Recently back from Maui, where I played a gig and ran a guitar workshop… and admittedly, took a little time to enjoy myself.
My last gig in Maui was in March or April, 1979…. at a place in Lahaina called the Maui Bluebird. Amos Garrett and I were on the way back from a Japanese tour and stopped in for a quick one. The party was very on, so I’m surprised I remember anything at all about it. I guess the gig went fine - they tell me it did - but the high point (no pun intended) for me was a boat trip I took out towards Lanai to see the Humpbacks. They were mating. The little skiff I was in was all wood, and when the whales would moan and screech up through the harmonic series, the boat would shake with the sound. It was like standing in a speaker cabinet…. I saw God three times…. at least.
This time was different – no whales, but so many nice memories. I stayed at the home of luthier Steve Grimes and his wife, Joan. They live part way up Haleakala, in Kula overlooking the cane fields and villages below…. and the north and south shores of the island at its narrowest part (Maui has an hour glass shape.) Grimes is a top guitar maker… a perfectionist who makes about 40 guitars every two years for a prestigious group of pickers. http://www.grimesguitars.com
The first day in Maui, I took a little sightseeing drive around the Island with an old acquaintance from the Cambridge days, Charlotte Thompson. The drive took us around the south side past ranches and scrubby dry lands… the arid part of Maui. There is an incredible difference in climates from one part of the Island to the next, with vegetation zones of coastal, mixed open forest, dryland forest, rain forest, sub-alpine and alpine. (just got that from a Maui website) It was a good day… the day I learned the derivation of the Hawaiin word – haole (howly). The term is used for foreigners… non-natives. It is derived from the first meetings with white visitors, Cook and others. Haole literally means ‘those who do not breathe’. I get it. They hugged those westerners and the westerners weren’t breathin’…. up tight; stiff… I get it. Birds that day included golden plovers, java sparrow, spotted dove, morning dove, zebra dove, black francolin, chukar partridge, but no endemics… native species.
The next day, I awakened to find Steve and his friend, Michael Gurian, in Steve’s shop preparing to head over to the rain forest to look at some koa wood…. a beautiful indigenous wood of Hawaii. Michael, by the way, is a Seattle-based wood crafter of luthier supplies – marketry (whatever that is) and inlay, rosettes, purfling, bridge pins, pick guards, etc. all the little goodies that guitar makers use to finish off their creations. He makes other things as well…. too many to list, but his website is: http://www.gurianinstruments.com
Where was I? So, I tagged along with Steve and Michael around to the north side of the island where we turned off on a funky, bumpy, muddy dirt road up into the rain forest. Living up there, in what looked like the manner of Swiss Family Robinson, were John and Melinda Maher and their six daughters…. ten acres deep in the heart of nowhere. John is a fisherman who works two boats out of Sitka, Alaska in the warm months. He travels there by schooner (his) from Maui. (feeling sorry for this guy yet?) There were some nice young men working around the compound. John says he needs these boys to do a little work but also to keep his daughters from getting bored. Gee.
What an idyllic place. There’s a stream running down the middle of it where they are able to trap Thai prawns and crayfish. Fruit hangs from the trees and covers the bushes… mangos, apple bananas, mandarin oranges, berries of all description.
After many stories and chit chats, the fellows started going through the recently-cut koa. I think they were looking for the most ridiculously mottled and striped sections…. and they seemed to find them. After borrowing some gas to get home to Kula, we bumped our way back down the dirt road to the main highway. Oddly enough, we saw very little in the way of bird life. The rain forest is just where we might have spotted some of Maui’s more exotic endemic species, but it was not to be.
The next day I chilled in preparation for my gig at The Yoga Center, except for a quick drive up to the top of Kaleakala. The crater… what a beautiful sight, three thousand feet deep and the size of Manhattan….and the crisp cold air felt opened me up. I saw a couple of Eurasian skylarks near the top. “Any nene?” you say? “No, no nene”, say I. The nene goose is the state bird of Hawaii. I should have easily seen one, but I didn’t. I stopped at the Hosmer Grove on the way back down the mountain and spotted a Japanese white eye.
The gig went nicely… and I must say, I was able to sing with little effort. It’s the moisture and the lack of particulates in the air… a bit like singing in the shower. Man, did it feel good. Bob Jones opened the show. He’s a ‘local’ in that he was born in Hawaii, but he’s still a haole… not that he would agree. Semi-haole? That guy can play and sing blues though… much power. He’s been breathing that air his whole life.
The next day I ran a guitar workshop for about ten people up at Steve’s shop and we had a good old time of it. The people on Maui are just naturally nice, at least the ones I was able to meet. Maui’s a place I have to get back to…. it’s the air… I can breathe. Mahalo to all the folks who made me feel at home.
Aloha,
Geoff