We do folk songs, Tin Pan Alley, Beatles, jazz standards, whatever! It's a lot of fun, and of course I learn a lot myself from the whole process. We do a lot of the material frrom the Ukulele in the Classroom series but I also mix in other material that seems right for the group. This fall I'll have two groups – Tuesday nights is an ongoing group who have a bit of experience under their belts now, and Saturday morning is a beginning group who might need more of the basics before they get fed into the Tuesday night group. This year I started the Parkdale Ukulele Group, a weekly class I run out of my house, and I've had a really fun time doing that. UY!: Can you describe the kind of ukulele teaching you do? The age range and the type of material you cover?ĮG: Almost all my students are adults and I do most of my teaching in community settings – either out of my house, where I now have a lovely teaching space, or in some kind of community centre or school. There's something so infectious about being in a room with that many people all strumming away together, and Corktown attracts people across a huge range of ages and musical interests, which makes for a pretty dynamic community.
It's a pretty amazing gathering – every Wednesday night there are anywhere from 40 to 90 people in the back room of the Dominion Pub. When David Newland and Steve McNie started the Corktown Ukulele Jamhere in Toronto I started attending, and that's probably when I really got seriously hooked. He proceeded to haul out his whole collection until all ten or twelve of us at this dinner party were strumming away! I think that was probably the beginning of it – I got myself a soprano uke and kept playing around with it a little bit at a time.
Later I was at a dinner party at his house and for some reason we got onto the subject of the ukulele.
When I was not driving the van I started fooling around with it. Ken is a master at many different stringed instruments, including the ukulele, and he brought a ukulele to play in the passenger's seat. Eve Goldberg: A number of years ago I was doing an album release tour and my friend Ken Whiteley was travelling with me.