REVIEW: Piano Animals (duet) by Heleen Verleur

This 31-page book of four hand piano music is sheer FUN with a capital F. The composer Heleen Verleur knows just what pianists love playing: music that is easy to read, sounds hard to play, but is so much fun that you don’t want to stop until it ends.

Group piano class in Zoom

Introducing my group piano class online: Group Piano Class in Zoom. The first series of seven weekly one-hour class started in June 2021. The second (continuation of the first) started in October 2021 at alternating weeks, until end of December (seven sessions). The third series of 16 consecutive weeks started at the beginning of 2022. The fourth series will start in mid-May 2022 for 8 consecutive weeks. These sessions are highly interactive and custom tailored to the participants, who are encouraged to submit video recordings for feedback.

Chifuru Noda (3-29-1957 to 12-26-2018)

Chief Noda, as he was affectionately called, would be 64 years old on 29th March 2021. When he brought his Ubass for the Beatles’ Carpool Karaoke jam session on Thursday 12th July 2018, Chifuru Noda certainly wouldn’t have known that he’d not live to see his 64th, 63rd, or 62nd birthday. None of us knew any better at the time.

Join us to celebrate the music he loved so much. See the list of songs from Chief Noda’s Birthday Party Open Mic in Zoom.

When I’m 64 with Chief Noda

While Chief Noda was in the hospice in Milton, members of the Ukulele Union of Boston sang “Hey Chief” in Boston on the Thursday before Christmas (December 2018)

Short courses for guitar and ukulele

Music education is one of the most expensive investments in time and resource. It requires a serious commitment to reap the benefits of individual music lessons taken over a long period of time (measured in years  not months or weeks). Is there another way to acquire musical skills and knowledge?

Natural voice network

Reclaim your voice. Anyone can sing. You don’t need to read music notation. Listen. You can make beautiful music with your voice.

These are the messages of the “natural voice network,” something I read in Caroline Bithell’s well-cited 2014 book “A Different Voice, A Different Song: Reclaiming Community through the Natural Voice and World Song.”

I had to experience it for myself. I googled “natural voice network” and found a website with details of upcoming events. There was a free rehearsal at St Margaret’s House in Bethnal Green. It’s a part of East London I knew well, for I had lived and worked near Victoria Park some thirty years ago.

Guitar meets piano; guitar orchestra & ukulele club

When musicians meet, they want to play together. They exchange recordings of themselves. Playing together is a way to establish whether they are compatible, whether they want to collaborate, whether there is a future together.

Such was the case when I met a classical guitarist more than seventeen years ago. He copied a recording of his guitar quartet on CD as a takeaway gift.

The next time we met, I brought the only piano guitar piece I owned — an arrangement of Vivaldi’s guitar concerto for guitar and piano. Eager to find more pieces to play, I visited music bookshops in my travel as magazine editor. He arranged music for us to play. Before long, we had collected and arranged enough sheet music to give a concert. Soon composers started writing for our piano guitar duo.

The subtitle of our first concert at the Makawao Union Church in Maui, in December 2007, was “four centuries of music for piano and guitar” —- which comprised of arrangements, original compositions, and commissions. We released the live recording of the concert as a CD in January 2011.

Nearly two decades later, the guitarist is conductor of a guitar orchestra while I have founded my own ukulele group. How do we combine the two? Is it possible?

Ukulele song sheets: prolong & add variety to a song

How do you make a song last longer and sound more interesting? I call it the three-minute rule. A song needs to last at least three minutes for it to register in the listener’s ears. That’s my rule, after testing my audiences in a variety of settings. A short piece simply doesn’t register. How to you prolong and add variety to a song? This happens often in our ukulele jam sessions, in which we prepare for our gigs. Here are some ideas for all songs, whether you accompany with ukulele, guitar, or piano.

Obladi Oblada chords

At well past our 9:30 pm ending time, we wanted to end our Beatles Carpool Karaoke on a high note rather than a depressing “Hey Jude.”

How about “Obladi Oblada” ? The song in C major is a tad too high for my voice. The original is in Bb major. No wonder.

Hey Jude on ukulele

As usual in our jam sessions, we get bolder and bolder the later it gets. By 9 pm, the ten chords in “Hey Jude” don’t look formidable anymore. How can we sing “Let It Be” and exclude “Hey Jude” the last number in the Beatles Carpool Karaoke? Besides, Paul McCarney sings it in the same key as the song sheet from San Jose Ukulele Club.

Corden & McCartney sing Beatles songs in Liverpool

What a great idea to travel down memory lane singing songs you wrote in the different locations of your home town! That’s exactly what Paul McCartney did in Liverpool recently. The 24-minute Youtube video moved me to tears as “Let It Be” did for James Corden, host of “The Late, Late Show” in London.