Jake Shimabukuro's Turbent Currents Beneath Calm Seas; Echoes February CD of the Month
By John Diliberto 2/1/2026
In these troubled and turbulent times, I thought it might be right for a CD of the Month that will both soothe your senses, and take your mind into new spaces. Ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro’s Calm Seas does just that. Shimabukuro is the Jimi Hendrix and Tommy Emmanuel of the ukulele. He changed the way the instrument is expected to sound just like Hendrix changed the way an electric guitar is supposed to be played. And sometimes, he attains Hendrixian levels of electricity. As evidenced by his playing on his previous album, Blues Experience with Mick Fleetwood, his playing can be fast and pyrotechnical. That’s not what you hear on Calm Seas. This is an album of meditations and contemplations. But it’s also an album of sonic experimentation, drawing inspiration from across the minimalist spectrum.
There are only two sounds on the album: ukulele and nature recordings, in particular, the Hakalau Rainforest. Recorded on a stereo microphone, the nature recordings are kept relatively pristine. The ukelele however, goes through a lot of mutations.
The album starts somewhat deceptively, with a suite of pure solo ukulele pieces that are as wistful as a Hawaiian breeze at sunset. But even here, on tracks like “Makapu’u Sunrise,” Shimabukuro starts hinting that this will be something different, with a droning pedal tone and a second ukelele answering in response to Shimabukuro’s plaintive call.
There are several gorgeous tracks like this on the album, most notably “After the Rain,” which opens with what sounds like ukulele sonar pings. It’s purely acoustic, but the ukulele is dipped in echoes that create a space that is both intimate and expansive; a journey into sound as the plucks of Shimabukuro’s ukulele twang the universe.
“Waterfall” is one of the tracks that comes closest to a conventional song. It has a reflective, Beatlesque ballad quality to it, like “Yesterday” or “Norwegian Wood.” It’s a song that is begging for a lyric.
Other tracks on Calm Seas take on a more wide-ranging, experimental tone even though all the sounds, except for the nature recordings, originate on ukulele. Shimabukuro has never been a stranger to signal processing and his ukulele goes from electric guitar sounds to synthesizers on several tracks.
“Calm Seas (with Nature)” is a shimmering rustle of tremolo strings on the ukulele that sounds like a string orchestra in pizzicato. It builds in a minimalist style that could’ve been the province of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca, but without their dissonance. There are a few versions of this song spread out on the physical and digital version of the album. This one has ocean waves as the nature sound, with Shimabukuro processing his ukulele into whale cries over the tremolo strings. I do prefer the non-nature version, which has harmonic resonances that get lost under the waves in the nature version.
Shimabukuro expands that sound on tracks like “Beneath the Waves” and “The Passing Storm (With Nature).” The latter track is a deeply meditative piece with a ukulele sounding like a reverbed electric guitar that reminded me of Daniel Fichelscher of the 70s German band, Popol Vuh. It also has the eastern modal sound that Popol Vuh preferred. Shimabukuro taps that for a deeply woven piece accompanied by the sound of chirping birds. Although it begins peacefully enough, tension is drawn taught as more layered ukuleles emerge. The storm hasn’t passed — it’s surging. He’s orchestrating these arrangements and all of this layering in one take with live looping.
In a way, Calm Seas is two albums: one with shorter, solo acoustic ukulele pieces like “Let’s Go Home” and “The Stars Are Out,” and the other with longer, more impressionistic and experimental works such as “Sounds of Hakalau.” That track is a nearly 11-minute excursion that sits on one chord with shimmering tremolo ukulele and spare plucks that, although they sound like ukulele, remind me of pieces composed on Brian Eno’s Bloom app in their random, but tonal, wanderings.
While the physical CD for Calm Seas has 13 tracks, the digital version has 25, adding in variations both with and without nature, and shorter takes on some of the nine-to-twelve minute tracks.
Jake Shimabukuro is a complicated artist whose tastes are wide-ranging. This album could be wafting from the speakers of a yoga studio, or scaling the walls of a downtown New York concert, circa 1980. The long tracks are ambient in the Brian Eno definition of that term, while the shorter ukulele solos could’ve sat on a Windham Hill album. Like the best ambient and new age albums, Calm Seas is deceptively deep; placid on the surface, but rewarding deep listening as Jake Shimabukuro takes you on this exploratory journey.
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