Slack-key guitarist Beamer leads revival of Hawaiian music

Hawaii's "First Couple" Moana and Keola Beamer take to the stage Friday night at the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center.

With a rebooted "Hawaii Five-0" ruling the airwaves and phrases like mahalo creeping into the popular vernacular, it may be hard to believe that there was a time when even Hawaiians did not embrace Hawaiian culture.

"When I was a boy growing up it wasn't really cool to be Hawaiian," says Keola Beamer, 60, the acclaimed Maui slack-key guitarist who performs Friday at St. Mary Episcopal School's Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center. "There was a bit of negative stigma attached to it. I know that sounds kind of strange, but that's actually what happened back in those days."

That attitude began to change in the late '60s with the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance, a movement that mirrored the consciousness-raising going on in African-American, Latino, Native American, gay, and other marginalized communities back on the mainland. And Beamer helped provide the soundtrack to that movement, starting with his 1972 debut album Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar in the Real Old Style.

Today, it seems altogether fitting that Beamer would lead a revival of interest in traditional Hawaiian music. He can trace his family back through the legendary 19th century king Kamehameha I, all the way back to the 14th century. He represents the fifth generation of musicians in his family, a line that includes his great grandmother, the singer and composer Helen Kapuailohia Desha Beamer, and his mother Winona Beamer, a respected musician, dancer, and educator who coined the term Hawaiiana for the study of the islands culture.

Though he played guitar from an early age, accompanying hula dancers in his mother studio, Keola Beamer thought he wanted to pursue a different path early on.

"When I went away to college I was actually a philosophy major," he recalls. "Then I picked up a guy hitchhiking in Canada one year when I was a student. He had a doctorate in philosophy and I was so excited to meet him. We were driving along and I said to him. 'You know, you're living the life I want to lead. What do you do?' And he said, 'Don't be too excited about philosophy. I clean pet cages in Montreal.'"

Moving back to Hawaii, Beamer rededicated himself to music, specifically the obscure art of slack-key guitar. Possibly introduced to the islands in the early 19th century by visiting Mexican vaqueros, slack-key is a finger style guitar technique that emphasizes open tunings. Though Hawaiian slack-key has achieved limited success on the mainland, the basic technique has been very influential in blues and country-and-western music where the open tunings facilitate slide guitar playing.

"It's kind of a beautiful, open guitar sound," says Beamer, who in the early '70s wrote the first method book for Hawaiian slack-key. "It has these modal tunings where the guitar is kind of an open platform."

Beginning in the '90s, Beamer also recorded a series of popular albums on the Windham Hill imprint Dancing Cat.

While Beamer hasn't made a record since 2006, he remains very busy. This fall he can be heard on the soundtrack to Alexander Payne's new Hawaii-set movie "The Descendants" starring George Clooney. And next year he will star in his own PBS television special, tentatively titled "Keola Beamer & Friends."

However, like his mother before him, Beamer's greatest passion these days seems to be for teaching people about the traditions and sounds of Hawaii. He has pioneered online music learning with his web sitekbeamer.com as well as live one-on-one Internet lessons. And twice a year he hosts a music camp where students "hang out with us for a week, play music, drink a lot of wine, and talk about the culture."

Even this Friday's concert, in which Beamer will accompany his wife Moanalani (a kumu hula or hula master,) will have a strong educational component.

"People think they know about Hawaiian music from movies, but that's like me watching a Tarzan movie and thing I understand African music," jokes Beamer. "We try to explain some stuff. I think it's important to be inclusive with audiences. People's attention is precious, so we really try to do a good show people can understand and relate to."

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Keola and Moanalani Beamer

8 p.m. Friday at the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center at St. Mary's Episcopal School, 60 Perkins Ext. Tickets: $25, available online at buckmanartscenter.com. For more information, call (901) 537-1483.

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