Ukulele Tonya

Note: This is a lengthy account to give you an idea what it’s like to have attended this festival. If you want to skip the words and head directly to the 37 photos in the photo gallery album, click here.  If you want to see the captions for each pix, click “detail” in the bottom right corner of the album’s page; also, enlarge the thumbnails by double clicking on them.

Sweet sounds of the ukulele, wonderful workshop opportunities, island food and drinks (the kinds with the little umbrellas and wedges of pineapple perched on the edge) served in a tropical setting—and the friendliest group of ukulele people you could imagine. All of that defined my time at last week’s Windy City Uke Fest (WCUF), held in DesPlains, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

While organizers Terry Pensel (Nui Ukkulele Club) and George Klinglehofer (Windy City Islanders) hadn’t staged a festival prior to this inaugural year for WCUF, you wouldn’t have guessed it from the final results of this ukulele festival in the heart of the Midwest. Top-name musicians and enthusiastic ukulele players showed up in force from all over the Midwest, Canada, Washington D.C, Hawaii and even Australia (Read on …)

Note: This is a lengthy account to give you an idea what it’s like to attend a three-day festival. If you want to skip the words and head directly to the photo gallery, click here.  If you want to see the captions for each pix, click “detail” in the bottom right corner of the album’s page; also, enlarge the thumbnails by double clicking on them.

Portland Uke Fest 2008

My “barre chording” thumb is sore, I’m still catching up on sleep and I have so many new ukulele concepts to practice that my fingers won’t get any rest for at least eight months. But would I have missed the Portland Uke Fest held last week at Reed College? Nope, not for all the Aquila Nylguts in the world.

While I’ve been to more than a dozen ukulele festivals in the past four years, I’d never taken the plane north to Oregon to attend what’s known as the “favorite” festival by many ukulele workshop teachers, performers and students. This year I made reservations in early spring (they have limited space—sign up by late April if you want to be assured of a slot), snagged a couple Southwest flights and got myself prepped for three-plus solid days of ukulele learning, listening, playing and schmoozing. Sigh…I should have gotten more sleep ahead of time. (Read on …)

Note: This is long; it’s written for those folks who wonder what it’s really like to attend an ukulele festival and like to know the details. If you just want the photos, go here.

Pre-Festival:
Sunny weather, warm aloha and hot ukulele playing were on this weekend’s agenda as I traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area for the Northern California Ukulele Festival. Held in Hayward, this festival is the 15th annual for this group, making it the longest-running mainland ukulele event. While the day-long festival is on Sunday, there were some great pre-festival activities slated the day before the event so I headed out from Paradise early on Saturday morning. While I love my merlot special edition Miata (and the UKALADY license plates would have been especially appropriate for the weekend’s activities), it feels like an awfully tiny car to be slipping in and out of lanes on high-speed Bay Area freeways—so I toodled down in the ever-trusty 1986 Mazda 626; not a lot of style to the car but it got a whopping 41 miles per gallon—and at almost $4 gallon, that was more than appreciated. It’s about 3-1/2 hours to Berkeley, so I loaded up on a wealth of Hawaiian and ukulele CDs, aimed the steering wheel south and ventured out of the Sierra foothills and toward the Big City. (Read on …)