page_title: Jake Shimabukuro
section_title: Breakout success
hierarchical_section_title: Jake Shimabukuro / Career / Solo career / Breakout success
caption_attribution_description: English: Jake Shikimoburo playing ukelele at Stockholm JazzFest09
context_page_description: Jake Shimabukuro is an American ukulele virtuoso and composer known for his fast and complex finger work. His music combines elements of jazz, blues, funk, rock, bluegrass, classical, folk, and flamenco. Shimabukuro has written numerous original compositions, including the entire soundtracks to two Japanese films, Hula Girls and the Japanese remake of Sideways.
  Well known in Hawai’i and Japan during his early solo career in the early 2000s, Shimabukuro became famous internationally in 2006, when a video of him playing a virtuosic rendition of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was posted on YouTube without his knowledge and became one of the first viral videos on that site. His concert engagements, collaborations with well-known musicians, media appearances, and music production have snowballed since then. In 2012, an award-winning documentary was released tracking his life, career, and music, titled Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings; it has screened in a variety of festivals, aired repeatedly on PBS, and been released on DVD.
context_section_description: In April 2006, Shimabukuro came to national and international attention when, unbeknownst to him, someone posted a virtuosic video of him playing George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on YouTube. The video, which had originally been filmed for a New York television show called Midnight Ukulele Disco, quickly went viral, and has received over 15 million views. The video performance resulted in a huge increase in concert engagements, and Shimabukuro received collaboration requests from notable musicians including Jimmy Buffett, Béla Fleck, Ziggy Marley, Cyndi Lauper, Keali'i Reichel, and Yo-Yo Ma. He toured with Buffett in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and is featured on several of Buffett's albums and videos, including his 2007 CD/DVD release Live in Anguilla. Shimabukuro also began receiving many invitations to perform on major U.S. talk shows and other well-known media ventures, and began touring worldwide eight or nine months a year.
  Shimabukuro released his fifth U.S. album, Gently Weeps, in September 2006. The album peaked at #2 on Billboard's Top World Music Albums in 2006, and won the 2007 Na Hoku Hanohano Award for Instrumental Album of the Year. Also in 2006, he composed the music to the Japanese film Hula Girls, which featured hula dancing and a Hawaiian spa resort as its primary theme and setting.
  In 2009, Shimabukuro released his concert CD, Live, which captures him in performance at various venues around the world: New York, Chicago, Japan, and Hawaii. It peaked at number 5 in Billboard's Top World Music Albums in 2009 and 2010, won the Hoku for Instrumental Album of the Year, garnered Shimabukuro the award for Favorite Entertainer of the Year, and won the Hawaii Music Award for Best Ukulele Album. In November 2009, he accompanied fellow Hawaii-born Bette Midler at the Royal Variety Performance. They performed a rendition of the Beatles song "In My Life" as the first of Midler's three-song set, and afterwards they met Queen Elizabeth and shook her hand.
caption: Performing at Stockholm Jazz Festival 2009
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