The Harmony of The Islands

Hawai‘i pours out more music and more varieties of music per square mile—hula, “Jawaiian” reggae, hapa-haole tunes—than perhaps anywhere but Jamaica. Still, once you’ve heard the gorgeous, haunting melodies of Hawaiian acoustic slack-key guitar, chances are it will be the permanent soundtrack to your images of the Islands.

 

Dennis Lewison

 

Until the past decade, the strains of slack key seldom traveled very far from Hawai‘i. Only recently, thanks to the energy and generosity of the current players of slack key, and an enlightened record company, has the purest form of this Hawaiian folk music become known all over the world.
   
Slack key was one of the first benefits of Hawaiian commerce. The six-string guitar was probably introduced by the Mexican and Spanish vaqueros (cowboys) hired by King Kamehameha III in 1832 to teach the Hawaiians how to handle another Euro-American import: cattle. We know guitars were established by June 6, 1840, thanks to a guitar-strings-for-sale ad by the Henry Paty Company.
   
Hawaiian guitarists first played songs based on the rhythmic mainstays of island celebration like the chant and dance of mele hula. At the same time, they blended in what they had learned of the Mexican and  Spanish  music,  which  used  the major chords of the European scale.
   
Then they went beyond that. The Hawaiian term ki ho‘alu (literally, “loosen the key”) refers to the way the strings are “slacked” to produce many different tunings. Browse a slack-key guitar music book, and you see not just songs, but tunings in G, C, D and F, what’s been dubbed “tuning the strings to a note.” For example, “Taro Patch” is an open-G tuning, which means the open strings produce a G-major sound when strummed, because the fifth and sixth strings are loosened or lowered one whole step, or two frets, below standard Western tuning. 
   
Hawaiian players discovered the looser tension and lower pitches of these tunings gave a warmer, more sustained sound, as strings vibrated sympathetically and chords shimmered with overtones deep from the well of the guitar. The tunings also allowed them to develop an unmatched finger-picking technique. They learned that the resonance and musical character of more open strings would allow chords to be articulated with only one or two fingers on the left hand, allowing the other fingers to pluck more intricate melody and harmony parts while the thumb played the alternating bass. Slack-key masters can play magical echo effects, “chimes” of staccato harmonics, and a rich variety of slides and hammer-ons—sequential left-and-right-hand pluckings of the strings by both the fretting and strumming hand. It’s those techniques that led Chet Atkins to exclaim to slack-key guitarist Cyril Pahinui, “When I first heard you, you sounded like three guys playing.” 
   
Solo guitarists adapted classical and traditional Hawaiian songs—gentle, happy folk melodies such as “Pupu A‘o Ewa” (better known as “Pearly Shells,” a song Don Ho later made famous), and of course the state song, “Hawai‘i Pono‘i,” and Queen Lilu‘okalani’s world-famous song of love and farewell, “Aloha ‘Oe.” 
   
But other melodies were not written down, and tunings were often closely guarded family secrets. That secrecy might have confined slack key to Hawaiian backyard kani ka pila (literally “to play music”—actually “jam sessions”), had it not been for the work of the late Gabby Pahinui, often referred to as the father of modern slack-key guitar. In 1947, Pahinui made the first slack-key recording, Hi‘ilawe, for Aloha Records. He went on to creatively interpret a broad range of Hawaiian traditional, popular, and international standards. 
   
The Pahinui family, including Gabby’s sons Cyril, Bla, Philip and Martin (all slack-key guitarists) have become the First Family of the genre. Cyril told me his father was a walking encyclopedia of music. “Gabby was the original steel-guitar player . . . anything with strings he could play. He taught a lot of great musicians. He recorded a lot of songs and uplifted them, changed the tempos, made it lively. Local boys knew two or three chords; he knew a lot more.
   
“Every weekend there was music . . .” Cyril said, rhapsodizing about his childhood, “from day to night and into the day again”—with occasional guests like the Kingston Trio. Leading such sessions were the members of the original Gabby Pahinui Band of the 1970s, which featured Gabby’s four sons, the late great slack-key guitarists Leland “Atta” Isaacs, Sr., and Sonny Chillingworth, and Joe Gang Kupahu on bass. 
   
During the ‘50s and ‘60s, a new generation of influential players like Ledward Ka‘apana (with his trio, Hui ‘Ohana) and Peter Moon (with his trio, Sunday Manoa) helped usher in the modern slack-key renaissance.
   
Events like the annual Ki Ho‘alu Hawaiian Slack-Key Guitar Festival at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s A&B Amphitheater demonstrate the range and resilience of the slack-key tradition.
   
The delightful outdoor festival is a guided tour of the current state of slack key and its promising future, from second-generation masters such as Cyril Pahinui and Ledward Ka‘apana, to very young players. At the 11th festival, guitar master and teacher Ozzie Kotani was appropriately joined by 11-year-old Danny Carvalho; “passing what’s shared,” in Ozzie’s words, Danny played the “Hula Blues” arrangement first played by Ozzie’s teacher, Sonny Chillingworth. There were performers who strummed slack key to an uptempo bass backbeat, wove it into English-language songs, even played it to prerecorded accompaniment in what one player good-humoredly called “karaoke.”
   
And the third generation was very much in evidence. Ikaika Brown, who has played bass for a “Jawaiian” reggae band, proved his allegiance to slack key, which he’s been playing since he was nine years old, in a rousing performance with his father, Kevin. Makana, “the Ki ho‘alu Kid,” did a piece, “Koi”—which, for all its hard-driving momentum, expansive echo effects, and compositional dips and rolls, was recognizable as slack key. Makana’s clearly an innovator, but he told the crowd, “I want my playing to develop so I can have something to offer in the genre of Hawaiian music.”
   
Slack key’s resurgence was dramatically demonstrated in 2000, when sponsor Bank of Hawai‘i pulled out of the Maui festival because of financial problems. Promoter Milton Lau admits, “Many thought the festival would die without that sponsorship. The funny thing, though, when we were faced with adversity, people really stepped forward.” Art Vento, the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s operations manager, noted, “Given its cultural significance, we knew we had to do what we could.” The Center attracted a raft of sponsors, including The Maui News, the County of Maui, the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority, and KPOA and KNUI radio stations.
    
And thanks to pianist George Winston and his record label, Dancing Cat Records, the entire repertoire of each of the major slack-key players is being recorded and internationally distributed—in particular, the Pahinui brothers, who last recorded together on a 1992 CD with (among others) Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Dwight Yoakam and Van Dyke Parks. Winston worked closely with Bla Pahinui, a gifted instrumentalist with a unique percussive left-hand style, a penchant for D tunings, and strong R&B and Latin influences. But his collaboration with Bla’s younger brother Cyril was truly special. Winston calls Cyril, one of the first to play for him, “the ali‘i” (royalty), in part due to Cyril’s sheer dedication to the project. “I stayed in the studio 8, 12 hours,” Cyril told me. Since 1992, Cyril has recorded 90 songs, some just coming out this year.
   
No one exemplifies the depth, the beauty, and humble gentility of the slack-key guitar tradition more than Cyril Pahinui, who has been playing slack-key guitar for more than 40 years, including two performances at Carnegie Hall. To carry on the Pahinui tradition, he has become an ambassador for the music. At his trips to the Chet Atkins Guitar Convention, he regularly fraternizes with players from Australia, Europe and the Mainland. Sometimes he’s asked why he didn’t take up music in a more academic sense. “My degree is my dad, Atta and Sonny. Those are my three masters, and when I play music, I think of them.” As do guitarists around the world; the late Chet Atkins recorded “Pu‘u A Na Hulu” in memory of Gabby.
   
Now that Cyril’s retired from the proverbial day job, he wants to get a studio in Honolulu and teach in ‘Oahu, Maui and the Big Island. He totally supports the young players. “You’re a guitar player, you can play Hawaiian and contemporary, you can play any kind of music. I used to love to play the Beatles, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones.” Makana, he pointed out, has done his own version of Gabby Pahinui’s “Hi‘ilawe.”
   
Cyril Pahinui knows his tradition and is willing to recreate it for all who will listen for as long as he can. I can hear his pleasure and pride gently hushing his words as he tells me, “I thank all the people I played music with from when I was a child until now. We’re all in line, all the generations. I feel like I’m in my dad’s position right now. I hope I can keep on traveling and do a lot of things for the world and other guitarists. In Japan, they know me and my dad. New York, Kentucky—they know me now. My dad’s music will play forever and ever—and from there down the line.”