Keeping their rhythm
Streetlight Cadence stays true to form after moving from Hawaii to L.A. and will perform at the MACC on Dec. 16
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Moving to Los Angeles from Oahu about a year ago, the musicians of Streetlight Cadence noticed a major difference in how Mainland audiences responded to their street performances.
"The attention span is very short," Streetlight's Chaz Umamoto explains. "It's very different compared to Hawaii. We can't stop to talk to people and tell them we're from Hawaii because they will just leave. In Hawaii, they like it when we interact with the audience."
The Hoku Award-winning alternative folk-pop quartet, which started out busking around Waikiki, took to the streets of Santa Monica, playing five days a week, four hours a day for dollars.
"We prioritized surviving," Umamoto continues. "We were making a really good living when we left Hawaii, but in California street performing became our livelihood."
Because the musicians were from Hawaii, some folks assumed they would play Hawaiian music.
"They will ask us to play 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole," he notes. "We know a couple of songs, but we rarely play them. We just do what we do best."
What they do best is create delightful, indie folk-pop brimming with energy and enthusiasm, performed on violin, cello, accordion and guitar, that reflects influences of bands like Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers. Twice winning Na Hoku Awards for Alternative Album of the Year for 2014's "Kalakaua Avenue" and the recent "Beyond Paradise," they were finalists in the 2014 Global Hard Rock Rising Battle of the Bands.
"We had performed in Honolulu for six years and had achieved a lot of the goals we had set out for ourselves," Umamoto says, explaining their move to Southern California. "There were goals we couldn't accomplish by staying in Hawaii, and we could street perform like we did in Waikiki. It was like a necessary evil to move to Los Angeles."
Featuring Jonathon Franklin (violin), Brian Webb (cello), Jesse Shiroma (accordion and percussion) and Umamoto (guitar), all four musicians were classically trained. Shiroma and Umamoto are University of Hawaii at Manoa graduates, while Webb and Franklin graduated from Hawaii Pacific University.
Their story began with Franklin playing on the streets of Waikiki so he could afford to eat, and then accordionist and foot percussionist Shiroma joined in after responding to a Craigslist ad looking for "musicians who play interesting instruments." Soon crowds were enthusiastically responding to sets that ranged from Mozart to Lady Gaga.
Releasing "Thinking of You," followed by "Kalakaua Avenue," they raised funds through Kickstarter to produce "Beyond Paradise," their most accomplished work to date. Enhanced with a big production, some of their most captivating songs like "I Need You Tonight" and "Feel It" recall Coldplay's joyful anthems.
"We had never worked on a project where we could create what we wanted," Umamoto says. "It was always, we had a small budget, and record as fast as we can. 'Beyond Paradise' was an experiment for us to find out what we wanted to create without any boundaries."
With the holidays in mind, they have released a new live, acoustic album of Christmas favorites, along with posting a weekly series of live performances of yuletide hits on YouTube.
"We like to come back home with something new to give to people," he says. "We had never done a Christmas album and everyone was asking us to record the Christmas songs that we do perform. We picked nine songs that we really liked and put a new spin on each one, like 'Little Town of Bethlehem' has always been a really slow song and we arranged it with a Louis Jordan '40s vibe. Every song was rearranged in a way other groups haven't done. We wanted something fresh and engaging."
The "Home for the Holidays" album includes a new original song, "Magic of Christmas," that they composed (with Los Angeles-based musician Sophie Rose) with Hawaii in mind.
"We wanted to write a song for the people in Hawaii and the younger generation that loves Christmas," he says. "We wanted to write a Christmas song about experiencing Christmas from a place like Hawaii where you have no idea what playing in snow is like."
* Streetlight Cadence will perform at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 16 in the Maui Arts & Cultural Center's McCoy Studio Theater in Kahului. Tickets are $20 and $30, with a limited number for $45, (plus applicable fees) and are available at the box office, by calling 242-7469 or online at www.mauiarts.org.
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Big congratulations to Maui's Kalani Pe'a, who just got nominated for a Grammy Award in the 2017 Best Regional Roots Music Album. Pe'a's exceptional debut recording "E Walea," was the only Hawaiian album nominated in the category that includes Native American and Cajun artists.
"I'm sharing songs of love and hope and faith," he said when interviewed in August. "I chose the songs to honor all those I love and cherish, and I wanted to honor the elements, everything that is beautiful from the sky to the ocean."
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Morgan Neville, director of the Oscar-winning documentary "20 Feet from Stardom," has a new film out, "The Music of Strangers," which will screen at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Castle Theater at the MACC as part of the Maui Film Festival's FirstLight screenings.
Focusing on acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the international Silk Road Ensemble, the film was praised by The Wall Street Journal as "a joyous revelation, a group portrait of superb musicians from all over the world offering music as an emblem of what people can do in these fractious times when they live in concert with one another." And the Chicago Reader hailed it as "an affirmative answer to Leonard Bernstein's question of whether music can truly serve as a universal language."
The film follows performers drawn from the ensemble's more than 50 instrumentalists, vocalists, composers, arrangers, visual artists and storytellers as they gather in locations across the globe, exploring the ways art can both preserve traditions and shape cultural evolution.
Among the featured musicians, Wu Man is recognized as the world's premier pipa (a kind of Chinese lute) virtuoso and a leading ambassador of Chinese music. Kayhan Kalhor is a three-time Grammy nominee and an internationally acclaimed virtuoso on the kamancheh, a kind of Persian fiddle. Through his musical collaborations, he has been instrumental in popularizing Persian music in the West. And Cristina Pato is a Galician bagpiper, pianist and educator from Spain with a career devoted to jazz and Galician popular and classical music. A Christian Science Monitor review noted: "The film's most joyous performer is the bagpiper Cristina Pato, known as 'the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia,' who is such a powerhouse that she could probably upstage the Rolling Stones (in their prime)."
A companion album to the movie, "Sing Me Home," has just been nominated for a World Music Grammy Award. It features the cellist and Silk Road musicians performing with guest artists including Abigail Washburn, Bill Frisell, Gregory Porter and Lisa Fischer. Jazz vocalists Porter and Fischer sing together on the classic standard "Heart and Soul."
Also on Tuesday evening in the Castle Theater, at 7:30 p.m., the FirstLight will screen the critically acclaimed musical "La La Land," starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The two stars play an aspiring actress and a jazz musician in this modern take on the Hollywood musical from Damien Chazelle, the Academy Award-nominated writer and director of "Whiplash." It also includes John Legend in the role of a jazz musician.
The Guardian hailed it as "a sun-drenched musical masterpiece." The New York Times noted: "In 'La La Land,' Mr. Chazelle has a shot at something that has eluded auteurist titans like Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola: to make musicals matter again." And a Variety review concluded, "It lifts the audience into a state of old-movie exaltation, leading us to think, "What a glorious feeling. I'm happy again.'"
* Tickets are $14 per film or $48 for a four-film pass. For a full schedule for FirstLight: Academy Screenings on Maui and to purchase tickets, visit www.mauifilmfestival.com.
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Reggae musician Mishka will perform at Charley's Restaurant & Saloon in Paia with The 123 Band at 9 p.m. Saturday.
Mishka's latest album, "Roots Fidelity," was "inspired by my passion for roots reggae music, and by a request from many of my fans to make a genre-specific, straight-up roots-reggae album," he says. DJ Rambo of Judah Sound Systems will open.
* Admission is $15 at the door. For more information, visit www.charleysmaui.com.