Bill Tapia
With a performing career spanning nearly nine decades, Bill Tapia was involved with the ʻukulele, jazz, and Hawaiian music perhaps for longer than any other human. He began his career in the teens as a child performing for tourists on the streets of Waikiki and continued playing until his death in 2011 at the age of 103. In the 1920s and 30s he performed with many of the biggest names in Hawaiian music and pioneered an incredible style of jazz ʻukulele playing. In the early 2000s, he again began performing and recording on the ʻukulele, assuring that music fans now and in the future will be able to appreciate the incredible skills of this legendary performer.
Born in Honolulu on New Year's Day, 1908, Bill Tapia taught himself ʻukulele as a young child, and by age 10, was strumming on the streets for tourist tips and entertaining WWI troops stationed at Pearl Harbor. At age 12, he left school to help support his family by working in the Honolulu vaudeville circuit, where he became a huge hit playing his ʻukulele behind his head and offering up his trademark, spirited interpretation of "Stars and Stripes Forever."
At age 19 in 1927, Tapia opened the Royal Hawaiian Hotel as a featured player in famed Hawaiʻian bandleader and composer Johnny Noble's orchestra. He became one of the Royal Hawaiian's "musical drivers," who chauffeured wealthy hotel guests around the island, stopping to sing Hawaiian songs with Diamond Head in the background.
Over the 1920s and 30s, Tapia became a fixture on the Waikiki music scene. He gave lessons to celebrities such as Betty Grable, Jimmy Durante, and Buster Crabbe, and he hung out with Waikiki beach boys, such as Sam and Duke Kahanamoku. He was in demand as a guitar and ʻukulele player with top bands and had his own group, Tappy's Island Swingers.
Following WWII, Tapia settled on the mainland to pursue his jazz passion. Most gigs with the big bands required guitar playing, and this became his main professional instrument for over 50 years, playing with swing bands, teaching, doing studio sessions, playing in TV orchestras, and working as a sideman in band after band.
Tapia would play his ʻukulele at home for his wife, Barbie, and his daughter, Cleo. Their favorite song was "To You, Sweetheart, Aloha." Tapia lost both his wife and daughter within a short period of time in 2001. In the down period following their deaths, Tapia was rediscovered as an ʻukulele player.
In 2002, Tapia played at the 75th anniversary of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel — the only musician there who had also played at the Royal Hawaiian's grand opening in 1927. He released his first ever CDs, Tropical Swing in 2004 and Duke of Uke in 2005, both scoring top 10 on the CMJ jazz charts.
