Different countries,
Different cultures
one common language... the ukulele.
As the year 2010 comes to a close, it is time for me to look back and reflect on another amazing ukulele year.
Before doing just this, let me wish you all a very happy and enriching New Year 2011.
I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank all the readers who have subscribed to Ukulele & Languages. Seeing my growing number of subscribers is a big encouragement to carry on.
As this is going to be a rather lengthy post,…
Today’s post will focus on fingerstyle or classical ukulele with beautiful playing from Herman Vandecauter, Wilfried Welti, Josh Skaja and Ken Middleton.
Check out the end of this post to find out about the latest releases of classical style ukulele ebooks.
Herman Vandecauter from Belgium performs Paisanne, a piece by Silvius Leopold Weiss and treats us with a slide show of nice ukulele pictures and cunning photo montages.
Wilfried Welti from Germany plays Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór
Coming to an acceptable level of Christmas mood has been rather difficult this year, partly because Christmas ukulele videos in languages other than English have been rather hard to find.
Santa did bring me a nice Christmas present though, with the addition of a new language to the Ukulele and Languages collection : Corsican.
With a couple of days to go before Christmas, I’d like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, filled with ukulele songs and languages.
If you’ve come here just for the Christmas videos, scroll down to the end of this post. (It’s a bad idea though because you’ll miss some really good videos).
Let’s start the World tour with non-christmas songs in various styles to suit different tastes.
Great baritone ukulele fingerpicking on this cover of Richland Woman Blues, a song by country blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt performed by Jake Loew
Aaron Keim plays the ballad of KC Jones. Casey Jones was a locomotive
On the menu of our Ukulele World Tour today is some French poetry set to Italian, some classical music from Japan, a traditional song from Serbia sung by a Portuguese ukulele player, a song by a lovely Mexican girl, a ukulele entertainer from the Czech Republic,, some ukulele improvising from Spain and finally, a cover of a French song.
Enjoy !
Georges Brassens discovered the works of French poet Antoine Pol, among which Emotions Poétiques (1918), and decided to set the poem Les Passantes to music in 1972. This in turn inspired Italian Fabrizio De André, who translated the song to Italian and included it in an album called Canzoni.
Read the French poem here.
Duccio, a ukulele player from Italy, covers the song in Italian : Le Passanti.
I am still not quite ready to get into the Christmas mood so you’ll have to wait a bit more before you see a Christmas ukulele World Tour post (and it’s not Christmas everywhere in the world anyway).
If you can’t wait, you might want to check last year’s bunch of Christmas videos here and here.
In the meantime, here are some ukulele videos from the UK, the US, France, Brazil, Germany, Korea, Denmark and the Czech Republic.
A lovely animated song by Keston Cobblers Club : Giraffe Junkie
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