When Grandma
and Grandpa were
cutting a groove in
Honolulu’s swing clubs
It's the music of the islands given the MTV treatment.
The quaintness of hapa-haole music races headlong into the 21st century in a quickly paced and effects-laden special produced by KHON2 News that airs tonight and Sunday afternoon.
"Hapa-Haole Days -- Swingtime in Hawaii"
9:30 p.m. today on KHON; rebroadcast 4:30 p.m. Sunday
Affable morning anchor-reporter, and music aficionado, Kirk Matthews is the special's host, executive producer and co-writer, along with Howard Dicus of Pacific Business News.
The special features interviews with local musical luminaries Gabe Baltazar, Auntie Genoa Keawe, Noel Okimoto, Byron Yasui, Jimmy Borges, Mihana Souza, Martin Denny, plus Abe Weinstein, the man behind next weekend's Hawaii International Jazz Festival, where "Swingtime in Hawaii" will come to life at the Hawaii Theatre.
"It's all about the music from the '30s through the early '50s," creative director Roy Kimura said, "and the influence swing music had on Hawaiian music, and vice versa. ... Even though the special's airing is timely for the jazz festival, it's meant to be a stand-alone thing.
"The look of the special is nothing like anything before produced here. Editor Keoni Fernandez brought a good style and feel to it. Since it's about music, it has to have a rhythm in order for it to move well, and he embraced that."
"It's a rapid-fire walk down memory lane," Matthews said. "Not only will it be of interest to people that lived through it, but will be of interest to their kids and grandkids. It shows that grandma wasn't always in the garden, tending her plants -- she also spent a lot of time at places like the Brown Derby or the Alexander & Baldwin rooftop garden."
The special walks the fine line between form and content, balancing the fascinating history of hapa-haole music of years gone by with Kimura and Fernandez's aggressively stylized work. Interviews are intercut between in-studio and projected video shown by a constantly tracking shot that emphasizes the artifice of the medium. Some of the transition wipes are imaginatively rendered with musician silhouettes and a bunch of plumeria. Archive film footage and photos are manipulated with video effects for maximum impact.
It all makes for a busy, multilayered approach that could've sabotaged the content, but there's enough content in "Hapa-Haole Days" to still make it swing, and whetten the appetite to investigate further.
"I had my early years in the big band era," Matthews said, "so swing was my first music, and was comfortable with hapa- haole music. In producing this special, I learn about the juxtaposition and interpollinization that happened between hapa-haole and swing. Louis Armstrong even had a big hit with his version of Charles E. King's 'Song of the Islands.'
Matthews obviously enjoyed the process of putting this program together, watching the old movie clips and seeing the enthusiasm of his interview subjects as they spoke of the time when the music of Hawaii truly made an international impact, right up to the years of exotica.
"It was a labor of love on the part of a lot of people," he said.
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