Jake Shimabukuro revitalizes ukulele music

Tiny Tim infamously played the soprano ukulele and sang in a less than lovely falsetto about tiptoeing through the tulips. Tiny Tim and his falsetto singing as he played the ukulele in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to a lesser extent, Hawaiian-born Don Ho in his guest appearances on TV shows and in his ABC TV variety show (1976-1977) defined what many considered ukelele music in the United States. Jake Shimabukuro with his custom-made four-string tenor ukulele has single-handedly changed all that. Tadashi Nakamura's intimate "Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings" shows how this TED Talk virtuoso got his start and shot to fame on YouTube. The movie screens on Saturday, 4 May 2013, at the Directors Guild of America as part of the annual L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival.

This is, according to IMDb, Nakamura's first feature-length documentary. This is obviously a work of love. Nakamura also served as one of the three cinematographers (along with Jim Choi and Naalehu Anthony) and edited the film. The cinematography is good and the editing flows well, but, of course, in any documentary about a musician, it's all about the music and the man.  Nakamura gets it right with the soundtrack and the informal style of his interviews.

Shimabukuro is fifth-generation Japanese Americans (gosei) and received his first ukulele from his mother at age four. Now 36, the Honolulu-born and based Shimabukuro has ventured into jazz, blues, funk, rock, classical, bluegrass, folk and flamenco with is ukulele. Like many musicians, he got his start as a garage band. The documentary includes photos of him playing as a child and later as a trio with his friends. His group, a trio with Lopaka Colon on percussion and Jon Yamasato on guitar who called themselves Pure Heart, got popular local attention for this first album. They won awards, but Yamasato left the group and eventually after a brief stint in a newly formed group called Colon, Shimabukuro became a solo artist as well.

His YouTube page got him plenty of attention and Shimabukuro went on to perform with Jimmy Buffett and Bette Midler and score a Japanese award-winning film "Hula Girls."

The documentary touches on his childhood, growing up in a small apartment and raised by his single mother, his acquisition of a manager, his meeting and marriage as well as his rise to international fame and then focuses on his recent 2012 tour which took him to post-Tsunami Sendai, the birthplace of his manager. We see the affable Shimabukuro spreading the love of the ukulele by visiting with both the old and the young. Shimabukuro is humble and sweet. You just want to hug him and have him over for dinner. He's a regular guy who found his passion and brought the ukulele out from under the squeaky shadow of Tiny Tim and forward from the smooth but old-fashioned legacy of Don Ho (seen below on "The Brady Bunch").

  "Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings" screens on 4 May 2013 (Saturday) at 7 p.m. at the Directors Guild  of America #1, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles.

For more info, visit the film festival's website.

If you miss your change to see "Life on Four Strings" during the festival, don't despair. You can see it on PBS on 10 May 2013 (Check for local listings). You can even win a chance to meet him in person.