Jake Shimabukuro goes ‘where all the songwriters are’ to create latest album

Sometimes the simplest plan works out best. That’s what happened with Jake Shimabukuro’s latest album, “Nashville Sessions.”

“I was looking for inspiration to write some new songs, some new material, and Nashville is where all the songwriters are. A lot of my team is based there,” he said in a phone call from Japan, where he was on tour.

Shimabukuro went to Nashville, Tenn., rented a recording studio and spent six days working with his friend, Nolan Verner, a professional bassist, and drummer Evan Hutchings, a friend of Verner’s also based in Nashville.

Shimabukuro and Verner will play tunes from the new album at a release party today at The Republik.

“All we did was write music,” Shimabukuro said of those six days in Nashville. “As we were writing music, we’d come up with ideas, and we’d record them. We’d just start to jam off the tune. And that’s how this album came about. We weren’t even trying to record a record.”

The resulting album debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz Albums Chart, Shimabukuro’s first debut on a jazz chart. It’s getting rave reviews that show appreciation for Shimabukuro’s efforts to take the ukulele to heights never seen before, with comparisons to Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, John Coltrane, even Serena Williams and her impact on tennis.

All of the tunes, save one, were based on fresh ideas, with Shimabukuro drawing on his role models like Hendrix, Beck, Carlos Santana, Peter Moon and Troy Fernandez for inspiration. The exception, “Tritone,” is based on a “rock, funk” section of the ukulele concerto composed for Shimabukuro by former University of Hawaii composition professor Byron Yasui. “That whole experience was so inspiring,” Shimabukuro said. “I don’t get to play with orchestras very much, and I didn’t want that experience to go away.”

The spontaneous nature of the album is reflected in the titles of the tunes, which at first blush seem to have a didactic, instructional aim. “Tritone” is the name of an important harmonic structure in music; “Hemiola Blues,” the opening tune on the CD, refers to a rhythmic figure that changes the pulse of a piece without changing the speed; “6/8” is the time signature often used in a graceful dance.

“The reason some of those titles are such obvious nods to what the song is is because we were writing the tunes so quickly and recording them,” said Shimabukuro, who plays on three ukulele and adds electronic effects on several tunes. “When you record a song, you have to save the file before you can go on to another song. So, for example, we recorded a song called ‘6/8.’ And after we recorded it, the engineer asked us, ‘What do you guys want to call it?’ We didn’t have a title yet, so we just looked at each other and said ‘Well, let’s call it 6/8 because it’s in the time signature of 6/8.’ That way, when we talked about it, we’d know what we were talking about.”

Other tunes got similarly descriptive titles, like “Motown,” “Celtic Tune,” “Kilauea,” which was inspired by Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption.”

“They were just going to be temporary titles until we could later think about the tune and come up with other titles,” Shimabukuro said. “But the thing was, we got so used to hearing those titles that when we would try to put other titles to them, we couldn’t remember what song it was.

“I think it just added to the honesty and sincerity of the project.”

Nearing age 40, Shimabukuro has reached celebrity status. His recent tour to Japan took him to Iwaki, the town portrayed in the 2006 Japanese film, “Hula Girls.” Shimabukuro did the soundtrack for the film, which won several awards in Japan, and he performed the theme song during the visit

Locally, his work was heard in the Kumu Kahua Theatre production, “UchinaAloha,” a play by “pidgin guerrilla” Lee Tonouchi that uses music as a vehicle to explore the generation gap. Shimabukuro wrote a piece for the “sanlele,” a hybrid sanshin and ukulele. Shimabukuro treasured the request.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Lee’s work,” he said. “Even the letter he wrote me, I was kind of cracking up because he uses his pidgin. I called him up and I was like ‘Man, I’d be so honored to do that!”