There’s a reason why some guitarists are considered “masters”. The distinction has less to do with showy technical prowess than with virtuosity so innate as to remain a substratum of performance. Masters transcend the functional parameters of an instrument to tap into and present the essence of a genre; they are the “source” from which mortal players siphon inspiration.
Ledward Ka’apana is a master, and it is fitting that the title of his latest CD is the name of the genre he dominates. Over four decades, a couple dozen recordings, and world tours that have taken him from clubs to A Prairie Home Companion to the Kennedy Center, Ka’apana has come to define ki ho’alu, or Hawaiian slack key guitar.
For skeptics in search of a prodigious skill set behind slack key’s mellow surface charms — the languorous tempos, dreamy melodies, deceptively simple chord progressions — Ledward’s work on Ki ho’alu (much of it in “taro patch” tuning, or DGDGBD) provides the perfect study material.
On the traditional “Living on the Easy” and on his own “Pau Pilikea”, he conducts a clinic on his Muhammad Ali-like balance of power and agility, articulating the melodies and chordal notes with a sharp, “masculine” attack while maintaining a fluid, effortless propulsion marked by silky double-stops and playful grace notes. On Leonard Kwan’s slack key standard, “Opihi Moe Moe”, Led dresses the melody with filigreed, 32nd-note hammer-ons — colorative tassles hung unobtrusively but with strategic, pinpoint precision.
Ka’apana’s compositions (“Fish Market Slack Key”, “Slack Key Lullaby”) demonstrate that he is a latter-day originator, not merely a proponent, of the form. Yet, he also is a masterful interpreter, as evidenced by his intuitive readings of three disparate, somewhat surprising selections — “Killing Me Softly”, “Love is Blue” (!), and a rare instrumental cover of Bob Wills’s “San Antonio Rose”, each of which creates an entirely new context for a venerable, non-Hawaiian song.
And let’s not give short shrift to the un-technical, “aloha” element of slack key — its evocation of peace, place, and people, its celebration of natural beauty and the simple ways of the past in the face of modernism’s aggressive encroachment, its dependence on community and brotherhood for its very existence and sustenance. No one alive captures these qualities quite as comprehensively or compellingly as Ledward Ka’apana, and this CD is a high-water mark of his art.
[On Ki ho’alu, produced by Slack Key Festival impresario Milton Lau, Ledward not only employs an entire rack of our guitars (as well as ukelele, one of several instruments he plays), he even honors us with a song, “Wood&Steel Slack Key”, dedicated to “Taylor Guitars, makers of the finest acoustic guitars in the world” and to this publication. Right back at ya, Led.]
— John D’Agostino
There’s a reason why some guitarists are considered “masters”. The distinction has less to do with showy technical prowess than with virtuosity so innate as to remain a substratum of performance. Masters transcend the functional parameters of an instrument to tap into and present the essence of a genre; they are the “source” from which mortal players siphon inspiration.