years ago, just how much we’ve
changed as musicians and artists and all kinds of styles we’ve been trying to
inject into our play now has been a lot of fun.
And it sounds like
the two of you have a great sense of enquiry, not just creativity, about your
work – that you’re constantly thinking of things you can do with the
instrument, you want to explore what’s in the instrument. It could be said that
you’ve been playing for a long time and surely you’ve done everything but it
sounds like it’s not that for you.
Sarah: Oh my gosh, I wish that I could say that I have done
everything. There’s no way.
Craig: That’s why we enjoy all of the international travel –
growing up in Hawaii, it was very kind of stuck with Hawaiian music. It was
always paired with the ukulele. Now we can go to Japan and see these kids rip
classical numbers that are incredibly complex on the ukulele and they have no
connection to and they’re not held back by associating it only with Hawaiian
music. To me, that’s been one of the coolest things, is seeing all these
different people from all over the world do so many different things on it.
Sarah: The other thing to add to that is, I love the fact
that the uke is particular. There are other instruments but I feel like the uke
is particularly special in that it can bring lots of different cultures
together. We go all over the world, even places that do not speak English, but
we can all play the same songs, we can all share the same stories, and it’s
just a wonderful, connecting little instrument. It’s awesome.
When you’ve been to
this Cairns Festival in the past, are there any other creative connections
you’ve made – players that you’ve played with again or written with.
Craig: I think almost everyone I’ve met at the Cairns
Festival I’ve collaborated with in one way or another down the road. It really
helps connect. The amount of artists that are brought over for this festival is
just incredible and we get a chance to hang out, a chance to get to know each
other and share stories and share music. It’s one of the things I have been so
incredibly grateful for because it really introduced me to all these other
international artists that have been so important in connection and just being
able to build these friendships over the years.
Sarah: Absolutely. And it is so much fun when we get to see
someone like Ryo Montgomery here in the States if he’s on tour, and we’ve
stayed in touch and known him for so long, and it’s great to be able to help
support those friends when they come over here. It is just wonderful.
I guess it’s a part
of festivals that isn’t really quantified by anyone -
those relationships that continue – but what you’ve just described highlights
why they’re so important and how incredibly powerful they are for ongoing
creativity.
Craig: The biggest example I think was I got a chance to meet
Daniel Ho on my first time in Cairns and we’ve kept in touch and now we’ve
actually been collaborating with him on getting his ukuleles into schools that
lost their music programmes. So we’ve been going in and helping teach the
teachers to teach the kids. It was from that connection in Cairns but I probably
would have met Daniel down the road but in a much different way. Things like
this have been so incredible to build upon.
You just mentioned
the music programmes going from schools – I’ve played musical instruments all my
life so I know the importance of music, but what do you both think is the
importance of music for children to learn?
Craig: Just having that huge outlet – the chance to
experience something. A lot of the ukulele players who are attending [lessons]
are people who are retired and have feared music all their lives and finally
got a chance to play from this approachable instrument, and they realise how
much they wish they had started when they were younger.
Sarah: For the kids, I think music is incredibly important
for children because it gives them an outlet – if they’re having troubles or
they’re having a wonderful day, they can sing about it, they can write about
it. It gives them another way of connecting with other kids who enjoy music. I
started playing violin when I was six and I think part of that was because it
was a classical instrument but I think it helped me with discipline. My parents
never made me practise – I always wanted to practise and I wanted to play, but
that self-discipline is something that I definitely owe to music.
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