pressurizing the local
The band was in-between songs and there were still tables open when I walked in to the Dragon Upstairs last Saturday, just behind a group of retiree-aged hipsters. “C’mon in,” boomed a voice from a dimly-lit corner; the band gestured for us to do the same. I gamely follow a white-haired man in a pin-stripped fedora into the intimate, match-box sized club.
Ideas from the class reading bopped around inside my head:*
Stressing and pressurizing the local as a site of “critical resistance” posits a more dynamic way of imagining the relationship of a region, nation, and globe in which difference is not subsumed nor reified but circulated and affirmed” (Wilson 14).
I side-stepped the bell of a trumpet held close and low, nodding to the band while snaking past the potentially expectoration-flecked front line, to the raised seating area where Rowen, Miki and Hank sat holding court at the best table in the house.
It was only the second time I’d met Hank, the owner of both the Dragon Upstairs and Hank’s Cafe, another live music venue downstairs in the same Nuuanu Street building. Last year was the first time we’d met, I’d interviewed him for an article for Hawaii Luxury magazine. He’d impressed me with his charisma and passion for music. I’d sat at the bar drinking chardonnay, asking questions and scribbling notes for my story. Eventually he leaned in and spelled it out: “I want Hawaiian jazz.”
Hawaiian jazz was not on the bill last Saturday. This event was Bop Tribal, a night of “New York Style Jazz” described in some detail on the club website:
The collective assembled by leader Satomi Yarimizo (piano), BOP TRIBAL showcases the fierce improvisational prowess of its members. DeShannon Higa (trumpet) & Reggie Padilla (tenor saxophone) provide the dual melodic elements while Yarimizo, Darryl Pellegrini, and Jon Hawes lay down the groove like a well-oiled, high octane machine. B.T.’s home base is in 50s hard bop, but it adeptly weaves its way through modal jazz, bebop, post bop, and even hip hop. This is quintessential New York jazz, transported to the Honolulu stage!
Now, I like the potential that improvisation represents. Whether it’s comedy, rhyme or music, it can be as transcendingly sublime as it can be just suckingly terrible, it’s the chance of either that allows for both. However, that potential alone does not localize expression, regardless of who plays it or where. The Bop Tribal collective very consciously roots itself in a “quintessential” jazz syntax which is “transported” to Honolulu. And as expected, they sounded great. The jazz heads in the rapidly-filling house couldn’t get enough.
Already feeling the buzz of excitement, my ears perked up when Yarimizo announced the next song as one by DeShannon Higa, called (I believe??) “Manoa Mist.” Was this Hawaiian jazz?! I listened for a couple minutes. It was a lovely piece, more mellow and languid compared to the previous songs, but after the title, I couldn’t hear anything I recognized as Hawaiian. I asked Hank, “Is this Hawaiian jazz?”
“No!” he said firmly, then more gently, “no.”
Hawaiian jazz, he tells me later, is Hawaiian songs in a jazz motif. He mentions a 1959 recording by Rene Paolo that included “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua Hawaii” done without vocals in a progressive jazz style, as the type of music he wants to hear.
“There are a million people doing [standard] jazz, I want something that will set us apart from the pack,” he says speaking from the experience of years as a marketing executive. Yet his words echo the theory we’re reading, too, for example when he says he wants “something different but that makes sense for Hawaii.”
To that end, Hank creates a space for performance, cajoles jazz artists to play Hawaiian music and has even funded recording sessions. Once I saw him seemingly overcome with emotion when a Hawaiian vocalist took on a jazz standard. In a few weeks he hopes to launch a night playing in just this style. He’s insistent about Hawaiian jazz being the music he wants to hear.
Compare that with Ron Wilson’s call to action in “Reimagining the Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond:”
[T]he invention of an ‘Asia-Pacific’-based poetics demands border crossing, conceptual outreach, nomadic linkages, and interdisciplinary originality; its birth at this moment is mired in cultural politics and the global political economy. Much needs to be done to . . . nurtur[e] alternative spheres and counternarratives inside public culture (50).
Whether Hawaiian jazz will ever emerge as a “site of critical resistance,” remains to be seen. It might fizzle out without catching on, it might follow Jawaiian down the path of banal oversaturation. But it will happen in a “particularized place” (14) with local artists using local styles to participate in a global dialog.
Given the centrality of Bamboo Ridge to his argument, Wilson’s criteria for accomplishment of effective local criticism does not seem to require mass mediated popularity, tho Hank clearly sees that angle. I ask him about the political potential of combining Hawaiian and jazz, given that each has been and sometimes still is, rebel music.
“Hawaiian jazz could probably make a political impact,” he says, humoring me. “But that does not concern me. My thing is doing something that isn’t being done. I just want to hear the music.”
* sure, I think in jazzy blockquotes with citations, don’t you?? ;~j
Filed under Hawaii, music |8 Responses to “pressurizing the local”
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Hi Jeela-
hawaiian jazz sounds exciting- what I kind of latched onto in your paper was the idea of “something that makes sense for hawaii(ans)”-This is the type of gut feeling that sometimes gets discredited by parties with different ideas/visions- yet,I know what he means- sometimes I wish the world was more open to doing things that “make sense”- sarah
jeela: like sara, i was also excited when Hawaiian jazz was mentioned. however, one of my concerns was which types of songs musicians would choose to arrange in a jazz style and how much local can be maintained before it is consumed entirely by the global.
thx ladies! :~j you make a good point tomo, even a song like My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua Hawaii has some “baggage” w/re to the local.
Hey Jeela.
I guess one thing that jumped out for me for whatever reason, is to what extent do we need to account for some kind of balanced bidirectional flow in critical regionalism? What I mean is, we have Hawai`i importing and adapting cultural forms like reggae and jazz, but at some point do we need to “balance the books,” so to speak, and ensure that Hawai`ian cultural forms are then exported to the rest of the world? If not, isn’t it just repackaged globalization, as local spaces adopt more and more globalized cultural forms without having a recognized voice of their own?
You know, I really have to login to Facebook more often, so I can see when you post new blogs…I have figured out that feeder thing yet.
Anyway MANY years ago (when I was still at UH..95 or 96?)I went to see a show at the Art Academy theater with Byron Yasui (my music theory teacher at the time)and Lyle Ritz. Looking back at my journal on this, they did a lot of Hawaiian songs ranging from hapa-haole tunes (Waikiki, Blue Hawaii) to actual Hawaiian songs that I knew (Koke’e, Kanaka Waiwai) and it was DOPE.
Were they more able to translate Hawaiian into Jazz because of their experience/age? That might be dismissive of the younger cats playing jazz, but still..the more people that you play with the better your improvisation becomes. I would think that you have to know about the chord structures in slack key guitar tunings, or else if you strayed outside of them during your solo, it would sound less-hawaiian(??)
Around that same time there used to be a “big band” that played at Coconuts at the Ilikai on Mondays. 20 guys or so. I can’t remember if they did Hawaiian songs or not.
ay, Sean the feed is EASY if you use Firefox?? there is an orange icon to the right of the place where you type the URL. click that and then subscribe in Live Bookmarks… then under “Bookmarks” the browser will have all the latest headlines of any RSS-enabled site you add, including mines hehehe
there are a bunch of other ways to subscribe (I use Google Reader) but the browser method is super duper easy.
thx thx for your comment. I know jazzy/Hawaiian styles have happened from time to time, but if they want to make it a movement, practice/jamming/improv/commitment is totally key! people just gotta do the dang thing and see what happens…
Sorry I missed you guys when you were out here :’( I tried but SOMEONE was giving me a hard time! friggin guy! glad you guys got to meet up tho :~j
Hey jeela- just came across an article (Hawaiians on Tour) which names Johnny Noble as “the Hawaiian King of Jazz” circa 1929 when his hapa-haole hit “for you a lei” was popular- the song is described by the author Adria L. Imada as ” a jazz-influenced hula faeturing English language lyrics”(121)-This is from the March 2004 American Quarterly. Anyways thought it might be of interest-sarah
ps- still have your video- must get together-ciao!
PPS- COULDN’T FIND THE JOHNNY NOBLE VERSION BUT HERE IS A CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE OF THE SONG ON YOUTUBE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FDLYC5xess
ah, thx for passing that on, Sarah. It would be so interesting to comb through past archives looking for songs in this style. I’ll have to ask Hank what he thinks of Johnny Noble…