Customer Reviews

Jumpin' Jim's Ukulele Favorites: 30 Great Uke Songs

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4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a review for "Jumpin' Jim's Ukulele Favorites." The only reason I rated it two stars rather than one is that it isn't completely useless. I recommend any of Jim Beloff's other books, but not this one. There are several reasons.

1. There are 30 songs in the book, but only nine are in standard C (GCEA) tuning. The rest are in ADF#B (which was common many decades ago) and FBbDG, which has never been common. Of those nine, two are compositions by Mr. Beloff and another is a song that isn't a standard, so actually there are only six of the thirty that anyone has heard of and which are in C tuning. Not very useful for the vast majority of ukulele players.
2. The quality is inconsistant. Chord diagrams vary from song to song (there are at least four different styles of chord digaram), as does the print quality. It looks almost as though these songs were copied from various music books and pasted into this volume. It gives the feeling of not being a quality piece of work, and one on which neither care nor much effort was spent.
3. Despite having songs in three different tunings, and the fact that only nine songs are in C tuning, the only chord chart included is for C tuning. The majority of songs are in D tuning, so why not include a chord chart for that? Well, all of Mr. Beloff's other books have the C tuning chart, so apparently Mr. Beloff felt it was easier just to paste that in and ignore the tuning for the majority of songs in this volume.
4. Virtually none of these songs includes more than one verse, a singular exception being one of Mr. Beloff's pieces. Those, like me, who purchase music books in the hope of obtaining complete lyrics to songs are out of luck.

Most of these songs can be found in other volumes or online in standard tuning and often with more complete lyrics. If you really enjoy alternate tunings, just go to ebay and buy old music books. They're more professionally done, are likely to have more complete lyrics, and will probably cost less. Don't waste your money on this book.

Jim Beloff is a one-man ukulele rennaisance who (among other things) collects old ukulele tunes and edits them, adding chord symbols and publishing them in books like this. This particular collection is one of my favorites, along with Beloff's "Ukulele Gems". Both books offer around 30 tunes and a very complete set of chord charts for the price of a couple of sets of strings. Not bad.

If you like jazz standards and love the ukulele, here's another fine collection from Jim Beloff. I personally would start with his Ukulele Gems book, as I think the tunes are a little cooler. That, of course, is a purely subjective measure, I realize. I guess the fact that I own both books means I think this one is pretty good, as well. The songs run the gamut from easy to pretty challenging. Affordable, fun and filled with enough material to keep the average ukester busy for a long time. As the other reviewer noted, Jim has been a wonderful proponent of ukulele music. Do a search under his name -- you'll find a wealth of books, etc., worth looking into.

Jumping Jim books are a mixed bag. Some are pretty good (the Campfire book, the '60s book), but this ain't one of the good ones. For some reason, Beloff wants us all to change key and tune A-D-F#-B or F-Bb-D-G, instead of the conventional G-C-E-A tuning (which was inscribed on the stones Moses brought down from Mount Zion).

If you can follow the finger patterns without looking at the letters, or follow the letters without looking at the patterns, you can get through, or you can transcribe. Either way, it's work I don't want to put in for a bunch of meh arrangements of meh songs.

This would be a great book if one didn't have to retranslate all the tunings. Several different tunings are used in this book, so the only way one could play these songs in a sing-a-long setting would be to take them all and recopy them for the C tuning. Darn- there are so many good songs in here, but I haven't had the time to do the afore-mentioned task yet (and in doing that, the chord diagrams would be useless - you would have to just know them), and I've had the book for awhile. Why Jumpin' Jim - why??

This not only has a selction of great songs, but excellent arrangements. The chords aren't always simple, but beautiful. An intermediate player should be handle most of them with no trouble.

The only reason I haven't given this 5 stars is because the songs aren't all in the key of 'C'. Since there are chord diagrams this doesn't prevent them all being played on a uke tuned to one key, but it does mean the diagrams must be used and not the chord names.