Bill Tapia: The uke master

The cars parked outside had California plates and Hawaii bumper stickers. Many came wearing sweaters over aloha shirts and carrying ukulele cases.

It wasn’t a memorial for ukulele master Bill Tapia. He told his closest friends he didn’t want anything like that. "No flowers, no cards, no donations to a favorite charity," the invitation read. "Just a good-fun get-together."

Tapia was born Jan. 1, 1908, in Honolulu. He mastered the ukulele as a child and played for U.S. troops stationed in Hawaii during World War I. He traveled to and from the West Coast playing on steamships and eventually became a vaudeville performer and band leader. He released his first album in 2004 when he was 96 years old. His music career got its second wind then, and he released three more albums, toured worldwide and was inducted into the Ukulele Hall of Fame.

On Jan. 13, Pat Enos held a party in Tapia’s honor at the Oasis Senior Center in Corona Del Mar, a pretty seaside town near Newport Beach, Calif. Pat, a professional musician, and wife Nancy had been Tapia’s live-in caregivers in the last years of his life. Tapia died on Dec. 2, a month shy of his 104th birthday.

"In his will, Bill actually said he wanted to have this party, including paying the musicians," Enos told the crowd. There were 225 people invited, though the head count at the door went past that before people stopped counting.

The Oasis Senior Center was a special place for Tapia. About six years ago, one of the Oasis members invited him to play with the center’s ukulele group. He became something of an artist-in-residence, and the Oasis served as his hangout, his musical home base when he wasn’t touring.

Eric Kela, originally from Keaukaha but a resident of Orange County since 1974, made Hawaiian food for the party. Kela’s wife had made the cake for Tapia’s 100th birthday party. "It was as big as this table and this high," Kela said, holding his hand over his head.

On each table, Enos left a stack of Tapia’s business cards as keepsakes for the guests. The cards said, "Teacher of all strings — ukulele, guitar, steel guitar, bass fiddle, mandolin."

Among the crowd were many of Tapia’s students. Tapia saw about 25 students for weekly lessons in his Westminster, Calif., home. The classes were supposed to be a half-hour but would often stretch beyond an hour. As much as he loved playing, he loved teaching others to play, though one had to be a dedicated and disciplined student to keep up with him.

Jean Billyou, an attorney from Laguna Beach, Calif., who used to live on Wilhelmina Rise, took private lessons from Tapia for five years.

"He taught you the melody and the harmony and would play with you, switching off parts, so that you got to know a song inside and out," Billyou said. "He was a strict teacher. You couldn’t not practice. He would know."

He was a taskmaster with professional musicians as well, frequently admonishing them to "Pick it up!" and play faster. Bobby Tomei, a 75-year-old Pearl City native who lives in Costa Mesa, Calif., loved performing with Tapia but said, "I don’t play jazz. I only play Latin and Hawaiian. Bill, he could play anything. He was so smart."

The gathering in Tapia’s honor was all music and talk-story and clean-your-plate Hawaiian food until filmmaker and writer Christian Harder screened his documentary on Tapia. Harder’s teenage son Liam studied with Tapia for five years, and Harder brought a camera in to Tapia’s house during the lessons. He got Tapia to tell stories and to share his philosophies about the music business and life ("I never let things get me down. No matter what ailment I got, I go.") Harder captured moments of the old master teaching Liam, who was 15 when the film was made. In the film, Tapia jams along with his young pupil, encouraging him to play faster while the boy looks at him with unguarded reverence.

Near the end of the film, Tapia sits on a bench outside in his yard, strumming his ukulele and quietly singing to himself the words to "Young at Heart," a song that become a kind of anthem for him in recent years. It was a stunning moment, a glimpse of the consummate showman when he wasn’t on stage.

It was the one time the forks stopped moving and the room got quiet and the loss of the man was felt. People starting dabbing at tears. Perhaps some had let themselves believe that Tapia would go on forever. He had jokingly said he was aiming for 110.

» View a clip of a film on Tapia: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuaZcZ76kwo

Lee Cataluna can be reached at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.