Recently I had a great time down in La Jolla where I was hired to play for a beautiful outdoor wedding at the Estancia La Jolla Hotel & Spa. The lovely couple had wanted to tie their ceremony to the time they shared in Hawaii and was looking for a slack key guitarist to provide the right mood. For prelude music I played tunes like Moe Uhane by Sonny Chillingworth.I actually learned this one a long time ago when the transcription was printed in Acoustic Guitar magazine. I also played a couple of hymns I arranged: Amazing Grace and How Great Thou Art and I have to give credit to John Keawe for the inspiration for this. When I first saw him play live back in like, 1995 (I think), he was the featured artist for the Make Music Festival's opening night at the Honolulu Academy of Arts theatre. I went on in the beginning of the evening with my flamenco performance group Flamenco Pacifico. When I heard him play Amazing Grace I said ok that's it, I'm going home to figure this out tonight!
So back to the La Jolla wedding, I did my slack key version of What A Wonderful World for the bridesmaids and my own ki ho'alu arrangements for Richard Wagner's Bridal Chorus for the Processional and Trumpet Voluntary by Jeremiah Clark for the Recessional. I'd already had these worked out from a long time ago for my cousin' wedding back in Hawaii several years ago. All tunes were in Taropatch tuning (open G) mostly because I'm too lazy/busy to work out a lot of stuff in other keys.
The whole thing was a lot of fun, everyone dug it and everything went super smoothly. Did I mention Diana Ross was there and gave me major props?? I'm kind of kidding - Diana Ross was the name of the wedding coordinator. Oh and while I was playing ukulele at the cocktail reception, a guy came up to me and asked me if I knew Peter Moon - that was very cool!
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