Uke Scene: James Hill Visits Madeira, the Ancestral Homeland of the Ukulele

BY NICOLAS GRIZZLE | FROM THE FALL 2026 ISSUE OF UKULELE MAGAZINE
James Hill has done a lot of incredible things with the ukulele, but he had never played a Coldplay song with a cellist and three Madeirans playing traditional instruments until last February, when he was invited to teach and perform at the behest of the Madeiran government for its aCORDE festival in the ancestral homeland of the ukulele.

The annual festival is a celebration of the region’s deep connection to cordophone (stringed) instruments. That includes the braguinha and the rajão, which arrived in Hawaii in 1879 with Madeirans who were looking to work and make a new life on a different island. The diminutive 4- and 5-stringed instruments were soon modified by locals to become what we know today as the ukulele. “(Madeira) is sort of the incubator of so many of these instruments that have traveled around the world, and so they’re celebrating that history and that lineage, and they wanted me to bring the international flavor,” says Hill.

In addition to teaching a workshop, Hill also performed to a full house at Funchal’s opera house–like Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias with his wife, Anne Janelle, on cello, and the Madeiran trio Tângedores do Atlântico, on braguinha, viola de arame, and rajão. “The blending of the ukulele with Madeira’s traditional instruments worked beautifully,” says festival organizer Rui Pedro Teixeira Pimenta. “There was something quietly special about it, too: the ukulele, born of the Madeiran braguinha, sharing the stage once more with the very instruments it descends from.”

We caught up with Hill to talk about the festival and his takeaway from the experience.

How did you get involved with this festival?

They just cold-called me and said, “Hey, we’re running this government-sponsored celebration of small instruments that originate in Madeira.” I almost wasn’t quite sure that it was for real at first, because it was very random. But I’ve always wanted to go to Madeira—it’s like the Graceland of ukulele.

Did you get the sense that Madeiran people feel a strong connection with the ukulele?

Well, that’s a good question. The thing that they’re most connected with is the braguinha. That’s still a very clear and present thing in their lives. I don’t feel directly connected to the braguinha because I see it as sort of a stepping stone to the ukulele. Of course, that’s my perspective. They are still very connected to the braguinha and the rajão; those instruments are more alive in the everyday life of Madeiran people than I expected.

I think they appreciate that the ukulele is part of the family tree, but it’s not their everyday experience. The first thing that really made my eyes bug out is on the first night we were there, we went to a concert of kids playing their braguinhas, and it just took me back in a visceral way to when I was a kid playing in a school ukulele program (in Canada), a district-wide ukulele program that had a very similar kind of vibe.

And then you’ve got teenagers playing alone as a cool teen group, and they’re interacting with younger kids, so you’ve got mentorship and learning, and you’ve got the masters teaching everybody, and you’ve got the parents all there—what a good thing for the community. And then the whole ensemble of all the kids and teenagers launches into a Portuguese translation of “Island Style” played on the braguinha, and that’s the moment when my brain just exploded. Everything just coalesced in sort of a surrealist way.

The education side of things there is really strong, they’ve got a great music conservatory on the island that’s run out of an incredible old hotel that they’ve reclaimed. Visually, it’s like if Wes Anderson ran a music school.

What was your workshop like at the festival?

I wasn’t sure what to do because it was going be a workshop with all braguinha players, and I’ve got my ukulele, but I don’t play the braguinha. In the end, I gave
a composition workshop that I’ve taught a few times where we randomly, using a deck of playing cards, pick a number and then create a song using only the notes on that fret. You’re also allowed to use the open strings. So you have the notes of that fret, which is four notes, plus your open strings, and you have to come up with a piece of music alone or with a partner. And because it took it away from the idiomatic trickery of a specific instrument, we had an amazing time. I had to take it away from the mechanics of the fretboard, or the mechanics of strumming. So the common ground that we found was creativity. I spoke for maybe five minutes, and then it was just into creating.

What else did you experience, and what are your thoughts on the whole thing?

Well, the main event, technically, was the evening performance the next night, where we played in this incredible opera house right in the center of Funchal (Madeira’s capital city). In the weeks before we arrived, we connected with a local trio of musicians, three of the most renowned players and teachers on the island who play in a trio together (Roberto Moniz, Roberto Moritz, and Pedro Gonçalves).

We decided on two or three songs that we could play together, and the day before the concert, when we met for the first time in person, we ran through two traditional pieces from Madeira and Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” That really brought the house down. Hearing it with the three traditional instruments, the ukulele, and the cello, in that environment, people just lost their minds.

I think it was this sort of really unexpected synergy between the musicians. Like, these people have known each other for 24 hours, and yet their instruments have known each other in some way for over 100 years. And now we’re bringing them back together and making this beautiful music. You could just feel the response of the audience. It was overwhelming and it was really cool.

Honestly, I often will daydream about what it might have been like to be on one of those boats that left the island in the late 19th century (and landed in Hawaii in 1879). What it must have been like to choose your possessions, anything you could carry, and for somebody to feel so strongly that they couldn’t imagine living without their music. And the power of this little box, this little wooden box with these little gut strings, the thought that you could bring all of your music with you; it would be like having your iPod with all of your songs. Like saying, “I’m leaving my home and I may never return, but at least I will have all of my music”—how empowering that must have felt, the urgency and the depth of the need for this box that had all of their music in it. I try to connect with how important this little wooden box must have been to those folks.