Blacks play a major role in the arts of the Islands

By Miles Jackson
Special to The Advertiser

Hoopii: Hawaiian artist absorbed lessons from black jazz musicians.

The demand for admission to the show was so great that every inch of space in the popular theater was occupied long before the curtain rose. Many people were unable to get inside.

Since that date, blacks have continued to made a substantial contribution to the arts in Hawai'i. With their talents, they have enriched the lives of all of Hawai'i's people.

Jazz first arrived in the Islands in the early 1920s, when Hawai'i's musicians began to play new and unfamiliar music. Ricardo D. Tremillos, ethnomusicologist at the University of Hawai'i, has said Hawai'i jazz "represents an important cultural catalyst for integrating the various cultural streams of the population."

Musicians such as William and John Ellis, Sol Hoopii, Johnny Nobles, Sonny Cunha and Kui Lee left the Islands to play, study and travel on the Mainland. In their travels to the major cities on both coasts, all these musicians listened to and played with black jazz musicians. Sonny Cunha came home to Hawai'i and composed new Hawai'i jazz numbers such as "Honolulu Tomboy" and "My Honolulu Hula Girl," and Sol Hoopii traveled to California to record Hawaiian music that was influenced by jazz yet still retained a Hawaiian voice. Hoopii's jazz repertoire included such popular songs as "Twelfth Street Rag" and "Right or Wrong." These local musicians brought musical conversations recalled from those impromptu jams back to Honolulu, and helped popularize jazz and ragtime in Hawai'i dance halls and cafés of the 1920s.

Hawaiian musicians incorporated sounds of jazz into local performances, while black blues singers such as Son House, Cryin' Sam Collins and Robert Johnson borrowed the Hawaiian "glissando" effect when they played the guitar, sliding a jackknife or the neck of a broken bottle over open-tuned strings. Many listeners (and even some players) had no idea that this innovative technique was borrowed from the Hawaiian steel guitar.

Hawai'i's musicians who could not leave the Islands and experience jazz as it was played elsewhere could listen to black musicians who stopped briefly in Honolulu on their way to or from Asia and the Pacific. During World War II, some of the top jazz performers entertained Honolulu audiences, and later entertainers such as vocalists Billy Eckstein, Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole and the bands of Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway played dates in Hawai'i. These extraordinary jazz musicians helped win the hearts of new local jazz enthusiasts and helped build support when local musicians introduced new jazz variations, such as rhythm and blues and bebop.

George Wellington, principal bassist with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, was an occasional jazz bassist for more than 40 years. Wellington's daughter, Fumiko, a violinist and strings teacher, plays with the Honolulu Symphony and has played violin with some of the top Mainland jazz musicians.

Some longtime musicians in Honolulu who now play the jazz circuit include saxophonist and composer Que Martyn, drummer Chuck James and vocalist Azure McCall. McCall has won the Na Hoku Hanohano Award (Hawai'i's equivalent of the Grammy) twice, in 1999 as female vocalist of the year and in 2002 for her album, "Body and Soul." McCall says, "I like the energy and the people of this place. I feel blessed. I get energy from Hawaiian music, and especially from people like Amy Gilliom and Kekuhi Kanahele, and I always felt the soul of Gabby Pahinui."

Before McCall arrived in the Islands more than 30 years ago, Islanders had the chance to hear the legendary Maya Angelou display her talent as a vocalist.

Angelou arrived in the Islands in 1965 and sang the love songs of Gershwin and Duke Ellington in a popular Waikiki nightclub. She was an enthusiastic singer who at first attracted equally enthusiastic audiences, but when her followers drifted off to some other venue, she became concerned. After asking around, Angelou discovered that a new singer was in town. One fateful night, a musician friend escorted her to hear the popular Della Reese. Maya commented that "listening to Della Reese, I knew I would never call myself a singer again." After eight months as a nightclub singer, she decided to quit her job at Club Encore and to return to California. Before leaving, she told Della Reese, "I needed your music, and thank you for giving it so generously."

Other singers on the contemporary jazz circuit in Honolulu include Rea Fox and Ginai.

Known for her choice of songs from the "Great American Songbook," those familiar songs from the '30s and '40s, Rea Fox told a reporter at her opening night performance at Ships Tavern, a popular jazz spot, that "this engagement is a test to see what the market for mellow jazz is these days."

Ginai, a talented singer who can light up a room with her songs, taught voice at the Hawai'i Academy of the Arts and has completed a road tour with "Dreamgirls." In 2000, she earned recognition as a winner of the Na Hoku Hanohano Award for the best jazz CD as part of the group "Hula Joe & the Hutjumpers," which she founded and co-produced in 1999. She has performed in Canada, Europe, and in many parts of the United States, and opened for Lou Rawls' appearance with the Honolulu Symphony's Pop Series in 2001.

After playing Japan's Blue Note Jazz Clubs in 2002, Ginai's four successful jazz/soul CDs are selling well on the Asian market. "I enjoy going to Japan to do gigs because the Japanese people really understand jazz and really appreciate improvisation," she said. "I keep returning to Hawai'i because Hawai'i is my home; I was born and raised in Wai'anae. So, I played the Mainland, been there and done that, but I wanted to raise my family with clean air and water and in a multiracial society."

Clearly, Hawai'i's hapa-haole music has been historically influenced by American jazz, and although composers of Hawaiian music may try to "leave it alone in its natural beauty," culture never sits still for long. Hawaiian music continues its conversation with black musicians elsewhere, and new sounds are born.

Reggae is the most recent black influence on local Hawaiian music. Hawaiian musicians have adapted the spontaneous musical dialect of Jamaica, with its wave-like reggae rhythms, into a new local music labeled Jawaiian or Hawaiian reggae. Today, this music symbolizes a particularly local cultural identity for many contemporary young adults in Hawai'i.

Theater

Blacks have played significant roles in the literary and theatrical arts in Hawai'i. In 1989, a local production of "Dreamgirls" came to the Hawai'i Theater. This glitzy musical play about the 1960s R&B scene featured the lively Ginai and the rich voice of Starr Williams, a popular local singer and actress, in the role of Effie White, both of whom performed with a bevy of talented amateurs. Other plays produced locally were very popular with residents on O'ahu in the 1980s and included such classics as Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf," presented at the Manoa Valley Theatre.

The African American Theater led by Gregg Harris was active for a few years, but many of the professional actors in the company eventually left Honolulu to seek opportunities on the Mainland. Hawai'i theater audiences are small, but as Gregg Harris has stated, "Hawai'i is receptive to black theater, and when plays are produced, people of all ethnicities attend in large numbers. They see black theater as having the same richness and depth as other theater."

The Honolulu African American Repertory Theater, founded by Leonard Piggee as an extension of an evening acting class offered to the community, has been active since 1994. Piggee worked as an actor on Broadway for 12 years before coming to Hawai'i, and has also performed in touring musicals such as "Godspell," "Showboat" and "Eubie." The Repertory Theater gives free performances in prisons, military installations and on 'Olelo public-access television. Since its founding, the troupe has offered classes for adults and children and has served as a resource for theater directors seeking African-American actors for Hawai'i productions.

In January and February, Piggee produced August Wilson's "Two Trains Running."

" 'Two Trains Running' was received in a way that was, in a word, stunning to me," Piggee said. "The audiences were full and enthusiastic — particularly, the African-American audiences who hooted and really demonstrated a joy that I have not seen short of a Lisa Matsumoto production."

Piggee's take on Hawai'i theater, however, isn't all sunny. "The elite, effete, Eurocentric establishment theater remains closed to this kind of work," he said.

Dance

Earnest Morgan, a dancer and choreographer, was born on O'ahu in 1948 and was one of the first directors of the Honolulu City Ballet. He is credited with 80 choreographic works and had his prize-winning Ku'u Kahaluu performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the New York City Festival of Dance. He was also the co-founder with Richard Koob of Kalani House, an oceanside retreat for creative work in the arts, on the island of Hawai'i. After Morgan died unexpectedly at the age of 44, the University of Hawai'i-Hilo and his many friends and colleagues established the Earnest Morgan Endowment for dance in 1992. Until 2003, the endowment supported scholarships for dance training. More recently, some of the fund's principal was earmarked for a 6,600 square foot Earnest Morgan Dance Studio. The studio, now regularly in use, can accommodate dance groups up to 130 people.

Another innovative black dancer, Halifu Osumare, lived and studied in Hawai'i in the 1990s. Her classes in Afro-Caribbean dance on the Big Island and at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa were popular, as were her lively and emotionally powerful performances. Osumare completed her doctorate in American studies at the University of Hawai'i, and now is on the dance faculty at Bowling Green University in Ohio.

Hailing from Panama, free spirit Adela Chu has been dancing Afro-Caribbean/Brazilian professionally all of her adult life. She founded the San Francisco Carnival 22 years ago and, before arriving in Hawai'i in the 1980s, taught dance in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Jamaica, the Netherlands, the San Francisco Bay Area and Denver. Chu's energetic classes at the University of Hawai'i are always popular with dance majors and nonmajors. Performing regularly in the Islands, her dance company, Afro Jazz Dance, includes five musicians known as Espiritu Libre, with Chu sparking rhythms on the piano.

Chu would like to see more venues for dance in Hawai'i. "Today, there are not many opportunities for a dancer to earn a living through her art in Honolulu," she says. "There is hardly any infrastructure to support dance. ... Art in Honolulu is like a gold mine waiting to be mined."

After studying dance in Ghana, yet another dynamic black female dancer, the Big Island's Gwendolyn Hill, teaches and lectures on traditional dances of the West African diaspora. Her interpretation of West African dances adds luster and power to Hawai'i's multicultural and multi-ethnic dance community.

Literary arts

The poet Frank Marshall Davis moved his family to Hawai'i in 1948. Before coming here, Davis had published several volumes of his poetry, and many of his poems had been anthologized during the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s and 1930s, a time when poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen declared that the black poet "had achieved a degree and kind of articulation that made it possible for him to transform his feelings into a variety of literary forms."

For many years while reading his weekly column in the labor newspaper Honolulu Record, Honolulu readers experienced Davis's sensitivity to human behavior, the very thing that made him a poet. Davis died in Honolulu in 1987, the last of the black poets of the twilight years of the Depression and World War II. He left a poem for the people of Hawai'i entitled "Tale of Two Dogs":

Some poets read in bookstores and university sponsored readings; others participate in competitive "poetry slams."

Kathryn Waddell Takara, a poet who also writes on black studies, has traveled and studied in Africa, Europe, Central America and, most recently, China. Her poetic work has been published in Bamboo Ridge, Konch, Rainbird, Hawaii Review and Pleiades, with her most recent publication, New and Collected Poems, published in 2003. She has given many readings in Hawai'i and on the Mainland, including one at the Texas Book festival in November 2003.

Takara and Adela Chu have been instrumental in introducing choreopoems to Honolulu audiences.

Poet, filmmaker, writer and actress Ayin Adams lives on Maui. After winning the Pat Parker Memorial Poetry Award for "Momma Cried" in 1999, Adams created "Color of Her Tears," published on CD in 2000. Adams' "Spare Change," a short film, was shown at the New York Independent International Video and Film Festival in the mid-1990s.

Karla Brundage, a young and promising poet, has been published in Konch and in the 1998 Hawai'i Literary Council's Wordstar Chapbook. She also has presented her poetry in public readings in Honolulu and is an emerging young writer on the Hawai'i literary scene.

Despite the small number of blacks in Hawai'i, a thriving creative community exists. The music, dance, drama and poetry of Hawai'i's black community contribute decisively to the multicultural/multi-ethnic environment of the Islands.