Jake Shimabukuro has single-handedly popularised the ukelele

"A JOKE I TELL AUDIENCES is that one of the great things about being a solo ukulele player is that people all over the world have such low expectations of the music," says Jake Shimabukuro, with characteristic self-deprecation. "I embrace that, but I do enjoy showing people that the ukulele is capable of so much more."

Shimabukuro has certainly succeeded in doing that. In 2006, a video of him sitting in New York's Central Park playing his solo ukulele arrangement of George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps was posted on YouTube, and went viral. At last count it had racked up close to 12 million hits.

Thanks to that performance - and Shimabukuro's subsequent global fame as a concert performer - expectations of ukulele players certainly aren't low any more. In fact, the instrument is enjoying a global resurgence in popularity.

This phenomenon has a lot to do with Shimabukuro. He has shown that an instrument formerly associated mostly with Hawaiian beaches, English music hall comedians, and Tiny Tim can make music with harp-like delicacy, jazzy chordal sophistication, and flat out rock 'n' roll energy - often all in the same song. He has been called the "Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele" and the comparison is fairly apt.

"I guess in the past the ukulele was always thought of as kind of a laid-back instrument," he says. "You think of somebody strumming a romantic ballad. But when I was a kid playing the ukulele, it was always very energetic. I would try to pretend I was like a rock guitar player."