T
The Bloomington
Ukulele Club ~by Laura Gleason
photo by Cindy Steele
he Bloomington Ukulele Club’s musical lineup was eclectic on a recent Sunday; they played “Cecilia” by Simon and Garfunkel, then the 1920s favorite “Baby Face” followed by “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, a 2002 hit by the Flaming Lips. Mysteriously, it all worked— both the chestnuts and the recent songs were buoyed by the bouncy chords of the instruments.
Ukers present one spring Sunday afternoon: Standing left to right–Susan Sandberg, Linju Lin, Mark Saunders, Reina Wong, Carol Tai. Sitting–Kevin MacDowell, Sarah Kaiser, Ellen Campbell, Stephanie Hartono, Kate Charles.
“It’s amazing how the uke will work with any song. That’s what makes it fun,” said Ellen Campbell, co-founder of the club. Campbell received her instrument as a gift several years ago, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2010 that she took a class to master it. In class she met Reina Wong, who, like her, had not touched a ukulele in years. “I lived in Hawaii for a while and I went to a Catholic school, and one of the instruments they decided to use was the ukulele. It’s not very expensive, it’s easy to teach and easy for a lot of people to learn at once. In
12 INto ART • July–Sept. 2012
fourth grade we were all required to get ukuleles,” she said. The two women and their classmate Linju Lin enjoyed playing together so much that they decided to form a club. Today, the Bloomington Ukulele Club meets twice a month at the library, and anyone with an instrument and knowledge of a few chords is welcome to participate. Fortunately, the basics can be picked up fairly quickly. “Unlike the violin, you don’t need to know a lot to sound decent,” Wong said. Club meetings are essentially sing-and-play-along sessions. Group
members bring in sheet music, or they look up songs online and project them on the wall. Then they try out the chords and sing the song through a few times, tinkering with it when it sounds off. After a halting version of “Mister Sandman,” club member Susan Sandberg laughed and said, “That was rough!” so they moved on to “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Sandberg was recruited by Campbell, who knows her through their work on a city committee. “I already played guitar and although
Continued on 14