Looking for something different to do with your mother on Sunday?
Try the Hawaiian Mother’s Day concert featuring three Hawaiian musicians who bring the sounds of ki ho’alu (slack-key) guitar to Edmonds.
Veteran players Princess Owana Salazar and Cindy Combs are joined by teenage sensation Brittni Paiva. All are winners of multiple Hawaii Hoku awards and are making their first national tour together.
Slack-key refers to the finger style used (thumb playing the bass, others the melody) on the guitar and the practice of loosening or slacking one or more strings. The style probably originated as early as the 1830s when the guitar was brought to the islands by Mexican and Spanish cowboys.
Hawaiians adopted the guitar and made slack-key one of their signatures after adapting it to their rhythms and harmonic structures.
Salazar, a member of the royal family, is best known for her beautiful vocals and jazzy playing. Combs is a master of traditional and contemporary slack-key guitar, and Paiva is Hawaii’s newest musical child prodigy.
Salazar is known for her interpretation of Hawaiian traditional and contemporary music and jazz standards. As a descendant of Hawaiian royalty, she is committed to her cultural legacy.
Her first recording was in 1986, and she sang classics with the Royal Hawaiian Band in the 1980s. In 1992, she became the first female student to graduate from Hawaiian steel-guitar master Jerry Bryd’s tutelage and was the first woman to tour with the Hawaiian Slack Key Festival (2000).
She has a repertoire of her family’s songs as well as new compositions and classics. Don’t be surprised if you start picturing mountains and oceans even if you don’t understand the spoken language.
Combs, with 30-plus recordings, has been called the Slack Key Lady. She started out playing folk music, but everything changed when she took a class from slack-key legend Keola Beamer, although her style has changed to what she now calls “slack jazz.”
For the youngster of the trio, Paiva, the ukulele stirred a love-at-first-sight reaction and would become the heart of her music, although she also plays the slack-key guitar.
At age 17, she won the 2006 Hawaii Music Awards’ Ukulele Album of the Year honors.
Princess Owana Salazar
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