In the slack-key of love: Hawaiian guitarist Makana
March 1, 2019 / Molly Boyle / Pasatiempo
Two years ago, Hawaiian musician Makana was reunited with the guitar he thought was gone forever. Named Morning Star, the guitar was stolen from Makana’s Kaimuki home in 2005. For more than a decade, one of Hawaii’s most internationally acclaimed slack-key guitarists played on, opening for Sting, Elvis Costello, and Carlos Santana without his self-described “best friend.” It had been given to the child prodigy at age eleven by his late mentor Sonny Chillingworth.
Then in January 2017, he got an email. It said, “Aloha I might have your guitar.” A man who had bought the instrument for $100 on Craigslist had a hunch it belonged to Makana.
“It’s funny sometimes when you let things go, that’s when the magic happens,”
Makana told Hawaii News Now at the time.
The same might be said of Makana’s signature musical mode, which also embraces the magic that can result from letting things go. Slack-key guitar refers to a style of playing that uses open tunings, achieved by “slacking” the strings until all six form a single chord. Both hands are thus freed to create bass, rhythm, and melody simultaneously, resulting in a big sound that can mimic the synergy of three guitarists playing together.
The style originated from gauchos who migrated to Hawaii to work as cow punchers in the 1800s, bringing Spanish guitars with them. The music evolved from there to encompass the rhythms of Hawaiian melodies, but was not recorded until the mid-20th century. The slack-key guitar achieved popularity during the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance of the 1970s with players like Chillingworth, Gabby Pahinui, and Leonard Kwan.
“You can hear Hawaii just with certain tunings,” Makana said in a phone interview. He comes to Albuquerque on Friday, March 1, to play at Outpost Performance Space.
The guitarist is prudent about his mission in life — or kuleana, a Hawaiian word for a spiritual responsibility.
“I made it my kuleana to perpetuate slack-key guitar, and I’ve been evangelizing about the art form because it’s a dying art form.
The player base is so small, and so many of the masters have died, and there’s just a handful of us left.”
True to the slack-key tradition, which drew on the multitude of influences that shaped Hawaiian culture, Makana’s eight albums defy genres. He’s called his sound “slack rock,” combining elements of blues, rock, bluegrass, and raga. Though he said he does not come from a particularly musical family, one of his grandfather’s uncles, songwriter John Volinkaty, wrote the country song “Satin Sheets,” a number-one hit for singer Jeanne Pruett in 1973. “It was the first country number-one hit to go into the bedroom and talk about bedroom issues. I’m very proud of that.”
He described his new record, out later this year, as drawing on percussive hula implements, ukulele, slack-key and steel guitar, and conch-shell blowing. As if that traditional array isn’t dizzying enough, those traditions are couched in a modern context of house, acid jazz, hip-hop, and funk.
In 2011, Makana ramped up his longtime songwriting mission of addressing social change when he was invited by First Lady Michelle Obama to perform at a dinner during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Waikiki. Just before the summit, he had returned from a visit to New York, where the Occupy Wall Street protests were at their apex in Zuccotti Park. He had been thinking about a New York Times article that bemoaned the Occupy movement’s lack of protest songs. “It was true, but at the same time, it pissed me off,” he remembered. He sat down on his living room floor and wrote a song called “We Are the Many.”
He released a homemade video for the song on Nov. 11, 2011, which began going viral a day before the APEC dinner. The next day, in front of the leaders of more than 20 countries and his hosts, the Obamas, he sang,
Our government is not for sale
The banks do not deserve a bail
We will not reward those who fail
We will not move till we prevail
“In that moment, my life changed,” he said. “In a moment like that, where my career could be over, I could get arrested, there was so much fear — but also surrender.” Makana’s performance of the new protest song made worldwide headlines, turning into the top story on Yahoo! News for two days. He appeared on CNN, ABC, Democracy Now!, and The Sean Hannity Show to promote “We Are the Many,” which Rolling Stone dubbed “The Occupy Anthem.”
His new video “Mourning Armageddon” was filmed in the Russian nuclear fallout shelter Bunker 703. Inside, he improvised a protest song on the spot, inspired by the ominous surroundings and the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation. “In all of my shows,” he said, “I also educate and I talk about these things. It’s not a recital. It’s like going to church.”
A large part of that hallowed sentiment stems from the unique sounds he makes with the beat-up, lost-and-found guitar he’ll wield onstage at Outpost. “My guitar is really a piece of junk,” he admitted. “But I’ve infused it with so much of my — Hawaiians call it mana. It’s like my life force, my energy, my sweat, my DNA, my intentions.”