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HAWAII UNPLUGGED   (p. 2 of 3)

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Leilani Rivera Bond, who performs against the night sky at the Hyatt Regency hotel, is a source of great wisdom regarding this practice. Slack key is played on a standard-issue steel-string guitar, tuned in a variety of idiosyncratic ways. She herself plays a normally tuned guitar but spends much of her time in the mountains with the cowboys (the paniolo), who prefer the bizarre tunings.

Slack key is inextricably linked to cow culture. Captain George Vancouver brought a mini-herd of bovines as a gift for the Hawaiian king, Kamehameha the Great, in 1792. Since the king made it taboo to harm the ungulates, they quickly multiplied, and soon cowboys followed to keep them in line. Mexican cowboys brought Spanish guitars and left their instruments behind when they departed. As Leilani tells it, they didn’t teach anybody how to tune them properly, so Hawaiians came up with their own tunings, each jealously guarded by the family who invented it.

On my next green island, Maui, I meet one of Hawaii’s greatest living slack key players, George Kahumoku, who expands upon this story. Slack key was once a very intimate tradition, he explains. You would play for your loved ones but would turn your back to a stranger so he could not steal your technique. And when you put your guitar down, you would loosen the strings so he could not steal your tuning. "I am not one person," he tells me. "When I play, I am my whole family." George then gives me an astonishing private concert, in which he switches back and forth between his family’s musical styles. "This is how my uncle plays... and this is how my grandmother played... and this is how my great-grandfather played..."

George’s performance, in the theatre at the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, has been arranged for me by Clifford Naeole, the hotel’s cultural advisor. How many high-ranking employees in luxury hotels make a habit of showing subversive movies to their guests? Clifford sits me down to watch And Then There Were None, a documentary whose title refers to the chilling demographic fact that by the year 2040, there will almost certainly be no pure Hawaiians left. As Clifford says nonchalantly, "My people are going to flatline."

He and Paul Konwiser, an equally zealous cultural warrior, stage weekly concerts at the Ritz theatre. It’s packed this afternoon with great musicians, and Clifford introduces me to another Hawaiian legend: Richard Ho’opi’i, an older ukulele player who sings in a haunting falsetto. He gives me a brief private performance, and when we chat afterwards, I mention Jake Shimabukuro. He smiles with amusement and says, "I am very traditional."

Thanks to Clifford and friends, ukulele and slack key are alive and singing on the islands. But what of the denigrated steel guitar? More than one person tells me gravely that "there are only three steel guitar players" left in Hawaii. (How did they come up with this number?) But it turns out that this genre is also alive and is slowly reasserting itself as new artists achieve prominence. Owana Salazar, for instance, is a celebrated soprano who has mastered the steel guitar (traditionally the domain of men), as well as slack key and the ukulele. She also happens to have royal roots: Ms. Salazar is, more properly, "Owana Ka’ohelelani Mahealani-rose Salazar of the House of Keoua Nui."

The time has come to take the big step, on Hawaii’s Big Island. This island is, in part, a moonscape of black lava dotted with mysterious moving graffiti: protestations of undying passion created with white stones and shells carefully placed against the black stony ground. At the opulent Four Seasons Hualalai, I decide to establish what I secretly suspect – that I have what it takes to be a truly magnificent ukulele player.

I take a lesson with Auntie Elaine. (In Hawaii, "Auntie" is a term of respect for elders.) She permits me not to sing. Having studied guitar – although I am execrable – I find that I can quickly master the basic chords. No problem: After a couple of weeks of practice, I shall be Jake Shimabukuro.

On my way back to the airport, I slip one of his CDs into the car’s player. Within a few bars, I realize – with the sinking feeling I associate with stepping into an open manhole – that my sense of innate talent has been an oh-so-cruel hallucination. I am a flea who can’t jump.

As more of the world hears Jake Shimabukuro, it will become impossible to continue to associate the ukulele with novelty acts. And Hawaii itself will no longer be considered one big Elvis movie, augmented by happy dancing natives, wacky cocktails and tacky tiki. This sort of thing has happened before. At the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, a certain instrument was associated only with vaudeville comics and horn-honking clowns. All it took was a single virtuoso to reform that instrument’s reputation. That man was Coleman Hawkins, and the instrument was the tenor saxophone.   [ ]

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