Hapa
What: Hawaiian duo of Barry Flanagan and Ron Kuala'au perform island-style originals and traditional songs, with hula performers.
When: 7 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd.
Tickets: $45-$55.
Information: 562-556-4824 or www.hapainla.com.
By Al Rudis
It might be the best-known Hawaiian music album of all time, but half of its roots are in New Jersey.
When it was released in 1993, the eponymous first album by the duo Hapa created a tropical storm that is still raging. Barry Flanagan, the founder, feels its winds nearly every day.
You can be sure that many of the songs from "Hapa" will be performed by Flanagan and his partner, Ron Kuala'au, at their concert, Sunday nighttonight,11/13 at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center.
There have been other successful Hapa albums since then, but if they don't perform "Olinda Road," "Anjuli," "Haleakala Ku Hanohano" and "Lei Pikake," it would be like Simon and Garfunkel giving a concert and not performing "The Sounds of Silence," "Mrs. Robinson," "Scarborough Fair" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
Hapa is the Simon and Garfunkel of Hawaii, and even if you've never listened to their albums or seen them perform, their music is familiar from being in the background of television programs and films.
Flanagan is the Paul Simon of the duo.
He is the group's visionary, guitar virtuoso and mastermind. Complementing him is Ron Kuala'au, who is Flanagan's third partner in Hapa.
Kuala'au is a Hawaiian singer-songwriter with an illustrious career. His main role in Hapa is as the Art Garfunkel vocalist. Flanagan sings some lead, too, but mostly he's there to provide the harmony and, as he puts it, "noodling" on guitar.
What makes Hapa's music memorable for anyone who grew up in Hawaii since the 1990 s, or tourists who have been coming across it since then, is Flanagan's synthesis of traditional Hawaiian sounds and instrumentation and styles with the dynamics of such rock duos as Loggins and Messina or Crosby and Nash.
The result is music with beautiful melodies, soaring harmonies and sweeping rhythms that is immediately captivating and doesn't grow tiresome with repeated listening. And between the vocal gems are haunting instrumentals. Hearing Hapa's music, the listener might feel if the Hawaiian Islands could be turned into a movie, this would be its soundtrack.
The name of the group is sort of a joke. Hapa is short for hapa haole, or half-white in Hawaiian slang, and the phrase began as a racial slur, with a connotation similar to half-breed. It was also applied to the music from or about the islands that mixed in jazz and pop elements - often quavering pedal steel guitar - in such songs as "Sweet Leilani" or "My Little Grass Shack."
This music was contrasted to so-called traditional music, which was played on ukulele and guitar, even though both those instruments didn't arrive in the islands from Europe until the 1800 s.
But like many insults, most notably the word jazz, the term was co-opted. Musicians and multi-ethnic Hawaiians began using hapa haole as a description rather than an insult. It also perfectly describes the chemistry of half mainstream pop and half Hawaiian tradition performed by the half-Anglo, half-Hawaiian duo that made that phenomenal first Hapa album.
Flanagan, the musician with the Irish name from New Jersey, is a light-skinned haole who fell in love with Hawaiian music after hearing another famous album, one that came out in 1975 through the efforts of guitarist Ry Cooder.
Cooder convinced his record company to release the album by legendary slack key guitarist Gabby Pahinui and a band of Hawaiian all-star musicians. It was the Hawaiian version of the Buena Vista Social Club, the Cuban musicians whom Cooder championed in a similar way many years later. The album wasn't a big seller, but it introduced Pahinui's virtuosity to a new audience, including many guitarists like Flanagan.
"I grew up in Bergenfield," he said in a phone interview from his Hawaiian home. "It's the hometown of Al DiMeola, a town of about 22,000 people but a lot of guitar players. I was really kind of known as a basketball player, and I loved the practice and routine of the school team.
"And then in my senior year of high school, it literally went from basketball being my main focus to guitar. There were guitars laying around the house, because my mother, who was a nursery school teacher, plays, and my middle sister played in an all-girl Paul Revere and the Raiders cover band. I had taken some lessons and played in bands like Grateful Dead cover bands before, but now it was eight to 10 hours a day of practicing."
Flanagan and a lot of his New Jersey friends decided that Colorado was the promised land and moved there after graduating from high school to establish residency so they could go to college. A Hawaiian student, Rae Dryzmala, who worked at a record store with Flanagan, introduced him to the Pahinui album.
Shortly afterward, the house where Flanagan and some friends were living burned down.
"I ended up with an insurance check, and it was the beginning of winter," said Flanagan. "I got a call from a Hawaiian girl who had been living in the house, and she said why don't you come for the winter?"
It was 1979, and Flanagan flew to Maui. A few months later, he decided to stay.
"The man who changed everything was Jimmie Kaopuiki," said Flanagan. "Jimmie is a bass player and a Hawaiian musician who seemed to know everyone. He was the bridge for me."
Through Kaopuiki and others, Flanagan immersed himself in authentic Hawaiian music, learning the special tunings used by the slack key artists.
"I already knew some open tunings, which really helped," he said. "I knew a song by Peter Frampton called 'A Penny for Your Thoughts' from 'Frampton Comes Alive,' and that actually is in a tuning known in Hawaii as taro patch. So it wasn't all that foreign to me."
Before coming to Hawaii, Flanagan had experience with many guitar styles, and Kaopuiki and others encouraged him to incorporate them into what he was learning.
"I kind of wanted to study traditional slack key," he said. "But their advice was to put your own style and your contemporary stamp inside of the tunings. It was something along the line of 'Keep it real, but create your own map,' which was a big influence on me and later became the mind set behind Hapa."
He met Hawaiian singer Keli'i Kaneali'I at a Christmas party, and when they sang together, they sounded so good that others thought they were in a group. They became Hapa and began practicing, performing and, of course, recording an album. Kaneali'I and Flanagan's second partner, Nathan Aweau, eventually chose to leave Hapa in favor of solo work, and both are still friends, said Flanagan.
Hapa soon was booking shows and playing 500 gigs a year in the thriving Maui club scene of the 1980 s. Making a record didn't turn out to be that easy. Financing appeared and then disappeared, and Flanagan and Kaneali'i had to book studio time when they had enough money.
"It was a blessing in disguise," said Flanagan, "because it gave us time for woodshedding, and every time we got back to the studio with a little bit of our own money and some of the record company's money, we were able to see how much we grew."
They had plenty of time to grow, because they started recording in 1984, and the record didn't come out until nine years later.
"Looking back, I'm glad it took that long," Flanagan said, "because the record kind of sucked at year three. But when we finished, it was pretty mature and still stands up well 18 years later."
What Flanagan learned to do in the course of those nine years was perfect his vision of synthesizing traditional Hawaiian styles with mainstream pop.
"We wanted to make sure that the traditionalists, who are open minded if things are done correctly, would be fine with it," he said. "I was listening to everything during the recording period and I wanted to put it all into the record, but just make sure that the language was pronounced correctly and there was enough original music on it to make a statement.
"At that time, Hawaiian music was dominated by Jamaican music, the Jawaiian style. I wanted to return it back to the groups that I loved so much, like the Sunday Manoa with Peter Moon and the Brothers Cazimero and the Beamer Brothers. And I wanted the production to be slick and more pop oriented."
He succeeded in making an album that crossed into the mainstream and sold over 100,000 albums in Hawaii, with a population of around 900,000 when it was released. And it continues to make an impact.
Last year, Flanagan got a call from one of the record's fans who remembered the album from when he was directing "The Byrds of Paradise" TV series in Hawaii in 1993. It was Dennis Dugan, who was now directing an Adam Sandler film set in Hawaii, and he wanted music from the album for the film "Just Go With It."
A month later, someone from "Hawaii Five-0" decided to feature the band by name to close an episode.
"That first record just keeps going like the Energizer bunny," said Flanagan. "I'm very lucky that it came out when it did and it was what it was. We're touring today because of that record."
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