Entertainers lend talents to fledgling performers
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
Lots of newbie musicians can play or sing a little, or maybe even a lot.
Advertiser library photo
The veterans have learned that making the leap from merely playing to truly performing takes trial and error, or a mentor who can shave years off the learning curve.
Melveen Leed helps students feel comfortable on stage.
Hawai'i Music Institute was born last fall as an outreach effort by Windward Community College, aimed at drawing fledgling musicians to the Kane'ohe campus, where potential mentors could clue them in on various aspects of the music business.
Some offerings are conventional skill-building courses, such as "Brother" Noland Conjugacion's beginner classes in slack-key and 'ukulele, or "Dances of Hawai'i" by kumu hula Pamai Tenn, which, starts off the institute's spring series tomorrow.
Other sessions will cover angles rarely discussed in the classroom, the finer points that usually are left to the School of Hard Knocks to convey. For example, self-styled Island diva Melveen Leed's "Vocal and Performance" series will teach singing method, to be sure, but the singer wants students to learn from her mistakes.
"I missed the knowledge of self-management," Leed said. "Entertainers all tend to get into some kind of financial mess. There are sharks out there that take advantage of us."
Or, Conjugacion said, there are singers who attempt Hawaiian music lacking the right attitude. In his "Lessons of Aloha" class, he hopes to draw the link for his students between how they live and how they perform.
"First, you go in with the right intentions," he said. "This is how Hawaiians approach things."
Performers may also go into performance without a firm connection with their material. Ku'uipo Kumukahi, the Hoku award-winning singer, said the understanding of Hawaiian lyrics that would richly inform a performance lies within the grasp of even those far from fluent in the language.
Her class, "Ho'opili (Making Connections)," will provide a template for studying a song's language and relating it to the performer's own experience.
"You can get hundreds of things from a song," Kumukahi said. "You can learn words, you can get visuals, you can get history.
"How do you connect with it?" she continued. "If you've never seen the lehua blossom after the misty rain has come, have you seen some other flower in the mist? You don't have to know the entire Hawaiian language, just to know the idea."
Often, the most important notes in a performer's work are not the musical variety. Personality counts for nearly as much as technique, Leed said: A singer must develop a stage presence and other elements of style, and there are as many variations as there are performers.
Leed plans to invite her peers (whom she won't name yet) to share perspectives on falsetto, jazz, country and other musical motifs.
"I'm going to teach them everything I know about how a performer should perform, from moving on the stage to body English, to attitude, to use of vibrato — if you don't have one, I'll teach you how to have one.
"All the vocal teachers I know of, they don't teach a person how to entertain," she added. "They have to get rid of their shyness ... be a little more aggressive. You have to get out there and know how to be in total control."
