Keola Beamer is the Andres Segovia of the slack key guitar. In fact, if you listen to his album “Coming of the Snow,” you’ll hear pieces that Segovia performed, although they sound different because, ...

They were Mexican workers on foreign soil and, as usual, they brought their music with them. It is believed to have been the 1830s and the workers were cowboys, brought to the Waimea area of Hawaii’s ...

When I think of Hawaiian music, I first think of the ukulele, but slack-key guitar is just as uniquely Hawaiian. Ledward “Led” Kaapana is a ukulele virtuoso, but to my ear, he shines brightest when ...

There's no music in the world quite like Hawaii's slack-key guitar. This unlikely marriage of the Spanish guitar with and Polynesia's rippling rhythms gets its name from the islanders' habit of ...

For more than 150 years, slack key guitar, or ki ho’alu, has been the “house music” of Hawaii. Islanders were introduced to guitars by Spanish and Mexican vaqueros and quickly adapted the sound and ...

The best musicians are usually the most versatile, such as Jim “Kimo” West. Van Nuys resident West is the guitarist for “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose latest effort, the chart-topping “Mandatory Fun” (RCA ...