Jake Shimabukuro

Over the past two decades, Jake Shimabukuro has proved that there isn’t a style of music that he can’t play. While versatility for any musician is impressive, what’s remarkable about Shimabukuro’s transcendent skills is how he explores his seemingly limitless vocabulary – whether it’s jazz, rock, blues, bluegrass, folk or even classical – on perhaps the unlikeliest of instruments: the ‘ukulele. Responding to the urgent calls of his fervent imagination, the Hawai’i-born virtuoso has taken the ‘ukulele to points previously thought impossible, and in the process he’s reinvented the applications for this tiny, heretofore underappreciated four-string instrument, causing many to call him “the Jimi Hendrix of the ‘ukulele.”

“Sometime during Jake Shimabukuro’s stylistically diverse, 90-minute-set, my insightful, musically attuned friend, caught up in the emotion of the moment, exclaimed, “Not only is he an amazing musician, he’s a magician.” The words perfectly captured the ukulele master’s essence and the gentle yet powerful impact he made on his audience as he embarked on a thrilling range of genre-hopping adventures and transformed his instrument into a flamenco guitar, electric guitar and even the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument.” —Music Connection