HAWAII PUBLIC RADIO Gordon Mark in the midst of recording his new album.

Pulling his own strings

A small group of ukulele aficionados will be in for a treat tomorrow night. That's when Gordon Mark will play his first full-length solo concert.

Gordon Mark Where: Atherton Performing Arts Studio, Hawaii Public Radio, 738 Kaheka St. When: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow Tickets: $17.50 (discounts for Hawaii Public Radio members and students) Call: 955-8821

It isn't the first time Mark has played for an audience, by any means, but when he takes the stage at Hawaii Public Radio's Atherton Performing Arts Studio, it will be his debut as a solo headliner.

"I've always been in concert with someone else, but it doesn't seem any different. I'll just have to go longer," Mark explained late Monday evening. Highly respected for years by those in the know, Mark has become more visible in recent years through well-publicized appearances with other masters of the instrument.

He made his debut as a recording artist on a compilation album in 2002, and just recently released his first full-length album, "Natural Elegance I."

"(A longer show) means playing more of a variety of different types of music. Light standards, some classical pieces, Hawaiian pieces, kind of a buffet-type, smorgasbord kind of thing. My feeling is that when people walk away from the concert, they'll either recognize something or hear something that they've liked."

It's a safe bet they will. Mark's repertoire ranges from "E Ku'u Morning Dew" to "Malaguena" to "Till There Was You" and "Clair de Lune" and over a thousand more.

Mark modestly describes his musicianship as "faking my way through."

"I'll know I'm not playing the piece in the right key, for example, and I know I'm not doing the complete range, because I don't have the range (with the instrument). Consequently, I take sketches, bits and pieces, and try to make each sketch recognizable to the point where a person can say, 'I know that.' I try to keep it clean, in the sense that if the composer were in the audience, that person would say that what I'm doing is OK.

"What I'm trying to do also ... is to become the soloist, the orchestra, the conductor, the whole bit. For me, it's a pretend kind of game that I'm playing all these parts."

CONCERTGOERS are guaranteed a one-of-a-kind performance tomorrow night, with arrangements that he'll never play quite the same way ever again.

"Things are very quick, very spontaneous, unplanned, unrehearsed, and just part of the feeling that will emerge at that moment in time," Mark says.

You'd never know from listening to him that Mark is totally self-taught.

He found his first ukulele in a trash can, repaired it "with Scotch Tape ... and Duco glue," then figured out how to tune it and play it, one chord at a time. He now excels at deconstructing complicated classical compositions for performance on a four-stringed ukulele, but doesn't read music or use musical notation in fixing or formalizing his arrangements.

"What I do is feel my way through it. I tell my students that I can teach them what to play and how to play it, (but) I can't really teach them how to feel. That becomes a very personal thing. You may feel differently about a piece than I do, and so it means that when you play the piece and I do it, it's going to be completely different. And that's OK."

Mark acknowledges that his approach makes recording a bit of a challenge.

"If I'm doing a live performance and I slip -- and I have -- it's here and it's gone, and you're not going to hear it again. On a recording, yes, I can't have something that's so obviously bad every time you put it on. With today's electronics, you can go back and splice and redo a segment and they can put it in ... but there still is a certain type of pressure because I can pick it up (where they want me to), but then it comes out different from the time I did it before.

"If I played the same song for you three times in a row, each time it would come out slightly different. Not by choice, (but) it's what I do and how I do it at that moment in time."

His ability to "feel the music" is more important to him than anything else.

"If I can't do that, it's going to come out like Muzak.

"When I was at Native Books recently, it was background music really. I was not supposed to be doing anything that was going to override conversations, just something very soft in the background. If you want to listen, sit down in one of the chairs that's close by, and you can listen. If you want to stand in the corner and have a conversation with somebody, so be it. I don't want the person to have to shout above the music, but yet I've got to (play) it in such a way that I'm pleased with what is coming out."

While idle chatter should be nonexistent at tomorrow night's concert, Mark plans to keep it as simple and clean as he would if playing background music.

"I'm really not an entertainer. ... I'm not going to crack jokes or do handstands. I'm going to do music."