One of the most memorable images of the ukulele is from Billy Wilder's 1959 film Nobody's Perfect. It's the instrument played by Marilyn Monroe. In the late 1940s, luthier Mario Maccaferri, who had made guitars for Django Reinhardt, designed plastic ukuleles, more than nine million of which were sold by 1969. In the film, Marilyn Monroe plays a white ukulele... but it's not plastic. "It's a curious case," says Salva Rey. In fact, it's a high-end mahogany martin, but painted white. "First they filmed the sequence with the natural colour of the ukulele, but since Marilyn's outfit was dark, you couldn't make out the instrument and you could only see a hole in the actress's belly, as if she'd been shot with a cannon shot. So the director of photography [Charles Lang] suggested that she be made out of plastic."
The love story for the ukulele that has changed Salva Rey's life
The Barcelona musician presents the show 'The King of the Ukulele' at the Luz de Gas venue
BarcelonaOne day he was fascinated by a shop window full of ukuleles in London, and a few years later he was having dinner with Robert De Niro at the 2024 Critic's Choice Awards gala in California. All this thanks to a humble instrument with which Salva Rey (Barcelona, 1975) has opened a lot of unexpected doors, including the possibility of doing a show called The King of the Ukulele, "somewhere between a TED Talk and Broadway with a touch of comedy", which can be seen on February 28 at the Luz de Gas hall in Barcelona (9 pm), and on March 29 at the Tinta Roja bar-theatre in Poble-sec. Salva Rey, with a long musical career linked to projects such as The Pinker Tones, Rolf&Flor and Navet, summarises in the show the 150 years of history of the ukulele in a story that incorporates elements of family biography and historical events.
Passion and rigour accompany the discourse of a musician willing to share all the secrets of the ukulele, an instrument that he claims for various reasons. For example, for its role in the origins of jazz. "The hybrid of ukulele and banjo, the banjolele, was the first stringed instrument used in jazz, before the double bass and the guitar," he says. Also for the expressive possibilities, exploited by artists of all kinds, from Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift to Paul McCartney. And, above all, for the joy of playing it. "With the ukulele, children immediately get rewarded. There are instruments, such as stringed instruments, that have a very high percentage of people who let them run. Few people go beyond the first year of violin. Among those who play the ukulele, there will surely be fewer who will become professional musicians, but they will probably be happier people: for 80 euros you can find ukuleles that sound very good. On the other hand, the guitar I started playing with was a wooden one with strings that were common around the house and it was very difficult to make it sound good."
Salva Rey is a wealth of knowledge about the ukulele, and he applies it to both shows and in popular science books and pedagogy and in the highly recommended videos he posts on YouTube. The story begins in 1879 in Hawaii, when "three carpenters from Madeira" used Hawaiian mahogany wood to build a machete, a small guitar from the family of cavaquinho and also related to the tiple and the guitarrón. "We have a photo of the ship on which the carpenters arrived. It's all documented," says Rey. The documentation multiplied following the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, "which placed Hawaii within the major trade routes," and the celebration of the San Francisco World's Fair in 1915. "In the Hawaiian pavilion, an orchestra performed every night in which the ukulele was present. time, but then it also entered the first jazz combos. The Martin guitar brand began to manufacture ukuleles, and then it arrived in Europe with the American soldiers fighting in the First World War from 1917 onwards," explains Rey, who remembers that size does matter a little. "The Martin company sold more ukuleles during the 1920s than guitars it had sold since 1835," he says. They were also manufactured in Barcelona and Valencia, by brands such as Parramon and Dulcet.
Great-grandma's ukulele
One of the unexpected doors that Rey has opened with the ukulele has to do with family: "One day my mother came home, saw a ukulele and said to me: 'Did you know that your German great-grandmother left Germany in 1929 with an instrument that I'm going to attract and can't attract me? ' to discover that you could make old and classical music with the ukulele. The infatuation is total and absolute," he says. Why did the German great-grandmother have a ukulele? "She was a woman from a rural area, a war widow. The great-grandfather had survived in the trenches of the battle of Verdun, but died six months after returning home. If in the twenties she had access to an instrument invented in Hawaii, it means that the expansion of the ukulele was bestial," he says.
Salva Rey's love for the ukulele also took a leap. In 2017, through a mutual friend, he met Alex Bornstein, one of the actresses of the series The marvelous Mrs. Maisel"The families connected immediately, we started making calçotadas, visiting the Empordà... And the following year I gave them some ukuleles," he recalls. One thing led to another, and it all led to the show. Alex Borstein: corsets & clown suits which the actress did with Salva Rey and Eric Mills, and which was nominated for the 2024 Critic's Choice Awards in the comedy special category. "Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the series, let us film the show at the Wolford Theatre, the cabaret of The marvelous Mrs. Maisel", says Salva Rey.
