Kaleponi
News
April
3 , 2009
Big
Fun in SoCal
The "No Planning" tour is over and I'm ready to
go back again already. Our trip included long stretches of
the Pacific Coast Highway, California Highway 1, which must
be one of the most scenic roads in the nation. Traffic was
light, the weather was gorgeous, the miles rolled by.
We
visited the Southern
California Slack Key Society at their weekly open mic
at Kaisen
Sushi in Oceanside and enjoyed the food and camaraderie,
not to mention the music. Nancy Cook, a buddy from Taropatch.net,
hosted a kanikapila at her lovely Mannhattan Beach home where
there was plenty more food, friends, and music.
The
Wingert House concert was another food, friends, and music
adventure. I was especially honored and thrilled to have Lehua
Kaapana Nash open the show with her duet partner, Chuck Burnett.
Lehua certainly demonstrated that talent runs in some
families. Please visit the Music
section for a video clip from the concert.
March
15, 2009
Rancho
Palos Verdes House Concert
Master luthier Kathy
Wingert is starting a house concert series at her home in
Rancho Palos Verdes and she has asked me to be her first performer.
The show will take place on Saturday, March 28, 2009, at 7:30
PM. Please contact Kathy at
wingerthouse@yahoo.com for a reservation.
More
News ...
|

Let's
get together and play music in California
Welcome
to Kaleponi Records,
musical home of Fran Guidry. I'm a convert to the joys of
Hawaiian music, and play kika ki ho`alu or slack key
guitar.
Kaleponi
is the Hawaiian word for California, where I live. There
are many connections between Hawai`i and California in history
and today. There are vibrant Hawaiian and Polynesian communities
throughout the Golden State. There are also many of us who
cherish our visits to Hawai`i, and who love the music, dance,
food, and attitudes that spring from those islands.
Ki
ho`alu, or slack key, has a direct link to California history.
The guitar was carried to the Big Island of Hawai`i by vaqueros
from California. Of course, this all happened in the 1830s,
when California was still a state of Mexico. You can read
more about the history
of slack key guitar on the Dancing Cat Records web site.
Slack
key guitar is named for the retuning that characterizes
the style. Most of these new tunings feature loosened, or
slackened, strings which give a deep rich sound. The retuning
leads to new chord shapes and melodic contours which add to
the distinctive slack key sound. The strings are usually played
by plucking or brushing with thumb and fingers, rather than
using a flatpick, or plectrum, and this fingerstyle technique
allows a slack key player to produce a bass line, chordal
accompaniment, and melody line simultaneously.
My
personal slack key history goes back to 1999 and my first
visit to Hawai`i. I had played rock'n'roll for years, then
given up music in the mid 90s, but when we turned on the TV
in our Waikiki hotel room I was captivated by the playing
of Keola
Beamer. I knew in an instant that I had to learn to play
this beautiful music. This new style of playing proved very
difficult for me, and it was over a year later that I found
a wonderful resource - Ozzie
Kotani's "Guitar Playing Hawaiian Style." This
book gave me the insight I needed to learn to play fingerstyle,
and also provided a vocabulary of slack key motifs that started
me on my way.
The
second phase of my slack key began when I met Patrick
Landeza, a California native born of island parents. Patrick
is one of the leading Hawaiian music artists in the San Francisco
Bay Area (and beyond) and at that time he shared his knowledge
by teaching and also arranging artist workshops. In 2002 I
began taking lessons from Patrick, and my playing immediately
went to a new level. I attended workshops with other slack
key artists when they visited our area and learned new facets
of the style each time. Eventually Patrick invited me to perform
with him and with visiting artists, and that generous gesture
inspired me to work even harder at developing my own personal
slack key style.
My
goal in playing slack key is to share the pleasure I've
found in this music, to expand the audience for slack key
and all Hawaiian music, and to introduce the many talented
slack key artists to as many new fans as possible. I'm convinced
that the world will be a better place when Hawaiian music,
and especially slack key guitar, reaches more people.
|