This post will probably require 15 minutes of your time.
If you treat it right it could take several months.
The link is to the startling voice and a startling song
The performing artist is Silvia Perez Cruz who startled
the 90s international world with numerous awards.
It trucks my heart!
cucurrucucu paloma
cucurrukukulele is the name of this post. No kidding. It is about a lot of things
but all those things it is about focus on your finding your groove; your finding
your way into thinking about kukulele. And that will be kukulele.
Two ‘k’s, two ‘u’s, two ‘l’s, two ‘e’s.
This post is an effort to explicate the development process in reaching for a
demonstration in thinking that would be with me now and to the end of my ability to
think whether that end be death or dementia.
This is a long post and this post is likely to be a concatenation of a number of
posts that will likely comprise a book on the subject. At this moment I really do
not know because I do not think in a way that enables me to know now what WILL BE.
I do not know how you have been inculcated. That is I do not know how you
think.That is, I don’t know what you have developed from all you have been taught
from birth up. I do not know how YOU think. But, if you are really thinking about
an instrument then whether this is the first post you read here or the last I think
this post will be the one that helps you most to know you want to play an
instrument and then whether the ukulele is the instrument for you NOW or you just
want to peer into the kind of thinking that created the kukulele method.
If you keep reading, if you get nothing else from this post, I think you will enjoy
my story and I think this post will give you something to think about. So bear with
me. Invest fifteen minutes.
When I was a boy I sang constantly. My older brother and I shared a love for
singing. We grew up in Memphis which was called The Home of the Blues. We heard
Hillbilly which early on was a simple version of Swing. Hillbilly became country
Swing but then pretty soon who cared cuz we were in the rock and roll era. Rhythm
and Blues was stealing Jazz’s thunder. PoP was becoming less like its name and more
like a steady kind of music, dependable, something you could fall back on.
My brother and I were into the crooners. Our favorite was Perry Como. Even after
Elvis made Memphis famous or vice versa and rock and roll made Elvis famous or vice
versa, we sang Perry Como. OK we crooned and rocked with Elvis too. And maybe more
so after Elvis bought his mom a house which I could almost see from my school. But
frankly I am glad it was Perry Como and not Elvis Presley who recorded cucurrucucu.
In fact I think it was probably Perry Como who first recorded Cucurrucucu Paloma in
English. I loved the idea of a song sung by mourning doves. I still love birds. I
still love that song. How was I to know that 20 years later I would hear that song
again but, in Spain in its original Spanish language, and sung by the top crooner
in Spain, Julio Iglesias, whose dozens of albums were topped only in world sales by
Michael Jackson. And much later I heard Spain’s Silvia Perez Cruz’s version of
Cucurrucucu I think that song was what took her to multiple national and
international awards. BTW, I, for the most part learned Spanish from the album
notes on Julio Iglesias 33 and a third album covers.
When I started playing the ukulele I was also developing the kukulele method. Three
subjects started playing around in my head.
One was the realization of an error. I had already created a web site called PLAY
IN A DAY GUITAR UKELELE. Observe that I spelled ukulele incorrectly. But the web
site was alread registered and I couldn’t change it. As I thought about correcting
the spelling anyd creating another site I fussed about the error and cussed about
my failure and wasted effort I slipped into an old pattern of thinking not unknown
to many who came before me. How could I redeem this error by using as a stepping
stone to something better? Having finished fussing and cussing I shoved the matter
into my brain’s background oven to bake a bit, or an hour, or a while. When the
background oven finished I would hear a ding. I was then thinking about the crazy
way I approached creativity.
Two, I was thinking about cucurrucucu paloma. The palomas or mourning doves are
crazy for spending hours ‘mourning’ their sad song. They must be cucu and I
actually wrote ‘cucu’ and then wrote the english word properly. Cuckoo. Crazy. I
was singing the song and scribbling (you can learn a lot scribbling) cucu and
cuckoo. And I stopped. I had scribbled ‘kuku’. DING! Somehow I thought the word
looked and sounded better as ‘kuku’. I continued thinking as i started playing
around with the cucu song as it became more and more kuku.
Three, I heard a distinct insistent DING!!!!!! I continued playing getting warmed
up now on the uku. I was interrupted by DING DING DING DING DING. I stopped playing
and scribbled ‘kukulele’. That says it all, I thought.
kukulele 