BILL TAPIA & EMBRACEABLE YOU

I met Bill Tapia for the first time at his 100th birthday party. Living to be a hundred years old gives you plenty of wow factor. People listen. Your stories get recorded by the Grammy Museum and documentaries get made about your life, which is what happened to Bill. Basically, Bill lived long enough for the rest of the world to finally wake up and take note of his eight-decade-long musical career. I’d seen him on stage a couple of times and heard stories and rumors of performances with legendary greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. So when the invitation came to attend his centennial birthday party in Orange County I said yes immediately and put in a request for the day off from work.

Girl Singer

I was seven when I first heard Glenn Miller’s recording of “Moonlight Serenade.” It was a moment of lightning bolt beauty, an epiphany in the dappled afternoon sunlight of my grandparent’s living room. The floppy plastic 45 rpm demo I’d dug out of my father’s trash can and played on a portable phonograph I’d borrowed from my cousin was a moment I never forgot. For the rest of my life I would long to be enveloped again and again in the lush sound and feeling of swing, big band, a tight sax trio and American standards born by the Jazz Age. 

Decades later, after I’d read every book and listened to every jazz recording in our small Hilo library and then moved to Los Angeles where they actually had a radio station dedicated to jazz, I discovered an Ella Fitzgerald recording of George Gershwin’s tune,  “Embraceable You.” I must have played it a million times in my car driving to and from work each day for months. It was the perfect song for me and reinforced my (still present) belief that George Gershwin and I are soulmates. I, his muse, and he my Jewish Adonis. I’m certain it was a previous lifetime of ours that inspired him to pen those teasingly racy lyrics, “Don’t be a naughty baby…come to Mama do…”  George, although not known for it, was a showman, a composer, a playwright, an entertainer.

When you’re an entertainer it’s not enough to have musical skill and talent. You can be a top notch musician but suck as an entertainer.  A good entertainer makes their audience feel included, appreciated and emotionally involved. A great entertainer does all of that and then creates a path for the audience to be inspired and to take action.  An encounter with a good entertainer is never forgotten.  An encounter with a great entertainer changes and alters your perception of life. You will never be the same or think the same after that encounter.



The Duke of Uke

What Bill did that day, on ukulele and guitar at his own hundredth birthday celebration for more than three hours, was entertain. He wove stories of love and painful memories between rich instrumental solos and poignant melodies. His extra slow rendition of “Little Grass Shack” wasn’t the jocular tune of a carefree tourist but the lament of a man reminiscing of a youthful time and place to which he could never return. 

At a hundred Bill dressed like a dapper gentleman out on the town, his red leather shoes keeping time with the present and celebrating a flaming past, like a comet. Street musician, lover, fighter, teller of tall tales, romancer, innovator, explorer and chronicler of the human spirit; at one hundred years of age Bill was alive. 

There were rumors he’d fallen in love and proposed to a woman fifty years his junior and was  heartbroken…at the age of one hundred. It was also rumored Bill tried to buy a condo and applied for a mortgage loan. With a stellar credit rating and a solid downpayment Bill was incensed by the bank’s reticence to enter into a thirty year mortgage loan with a hundred year old man.

Though he started playing ukulele on the streets of Honolulu at the age of eight, Bill didn’t record an album of his own music until he was ninety-six years old, in 2004. As fate would have it, a new ukulele boom, the third in Bill’s lifetime, was just getting started and, after almost more than eight decades as a relatively unknown musician, Bill was inducted into the Ukulele Hall of Fame and crowned, “The Duke of Uke.” 

Dozens of musicians, some of whom had traveled for many miles and hours to be at his birthday celebration, considered it an honor to play any song, just one song, on stage with Bill Tapia. I was no exception. At 45 I was at least a decade or two younger than most of the other seasoned musicians there and with relatively little stage experience when it came to singing jazz. They were all pals and I was a newbie, nervous and frightened about how badly I might screw up even though I’d already started singing with a couple of big bands and swing bands around town when they’d have a “girl singer.” 

Bill blew out every last candle on his cake and it was clear he was eager to get back to the business of music before it was time to say goodbye. I’d seen a couple of other singers get on stage so I cranked up my courage and timidly asked the emcee if I might be able to join Bill on one song; George Gershwin’s beautiful ballad, “Embraceable You.”  “Key?” he asked as he looked me over doubtfully.  “E flat,” I replied in my bravest voice.

My palms were sweaty when they called my name and I tried not to trip walking out to center stage. Bill’s eyesight wasn’t what it used to be and after giving me a serious sizing up he apologized then asked my name. I don’t remember ever giving him my name as, right then, the emcee decided to let Bill know what song and key I’d requested. I thought I saw a sparkle in his eye when he heard “Embraceable You” and he asked again what key I wanted. By this point I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole - there was no going back to the safety of the curtains once Bill started counting off the tempo. I heard him lead in with an eight bar intro on guitar. Then I closed my eyes and slipped into that slice of heaven to sing George’s ballad. Bill was the birthday boy, but I was the one that received a gift that day.



It would be years before I’d come to appreciate the richness of Bill’s innate sense of timing and the humor that put his audience at ease and on the edge of their seats at the same time. It will be years again before I can approach his mastery of a simple four-stringed instrument his Portuguese forefathers brought to Hawai’i over a century earlier. I only regret having missed the slim window of opportunity I had to record a tune with Bill before he passed in his sleep at the age of one hundred and three. 

The handful of times Bill and I met each other on stage after his hundredth birthday party he’d greet me with, “Embraceable You, E flat,” and a wry smile under his pure white moustache. I’m not sure if Bill ever really knew my name. It doesn’t matter, really. It is enough for me to know that to Bill Tapia I am “Embraceable You, E Flat.”