His new album, "Mauna Kea -- White Mountain Journal," will be released this week by Dancing Cat, along with new works by Bla Pahinui, George Kahumoku Jr. and Ledward Ka'apana with Bob Brozman. Illustrious company.
All are giving a public concert Saturday to celebrate.
The album's title grows out of Beamer's lifelong reverence for the mighty Big Island volcano, about which he has kept a journal most of his life. Not a journal as the rest of us know it -- it's musical.
"The older I get, I find that words are such crude tools to express and approximate emotion," said Beamer, who is recording another work on Maui this week. "Music, however, goes straight to the heart. Bypasses the brain.
"Slack key is a beautiful medium for expressing this, because of the spatial qualities of the music. The music is not just the notes, it's the spaces between the notes. The silences speak loudly. You fall into it, like being bitten by a virus. You learn so much intellectually, and suddenly, you're bitten; you're hanging with the players, vibrating sympathetically."
Like lots of local kids, and despite his family's musical traditions, Beamer "took Hawaiian music for granted" when he was younger.
"It's difficult for a younger person to appreciate the beauty around us, or to see the deep soulfulness of the culture, one that's unique in this world. Well, it opens a door right into your own soul. I get the inspiration from nature, from the pulsing of the mountain, like the rising and falling rhythms of a small boat on the water. It's part of growing to understand that."
Before the Hawaiian "renaissance" of the late 1970s, "no one really gave slack key a chance. It was treated as a backyard, folksy musical style, and not considered one of the great guitar traditions of the world -- which it is. . . .
"And we interfered with our own progress. If you weren't part of that particular family, forget it! The tunings were secret. The playing was secret.
"I once saw a man playing the most beautiful slack key I ever heard in my life, and I rushed up to him with nothing but love in my heart, to sit down and listen to him play, but when he saw that I was not part of his family, he stopped playing and turned his back on me. That kind of attitude almost killed slack key. You have to hold on to the things you love with an open hand, not a closed fist."
In the 1970s, Beamer wrote "Keola Beamer's First Method for Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar," the first manual ever written for the guitar styling, and yes, he got heat for it. He continues to teach, and the latest slack-key information is available at his web site. Just because Beamer plays in "the real old style" doesn't mean he hasn't embraced advances in technology.
Beamer worked with composer Christopher Tyng on the soundtrack to "Mr. Spreckman's Boat," a film to be released later this year, and while he found the "fertile cross-cultural teamwork intellectually challenging," he zeroed in on on Hollywood's "elegant digital editing platforms. I bought one for myself -- it's empowering technology!
"This stuff has caused a revolution in recording. You know, when my first recording started in 1971, there were six albums released that year in Hawaii. Last year there were 133! I don't miss the vinyl at all, but I do miss the big album jackets. Recordings are tremendously important -- they are our legacy."
OK, there's one advance in technology he hasn't tried -- composite guitars. "You know the Hawaiian philosophy about an instrument: It shares your sorrow. It shares your joy. The feeling flows through the instrument, like mana, like your blood in your children. You pick up an instrument, cold from the case, and you play, and the molecules in the wood begin to vibrate, and get in line, and the feeling flows back into you. How do you do that with ... graphite? Guitars are very healing. Give armies guitars instead of guns, and pretty soon no one will feel like fighting."
For a guy who considers words "crude tools," Keola Beamer manages to express himself pretty well.
Na Mele O Hawaii celebrates the release of four slack-key CDs with a concert:
Date: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow