Kaleponi

Finding Ozzie Kotani‘s book, Guitar Playing Hawaiian Style, in the old Kihei Disc record store was the key to my learning slack key. Ozzie is a remarkably adept teacher, and his book showed me the baby steps needed to begin my journey. Along with these fine grained details he included wonderful arrangements and compositions, charming pieces of music that entranced while they taught. His songs were so much fun they made me practice harder so I could get to the next piece.

The second song in the book is an old rascal song, Manuela Boy, a vocal number with a checkered history that describes the family life of a young man who finds himself penniless, hungry, and homeless. The chorus says “No more five cent, no more rice, go ala paka hiamoe (go to the park to sleep).” Ozzie’s version was instrumental, of course, but he found a way to express the rascally humor of the song in his rhythms and note choices, making the song a blast to play. It was also the first song that I tried to expand with my own ideas, for better or for worse.

Which brings us to this little video. We have a spectacular new guitar shop in our neighborhood called Mighty Fine Guitars, and even though I have too many guitar already I find myself visiting often. For one thing the proprietor, Stevie Coyle, is both a talented musician and an interesting and enjoyable character. When I asked about the possibility of shooting a video in his shop he was very agreeable, so I wandered over with a recorder and a couple of cameras. It turns out Stevie studied theatrical lighting, so he immediately adjusted the lights in the room and figured out a good shooting angle. I pulled down a custom Martin 000 with koa back and sides, a big wide neck, and a big bold voice. I fooled around with a couple of songs, and Manuela Boy seemed to click.

If you’re familiar with Ozzie’s arrangement you can certainly hear that I borrowed his concept, his framing of the song. My key licks are either his or inspired by his. I guess you could say I’m trying to play it the way I learned it from Ozzie’s book, but I’m doing it wrong!