Monday, September 27, 2004
Santa Cruz & Hawaii: Separated at birth?
From the Santa Cruz (CA) Sentinel
When the Santa Cruz Ukulele Club met last month, 200 string-strumming, self-professed "ukulele nuts" showed up.
It’s a gathering that would seem amazing almost anywhere else on the U.S. mainland. You probably can’t find 200 ukulele players in the entire state of Minnesota, for instance.
But in Santa Cruz, the ukulele draws a crowd.
In fact, anything Hawaiian seems to attract a following here.
We’ve got hula schools and canoe clubs and the headquarters of the nation’s foremost Hawaiian slack-key guitar record label.
For the Monterey Bay is the beginning — and now part of the preservation — of the Hawaiian folk music tradition of slack-key guitar.
It started with three head of longhorn cattle, according to Houston and Ben Churchill who worked at Santa Cruz’s Dancing Cat Records, which has, for years, preserved and popularized the slack-key guitar.
Back in the late ’70s, local vintage blues guitarist Bob Brozman encouraged a then-unknown pianist named George Winston to move to Santa Cruz.
Winston, who became a million-album-seller in the 1980s, set up Dancing Cat Records in Santa Cruz as a way to document the Hawaiian tradition of slack-key guitar — a style he said was one of his influences.
"He (Winston) elevated slack-key guitar to be a legitimate form of guitar, like flamenco and jazz," said Brozman, who has produced his own albums of vintage Hawaiian music.
Read the article
Santa Cruz Sentinel
When the Santa Cruz Ukulele Club met last month, 200 string-strumming, self-professed "ukulele nuts" showed up.
It’s a gathering that would seem amazing almost anywhere else on the U.S. mainland. You probably can’t find 200 ukulele players in the entire state of Minnesota, for instance.
But in Santa Cruz, the ukulele draws a crowd.
In fact, anything Hawaiian seems to attract a following here.
We’ve got hula schools and canoe clubs and the headquarters of the nation’s foremost Hawaiian slack-key guitar record label.
For the Monterey Bay is the beginning — and now part of the preservation — of the Hawaiian folk music tradition of slack-key guitar.
It started with three head of longhorn cattle, according to Houston and Ben Churchill who worked at Santa Cruz’s Dancing Cat Records, which has, for years, preserved and popularized the slack-key guitar.
Back in the late ’70s, local vintage blues guitarist Bob Brozman encouraged a then-unknown pianist named George Winston to move to Santa Cruz.
Winston, who became a million-album-seller in the 1980s, set up Dancing Cat Records in Santa Cruz as a way to document the Hawaiian tradition of slack-key guitar — a style he said was one of his influences.
"He (Winston) elevated slack-key guitar to be a legitimate form of guitar, like flamenco and jazz," said Brozman, who has produced his own albums of vintage Hawaiian music.
Read the article
Santa Cruz Sentinel
# posted by Dave Sichak @ 9:19 AM 
