Jake Shimabukuro - Walking Down Rainhill

I recently saw Jake Shimabukuro on Conan O'Brien. Conan was going on about how amazing his next act was, when it cut to Jake starting to play a familiar tune on his little ukulele. Turned out to be a cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." And it was a great one at that, which is hard to say about 99% of Beatles covers. It was intense and captivating, frenetic and graceful. He was rocking out. So I decided to pick up the album that Jake had made with that cover on it, called Walking Down Rainhill.

I didn't really know what to expect because I didn't know who Jake Shimabukuro was. He's a Japanese-American from Hawaii. He got his start in Pure Heart, a Hawaiian trio that won multiple awards at the Hawaiian Grammys. I also expected most, if not all, of the album to be just Jake and his ukulele, playing intense music that you wouldn't believe was coming out of that tiny instrument. I was half right.

Some of the music is insane, but the majority of it is radio friendly music accompanied by Jake's incredible ukulele skills. The album suffers a bit from that slick Hawaiian style of production, causing it to sound a bit too mainstream and perhaps like something that your grandmother would listen to. I don't think it's a great representation of Shimabukuro's style or songwriting skills, but it does prove how amazing he is at the ukulele. The songs on Walking Down Rainhill cover most genres -- it has adult contemporary music (Heartbreak, Walking Down Rainhill, Blue Roses Falling), a seventies style song (Grandma's Groove), a 50's diner kinda song (6 In The Morning), a surf-rock song (Toastman's Wave), an amazing jazz song (Wes On Four), even a Honolulu Marathon Theme (Rainbow). And then there's the Beatles cover itself. While My Guitar Gently Weeps is certainly the centerpiece of the album, but it's nowhere near as good as when he played it on Conan. It's more restrained, and worst of all, it's not just him on the uke. About halfway in, other instruments find their way into the mix, which is exactly what I didn't want to hear. While this was a mite disappointing, the cover itself is still more than satisfactory and definitely fun to listen to.

While I was only half correct in my expectations, the unexpected half isn't actually that bad. There's no song on the album that I would go out of my way to not listen to; they're all rather relaxing and pleasant. A few of them are great, even. However, as I stated before, I don't really think this is an accurate representation of the full spectrum of Jake Shimabukuro. He plays some bafflingly beautiful and inventive lines and melodies, but it's the underlying instrumentation that got to me. I want to hear a composition that is 100% Shimabukuro; I want an album of straight-up, ONLY ukulele, ONLY Shimabukuro penned songs. Backing music or not, Jake Shimabukuro is obviously an extremely adept ukulele player an musician in general. His influences have honed in him a fantastic musical sensibility, one that pops its head up rather often on this album.

5/7