Anything You Can Do

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? An email arrived this week, telling about the ukulele "big band" arrangements from James Hill. Perfect timing. We've got a good handle on our regular set list now, so we are ready to try something new.

A video of James Hill's "Big Band" class at the Portland Uke Fest was posted on YouTube last year and we thought it was such fun, but beyond our abilities. Five parts? No way. But this year we are ready.

One free arrangement is available to try. So we tackled it yesterday at practice. And we were pleasantly surprised that we actually could do it! Some of the Yesterukes do not read music. And others who do read music play piano but don't know where the notes are located on the ukulele fret board. So by penciling in fret numbers and using a little color coding of strings, we made this work for our group. We'll need a little polish before we play it for an audience, but think it will be ready in a couple of weeks.

Keeping it new, keeping it fresh is how we continue to have fun and gradually expand our level of playing. The rest of the phrase from Anything You Can Do, is "...I can do better." We certainly don't think we did it better than James Hill's class---but we DID it. And that's enough for us.

Anything You Can Do, by Irving Berlin, from Annie Get Your Gun, 1946

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