Kaleponi

It’s been a couple of weeks now and I can’t stop thinking about the weekend I spent at the Spirit Hawaii Cultural Retreat in Lafayette, CA. Here’s an article at SFGate telling the story of the event. The two days were filled with chant, hula, music, history, cultural insights, food, and friendship, another example of the rich current of Hawai`i oriented events flowing around us here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As much as I enjoyed the whole experience, I was most enthralled and inspired by the remarkable Elmer “Sonny” Lim, Jr. Lynn and I met Sonny and his family a number of years ago when we visited Hawai`i Island. It’s a meeting we often think about and talk about, we felt so warmly welcomed by this charming and talented family. Since then I’ve looked forward to my next meeting with Sonny, but somehow the opportunity has never presented itself until now. (more…)

Playing along with Ledward Kaapana while sitting on the deck is a major treat – one of the high points of my musical life. And I was really happy to be able to share a bit of video from one session: http://www.kaleponi.com/2012/06/24/backyard-jam-in-kaleponi/ But the next level in fun is the classic kanikapila, a party dedicated to playing music, singing, dancing, sharing food, and talking story.

We have musicians and dancers over nearly every week, but several times a year we have a bigger session, often when we have guests visiting from Hawai`i. With Ledward in town we knew the party would be something special. We filled the cooler, baked some cookies and some teri chicken, and counted on our guests to fill out the menu – which they did in fine fashion. (more…)

The tour is over but the fun continues. Mike Kaawa has returned to Hawai`i and his busy schedule, but Ledward and his wife Sharon are taking a little vacation in Kaleponi, visiting the stores and the sights, trying restaurants and spending time with friends. We jam in the living room and up in the studio, but the best jam time seems to be on the deck, with the planes flying over, the kids hollering at the swim club behind us, and the birds calling from the trees all around. Here are a couple of video clips we captured during the quieter moments of a backyard jam.

With the lovely breeze keeping us cool, the most important audio feature was a good windsock. I have a nice Rycote mini windjammer for the Sony PCM-D50, so that’s the only thing I could use to capture audio. And with Ledward doing some vocal tunes I had to position the recorder right in the middle of the shot. Hearing Ledward sing Pauoa Liko Ka Lehua made it all worthwhile, though.

One of my favorite of Ledward’s tunes is an instrumental version of Aloha Ia No O Maui, an old song that tells of the beauty of various features of the Valley Isle. Ledward tells me that one of his uncles created this arrangement and played it every party.

I hope to capture a little more of Ledward’s artistry before he heads home to Kane`ohe, but I’ll treasure these two songs in the meantime.

I’m really not the hardest working man in show business, I’m afraid. I have so much fun just playing in my living room that I don’t feel a big push to get on stage. But since my mission is to spread the word about slack key and Hawaiian music, I really should be getting out and telling the story. Now the time has come to hit the road, because Ledward Kaapana and Mike Ka`awa have invited me to open on their spring tour.

All the details are in the Kaleponi Calendar link above, but here’s a rundown:

Thursday, May 10, Harlow’s in Sacramento, CA
Saturday, May 12, St. Joseph’s Cultural Center, Grass Valley, CA
Monday, May 14, Sierra Nevada Brewery, Chico, CA
Tuesday, May 15, Don Quixote’s, Felton, CA
Thursday, May 17, Club Fox, Redwood City, CA

After that week Mike goes home and we have a short break, then Ledward and I head to Oregon.
Saturday, June 2, John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts, Eugene, OR
Tuesday, June 5, The Alberta Rose Theater, Portland, OR

Mike returns from O`ahu for dates in Washington.
Wednesday, June 6 and
Thursday, June 7, Seattle’s Triple Door, where Ledward and Mike recorded their magnificent Force of Nature live CD.
Friday, June 8, The Upstage Restaurant, Port Townsend, WA

If you’re in any of these neighborhoods I hope you’ll join us for an evening of slack key and Hawaiian music.

We’re back in Walnut Creek after our too short visit to Kailua, O`ahu. I’ve posted a few videos I shot during the trip, but here’s one more – a celebration of the neighborhood where we like to stay when we can. Kailua Beach is one stunning place, it attracts visitors from all around the world, and they all pass Kalapawai Park and the Kalapawai Market on their way to the beach park. The store has been at this location for over 70 years, it’s part of Kailua’s history. The park is more recent, from the late 60s.

There’s a little shopping center a block mauka, where pizza and shave ice, real estate and emergency medical services, sunglasses and bikinis, kayaks and bicycles and Segways are all available. Traffic jams are common when a class of kayak beginners crosses the road, and many of the trucks and cars are carrying canoes, paddle boards, kite surfing rigs, or kayaks.

This little corner of Kailua seems dedicated to fun, to enjoyment of this beautiful place. The spirit of the place seemed to match the feel of a song I’ve been working on for a few years, so I gave it the title Kalapawai Swing and set up cameras to record the song in its namesake park.

When we head to the beach from our friend’s cottage in Kailua, we pass through a hedge of naupaka kahakai, beach naupaka. This salt tolerant plant produces seed pods that float and can survive for a year in sea water, so this naupaka has spread to beaches throughout the South Pacific.

It features a flower that appears to have half its petals missing, and the naupaka kuahiwi, the mountain naupaka, shows the same “missing” petals. Naturally there are long ago stories told of the ill-fated lovers represented by these widely separated half-flowers.

I’ve been developing an instrumental piece using the name Naupaka Kahakai for several years, and recently I came up with a something I’m ready to call done. The beach at Kailua is the only location I could consider for doing a video of this song.

The recording uses the pickup through an effects box, because the tradewinds and waves drown out the guitar. My shots of the beach fail to do justice to this beautiful place, but perhaps they give you a bit of the flavor.

One of my favorite slack key instrumentals, Black Sand, was written by George Kaapana, Ledward’s father. Ledward used it as the title track for a wonderful CD, one I highly recommend. I managed to capture a video of the song in the Kaapana backyard, with the Ko`olau range in the background.

Playing duets with Ledward is a wonderful combination of inspiration and intimidation. I hate it when I mess up in front of my hero, and sometimes he plays such amazing stuff that I can only watch. But Ledward plays so solidly that it’s easy to get swept along and play beyond one’s limits, and he’s always generous in sharing his ideas, his licks and tricks.

It was a few years ago that I seemed to suddenly hear this song everywhere. It’s a familiar pattern – we learn a new word or concept and suddenly it appears all around us – but I was really grateful and excited about this discovery because the song was both so charming and so mysterious.

The melody is absolutely infectious, and one version in particular, Gary Haleamau‘s vocal featuring western swing fiddles in the hook, had me bouncing around and humming and grinning while Sonny Lim‘s solo slack key instrumental inspired me to find the notes for my own arrangement.

But the lyrics and translation were so mysterious, so puzzling. A shining steel cable? A cliff connected to a rooster or chicken? A land that looks like California? What can be going on? My search for understanding was made more difficult because the usual name of the song has been compressed into one word – Paliokamoa. Eventually I stumbled on a source, an essay by a relative of the composer that explained some of the mystery (but introduced a bit more).

The title refers not to the appearance of the cliff, or the presence of a chicken flock, but to the demands made on the workers at the sugar mill located there. They were expected to be at work before the rooster crowed at dawn. And the steel cable going down to the sea was part of the local transportation system – with no anchorage in the area and a strong offshore wind, sailing ships would be tied to a steel cable dropped from the cliff, and passengers and freight were winched up and down the cable. The “land that looks like California” turns out to be a literal description of the area around Upolu Point, where the vegetation and terrain appears strikingly similar to forested areas on the mainland.

I’ve worked on this song for years, it was one of the tunes that compelled me to learn to use Leonard’s C or “drop C” as it’s often called. This clever tuning is one string away from taropatch open G, and is reached by lowering the sixth string one whole step from D to C. The result is a tuning that is not “open” – not a major chord without fingering, but a very useful tuning nonetheless because it allows an easy switch between the keys of G and C. By using a capo and these two tunings the whole range of keys is readily available.

So here’s Pali O Ka Moa performed under the mango tree in the backyard of our friends the La`a family in beautiful Kailua, O`ahu, HI.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to some videos of Uncle Sonny Chillingworth performing and mentioned how much he has influenced me. One of his contributions to slack key was what he called the “Spanish bass” which takes a syncopated approach to a 4/4 rhythm. Sonny brought that innovation to slack key and it has become an integral part of the style.

One of the simpler tunes he composed with the Spanish bass is his Slack Key #2, which he recorded on his Dancing Cat CD, Endlessly.

I’ve been playing this tune for a few years now, since Lynn suggested I learn it. I usually play it with a lot of my own variations, but for this video I tried to stick pretty close to Sonny’s original.

This is a great tune for practicing the Spanish bass because it develops gradually with only slight changes from verse to verse, but it’s also a fun one to listen to, with the hypnotic repetition of the bass and treble speaking and answering.

The Acoustic Guitar Showcase on Superbowl Sunday drew a nice crowd to the Mission City Coffee Company. It’s always a pleasure playing alongside Doug Young and his guests are always compelling players. Mark Goldenberg has such a command of his instrument that every note contributed to the story.

I had some slight technical difficulties that made me glad I’d brought two guitars. And once again I made a bad choice of settings on my audio recorder, but this time I turned the gain too low and cut off the input completely. What a klutz, take 2.

Happily the sound of the PA in the room was quite respectable thanks to our system operator and also due to the attentive audience. And the audio on the Panasonic Lumix GH2 is not entirely terrible, so I have a couple of clips to post. These are both songs I’ve posted before, but the versions are somewhat different.

I’ve been doing my “Honolulu Medley” combining He Aloha No O Honolulu and Honolulu, I’m Coming Back Again for a few years now, and occasionally I’ll do the second song as a vocal. In this clip I captured that vocal on video for the first time, so it’s something of a debut for me.

Maori Brown Eyes is a classic Hawaiian song and one that was made into a slack key standard by Leonard Kwan. It’s one of my favorites and its rollicking nature seems to go over well with audiences too.