Ukelele buffs meet in Somerville
By Ed Symkus/ Senior Staff Writer
Thursday, March 9, 2006 Somerville Journal

Ask one or two questions about ukuleles to Craig Robertson, and you might spend the rest of the day getting the answers. Although the Somerville resident was turned on to the uke only seven years ago, he sure has done his research. And though he's been a guitarist for about 40 years, he now favors the uke over it.
    Robertson performs and hosts a host of other ukulele players in the latest edition of his ongoing Ukulele Noir at the Sky Bar on Friday night.
    "In the middle of the 19th century, a ship called the Raven's Crag landed in Hawaii, he says from his home office where he works as a graphic Web designer. "Onboard were a bunch of cabinet makers and musicians who brought a little four-stringed instrument, and the islanders were immediately enchanted. At the time the instruments were called the machete. It kind of took over there and it was adopted."
    Robertson, 58, scoffs when asked if the proper pronunciation is yookulaylee or ookulaylee, preferring the version with the "y" sound at the beginning. And he says that "uke" is fine to use.
    "That's very mainland," he says of the short form. "The ukulele players are divided into island players and mainland players. The island players are a lot more snobbish about their instrument. They consider it part of their heritage, even though they actually came over from Portugal."
    He first met up with one when a friend found an old Kamaka ukulele while Dumpster diving and brought it home.
    "It was all beat up, and missing strings," says Robertson. "And he said, 'Here, you play things like this, don't you?" He knew I was a guitarist, and it turns out that guitar chords translate very well to a ukulele.
“I put strings on it, and it was a fun instrument to play," he adds. "And for some reason, I just began playing a lot of it. I got a couple more, and a couple more."
    With a dozen or so now in his collection, Robertson calls his Stewart Le Domino model - which is black with little dominoes on it - the one that everybody notices.
    "What appealed to me about the ukulele is that it's such a proletariat instrument," he says. "During the late-'20s and early-'30s, everybody played one; it was the most popular instrument in the United States. But then the guitar came along - electric guitar was really the problem - and ukulele became kind of a novelty for a while."
    He calls Tiny Tim "pretty much of a novelty" who "played ukulele, but more in a novelty way." He says that Arthur Godfrey was "more of a player," and points out that George Harrison, who had a giant ukulele collection, wrote "Here Comes the Sun" on a ukulele.
    "Part of the Ukulele Noir thing is to get away from the novelty aspect of the instrument," he says. "My own songs are mostly pretty dark." But all kinds of ukulele-based music will be played at Ukulele Noir. It started about a year and a half ago, when Robertson was hosting open mike nights at the Sky Bar.
    "I was playing ukulele, and other ukulele players started coming down," he recalls. "And I decided to do an all-ukulele night. I called it Ukulele Noir, because I wanted it to be in a nightclub setting, with grown-ups and grown-up tunes. And it sort of picked up.
    "It's always like a cabaret atmosphere," he adds. "No act goes longer than 20 minutes. There are solo acts, intermixed with duos, trios, and even bands, but generally not with a full drum set. We have everything from '20s tunes to rock 'n' roll to a lot of original music."
    Robertson will, as usual, be playing and hosting, and promises that while he enjoys those dark songs about dark subjects, he's just as likely to play some goofy material.
    "At Noir, I always try to do something different," he says. "I like playing my own stuff, but I also like doing interesting covers. So I might do a Tom Waits tune, or I might do 'Little Red Corvette'."
   

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