Winter Showcase 2016 – Round up

Our 3rd Year Junior students have made us and their families & friends super-proud this year. In the jam packed hall at The Village Club we played our first classical/blugrassy ukulele orchestra piece: 'Ode to Joy' and explored a number of great covers by favourite artists and iconic bands that have influenced our generation as teachers and parents and have captured the imagination of our juniors too. From The Rolling Stones to David Bowie, John Lennon and The Beatles to The Eagles and Cat Stevens and even some good old festive Slade to finish off! Cameron, Sylvie and Noah were phenomenally good. They all worked with enthusiasm and commitment to achieve the wonderful results at their showcase last Sunday. This meant they practised every day throughout the term to learn chord progressions, strumming patterns and songs structures, solos, lyrics, voice warm ups and forward projection, arpeggios and finger-picking parts. Once the songs were memorised to a confident standard individually, we shared and practised altogether as group, talked about mindfulness to combat stage nerves, built in additional stage skills, where on top of playing the ukulele and singing, we came up with fun moves and even a bit of comedy acting.

We also had the joy and the honour to have many new young aspiring ukulele players in the audience who were totally absorbed by the performances and hopefully will be inspired to continue to follow in their steps. A heartfelt thanks goes to all the parents for supporting their children in their music journey with us, to Emily Byron, Principal of NLPAC, to my mega-talented collaborators, teachers Luca Comencini and Alexander Karl Gold, and to the irreplaceable Anne McMahon, event coordinator for the show. Now we are so thrilled we can't wait for the next one! Please don't forget to visit our Facebook page and like it, and for those who were not able to come on Sunday click on this link to watch the videos on the You Tube Channel.