Time To Come Home: The Southern California Slack Key Festival brings Hawai’i to the mainland through hula and ki ho’alu
Hope Keawe has been practicing Hula since 1994 and will perform with her husband, slack key artist John Keawe at the Southern California Slack Key Festival. Photo by Oceanfront Photography
When Kawika Kahiapo sings, it is the depth in his voice you notice first. Not the song. Not the slack key guitar. Not even the ocean playing in the background. Kahiapo’s first notes usher a prayer into the world.
This is not an unusual occurrence for a singer/songwriter, but unusual enough in the
ki ho’alu (slack key) community where the guitar’s open tuning often identifies the song.
Kawika Kahiapo is a world-renowned slack key guitarist, an ordained minister, and an environmental steward on the island of O’ahu. He will join a full stage of slack key masters and hula dancers at the 9th Annual Southern California Slack Key Festival this Sunday, January 17, at 2 p.m. at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center.
When asked if he has always sung, Kahiapo humbly replies that he has always attempted to sing.
Kahiapo grew up on the windward side of O’ahu. The late Gabby Pahinui would come around to watch NFL football in his family’s garage and jam with Kahiapo’s father, Uncle Sam.
“When I was in the company of Gabby, I needed to pick his brain,” Kahiapo said. “He took the time to talk to me about theory, tunings. When influence comes to mind we are all products of the music we listen to.”
There is one situation Kahiapo remembers specifically.
“[Gabby] sat me down. There is a hook, a riff that he played. He sat down once and played it and asked what it sounded like to me. I said ‘The name is Ua Nani Kauai.’ He played it again. I kept responding ‘That is the name of the song.’ He did that about four or five times. Then he stopped, he paused and he looked at me and took that same riff, he slowed it down. I mean he really slowed it down and I recognized it as a riff from a Three Dog Night song Shambala. I recognized it and he laughed,” Kahiapo said.
A slack key musician works in both traditional Hawaiian song and foreign influence. It is an open, airy music, easily recognizable by the slacked strings that give the guitar its open tuning. In the 1830s Mexican cowboys brought the guitar to Hawai’i. In the 1860s Portuguese sailors brought steel strings for this guitar and a new sound was borne across the Pacific Islands.
Slack key artist Kawika Kahiapo serves on the board of the Kokua Hawai’i Foundation and the North Shore Community Land Trust where he works to preserve the land for future generations. Photo by Sari
It is now a sound inseparable from the landscape that grounded it. Within slack key music live ancient stories.
Several years ago the late Dennis Kamakahi said in an interview, “Kids today are really searching. They want a true translation of the Hawaiian music, they want to understand.”
Kauila Barber, a kumu hula at Halau Kauilanuimakehaikalani, will perform for the first time at this year’s festival. Barber grew up listening to Gabby Pahinui and the Sons of Hawai’i. Hawaiian music was the only music allowed when his father was home. Introduced to his first kumu hula at age 12, Barber studied hula kahiko, the ancient chants and dances, under Hoakalei Kama’u and Edith Kawelohea McKinzie. Kumu Keolahou Hinau brought Barber through his ‘uniki, or the protocol for earning his hula status.
A resident of both Hawai’i and Los Angeles, Barber is a renowned photographer, hair and make-up stylist, and a sought after cultural advisor for film and television. He has attended the Southern California Slack Key Festival nearly every year.
“I look around, I am interested in seeing who is gathering at the water for a drink. Who comes to this festival?” Barber said in a phone interview late one evening this week.
He has begun to notice a stronger turnout of non-Hawaiians at the Slack Key Fest.
“Who is speaking our language? At least our language is being spoken and listened to as slack key,” Barber said.
The law banning the Hawaiian language from public schools was not lifted until the 1980s.
Barber cannot help but wonder why more Hawaiians don’t come to the festival.
“If you are looking at how slack key can find its footing in the future, you need to look at what’s happening in our past, and what’s happening right now,” Barber said.
Right now Hawaiian protesters, or protectors as they call themselves, have blocked the building of an eighteen-story, thirty-meter wide telescope on the top of Mauna Kea on Hawai’i. Mauna Kea is a sacred place of origin to the Hawaiian people. It is also sacred, in one sense of the word, to astronomers who are able to see, from Mauna Kea, deeper into the universe than from any other vantage point on earth.
In astronomy as you see deeper into the universe, you see further back in time. For Hawaiians, Mauna Kea is where the past and the future exist, where ancestors are buried and the stars, the tools of navigation that first brought people to the islands, are clearly visible.
When the construction crews came to break ground for the massive telescope in April of 2015, lines of protectors blocked the road up Mauna Kea. At the front a thin, young man named Kaho’okahi Kanuha stood, his presence unshakable.
“[Koho’okahi] stands for the new Hawaiians,” Barber said. “He is a cultural practitioner and ‘olelo teacher to the children of Punana Leo school.”
“The Hawaiians banded together with no guns, no violence, in a positive light. We were able to struggle and stand up and want. When Hawaiians come together like that…” Barber paused and took a rare breath between bursts of concentrated enthusiasm. “Slack key does that… an opening to the future…but we need to gather more Hawaiians to the water. They miss home, too – slack key brings us home, for sure…”
Video of the standoff between protectors and police on June 24 is posted on YouTube. After hours of confrontation the police began to make arrests. Surrounded by chanting, Hawaiian song, and tears, one policeman touches his temple to that of a protector’s. He whispers a few words to the man and hugs him before arresting him for blocking a public roadway.
“We are just really protecting what is ours,” Barber said, “which is practicing our cultural protocol.”
“Do you know what a piko is?” Barber asked, turning the interview around. I think of a puka shell, a small hole, a cubby.
“A belly button,” Barber laughed. “Our piko. As we grow up we figure out what that piko actually means. We have many pikos on our body – that is our connection to our past, our connection to our mother. Her belly button is connected to her mother. And her belly button is connected to her mother.”
“Mauna Kea is the piko of the earth,” Barber said. “We are all connected to the earth there. The future and the past is in that moment.”
“To [some] it’s a concert, to us [the festival] is a piko.”
Love, Hope and John
This Sunday Kawika Kahiapo will join Cyril Pahinui, Ledward Kaapana, Jeff Peterson, Jim “Kimo” West, Patrick Landeza, Napua Greig, Mike Kaawa, Jeff Au Hoy, Peter W.K. Moon, Nathan Nahinu, and John and Hope Keawe for an afternoon of some of the best Hawaiian artists to grace a mainland’s stage. Founded by Mitch Chang, The Southern California Slack Key Festival is the largest of its kind outside the Hawaiian Islands.
“The approach I took with slack key is the same I took with my spiritual walk,” Kahiapo said. “It needed to be organic. It needed to be real. The more I discovered my identity – I am a pure Hawaiian man – the more I discovered how I was created. I believe each human being is born with specific gifts and a specific platform. When you can figure that out in life, through the good and the bad, you start to figure out what you become. This is a rising out of the ashes approach – Hawaiian history.”
John Keawe plays his koa wood guitar, built in Hawai’i in 1981. He brings it to every performance. Photo by Oceanfront Photography
“After [ministering] for 16 years now, I really feel like my gospel is aloha, love. It seemed like a natural flow to use my music to express that. Being ordained was a way for me to come back into community,” Kahiapo said.
“It all comes down to: can you love? I hope that comes across in my music,” Kahiapo said.
Four time Na Hoku Hanohano award winner and ki ho’alu artist John Keawe writes for love too, perhaps with a more focused chord. He will be joined on the festival stage by his wife of 47 years, hula dancer Hope Keawe.
“It is very special to write a song and then have the one you love dance to it,” Keawe said.
John and Hope have lived their entire lives on the northern tip of Hawai’i, in north Kohala, the birthplace of King Kamehameha I. Kamehameha the Great inherited the war god Kuka’ilimoku from his uncle, King Kalani’opu’u a year after the battle that left Captain James Cook dead. To his son, King Kalani’opu’u left his political kingdom. Kamehameha would seize this chiefdom and unlike any ruler before him, unite the Hawaii Islands into a political entity.
Keawe served four years in the navy as a young man. When he returned to Kohala, the sugar plantation where he had worked had closed down. What originated as a hobby became his livelihood. And he learned it listening to slack key records.
“Because we learn, we listen to other [musicians] – sometimes for me there are certain parts where you can’t figure it out – what others are playing,” Kawea said. “It is frustrating when I can’t figure it out. So I make up a rift that will fit into that spot. I did that a lot. I created my own style…my own sound.”
When Hope and John perform together, the hula reaches for the story being told in the slack key.
“I think the challenging part for any hula dancer is portraying their inner feelings…you can always tell if they are giving out of their spirit,” Hope said in a quick break from her work as an elementary school health nurse. “For me, I try to dance how I feel from my heart. For me to share my mana’o, my spirit, with other people…that is one of the most valuable lessons I learned from [my kumu], the expression of [my] hula.”
A renowned school for hula, the Ka`lmi Na`auao O Hawai`i Nei Institute in Kauai, describes the qualities necessary for a dancer. “There is no need to belong to any specific family or race to be a successful hula student,” the Institute notes. “Instead the student has to be loyal, supportive…and responsible for his or her actions. He or she has to be noble, humble and have the courage to stand up for his or her beliefs. And he or she must be beautiful, that means to reflect love and light.”
Who in the audience watches the hula dancer as mirror to their own light?
“Slack key is the voice you have to depend on,” Barber said before we hung up the telephone. “It is not a ticket, it is a call to our people. It’s time to come home.”
Enjoy the music, dance, and craft and food vendors at the 9th Annual Southern California Slack Key Festival this Sunday, January 17, at 2 p.m. at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center. For more information and to purchase tickets visit: www.slackkeyfest.com. ER