Hawaiian Music Star, Maker Of Hybrid Hits, Seeks A Bigger Stage Beyond Waikiki

HONOLULU — Henry Kapono spends most Sunday afternoons here, on the beachfront patio of Dukes Waikiki restaurant at the Outrigger Waikiki hotel. His standing engagement has become something of an island institution over the years. Its a bar gig, maybe not what you might expect from a Hawaiian music veteran of Mr. Kaponos stature. But he throws himself into it nonetheless, routinely playing for two hours without a break, to stoke the fires of a dancing-and-drinking crowd.

Henry Kapono, a Hawaiian music veteran, performing at Waikiki.

During one recent show a catamaran bobbed in the surf behind Mr. Kapono as he segued from I Can See Clearly Now, the reggae war horse by Johnny Nash, to Every Day in the Islands, one of his own hybrid Jawaiian (a mixture of Jamaican and Hawaiian) tunes. His four-piece band was crisp. The festive scene was typical, and true to the image Mr. Kapono paints in a song called Dukes on Sunday, which Jimmy Buffett borrowed as a closer for his last album.

But you wont find Mr. Kapono at Dukes on Feb. 11, because hell be in Los Angeles for the 49th Grammy Awards. He is among the nominees for best Hawaiian music album, for The Wild Hawaiian (Eclectic), which somehow represents both the most traditional and the most radical work of his career. Whether you regard him as a front-runner or as a long shot depends partly on your definition of Hawaiian music, a controversial issue ever since the category was established a few years ago.

The Wild Hawaiian is a Hawaiian rock album. More specifically, its an album of songs in the Hawaiian language, against a whiplash of percussion and distorted guitars. At times, its sound suggests Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana, artists Mr. Kapono often covers at his Sunday gig. Lyrically, it reaches further back: in some cases, to venerable Hawaiian chants. Not surprisingly, its release last year caused a bit of a stir.

The Hawaiians were taken aback when they first heard it, said Alakai Paleka, the program director and morning host of KPOA (93.5 FM), a Maui radio station that has three tracks from the album in rotation. It was rocking some songs that werent rocked before. The response — it was shock. Using the Hawaiian term for elder, she continued, Some of the kupunas were not happy with the style.

Over lunch at Dukes with his wife and manager, Lezlee Kaaihue, and their 6-month-old twins, Mr. Kapono, 58, described the album in less controversial terms: as a cultural outreach and the result of personal introspection.

My mom and dad spoke fluent Hawaiian; they were both pure Hawaiians, he said, recalling his upbringing as Henry Kaaihue. (Kapono is his middle name.) But they would never speak it to us. When they were growing up, they were forbidden to speak the language, and punished for it. So they never taught us the language. That was the case for my generation.

Mr. Kapono is a product of the 1960s, though it was in the 70s that his career took flight, when he teamed up with Cecilio Rodriguez, a fellow guitarist and singer. As Cecilio and Kapono, the duo made a string of breezy acoustic pop albums that resonated deeply at home and beyond, though perhaps not as well nationally as Columbia Records would have liked. (They didnt know what to do with C & K, Mr. Kapono said of the label. We were two brown-skinned guys with long hair singing contemporary music.)

Cecilio and Kapono were Hawaiis answer to Simon and Garfunkel, though its important to note that they too sang in English. Many of the duos best-loved songs — originals like Friends and Sailing, as well as covers like All in Love Is Fair, by Stevie Wonder — qualify as Hawaiian music only on a technicality. But for several generations of listeners, those songs embody the sound of Hawaii, at least in part.

After the breakup of C & K in the early 1980s, Mr. Kapono embarked on a successful solo career. About a decade ago he set out to make his first Hawaiian-language album, using traditional instrumentation. I did a recording, he said, and when I listened back, it was missing something. It just didnt have that power.

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