Posted on: Sunday, October 24, 2004

OUR HONOLULU

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Bill Kaiwa sings as easily as a brook flows. He knows so much about the old Hawaiian music that the knowledge runs through your fingers when you try to grasp it all at once.

Kaiwa keeps seven guitars in his house out at He'eia and he knows maybe 500 Hawaiian songs, 200 of which have never been recorded. So this column is about a repository of forgotten Hawaiian music, how he got that way and what he's doing to preserve what he knows.

He said he had no interest in the Hawaiian language as a boy in the Papakolea Hawaiian Homestead near Punchbowl. Kaiwa played hooky from school because he didn't have money for clothes. "The only thing to do was sing; we'd go to the park and make music."

At age 7, using a borrowed 'ukulele, he won a talent contest at the Palace theater on the corner of Beretania Street and Ke'eaumoku. But the turning point in his life came one afternoon in Makiki when he got caught stealing oranges in the yard of Jack Waterhouse, vice president of Alexander & Baldwin.

The other boys got away. Kaiwa was up in the tree and couldn't escape when the yardman came around. The 13-year-old boy was crying when Waterhouse arrived. "You want take him jail or call police?" asked the yardman.

"I'll take him home," said Waterhouse.

To avoid a licking from his parents, the boy said he lived in Pauoa. At the end of Booth Road, he said, "Let me out here."

"No, I'm going to take you home," said Waterhouse. So Kaiwa had to confess where he lived and got a licking anyway, although Waterhouse advised his parents not to scold him.

Later, Waterhouse drove by when Kaiwa was playing basketball at the Maikiki Fire Station. "Why aren't you in school?" asked Waterhouse. When he heard the boy's story, the business executive took the truant under his wing in the Hawaiian fashion called hanai.

"Take him," said his mother. "I have too many."

Kaiwa's transformation into an elegant, scholarly man took quite a while. What straightened him out was a stint among Hawaiian cowboys on the Waterhouse ranch at Kipu Kai, Kaua'i.

Waterhouse, who knew many Hawaiian songs, encouraged Kaiwa's musical talent.

"For 45 minutes every afternoon, I had to sing for Mr. Waterhouse and Kawena Pukui (the Hawaiian scholar at the Bishop Museum, where Waterhouse was a trustee). "If I made a mistake, I had to start over at the beginning."

He first sang professionally for Alfred Apaka at the Hawaiian Village lu'au in the mid-1950s. Now, 18 albums later, he's more interested in preserving the old songs. To do this, he recorded a disc and gave it to the Bishop Museum. But they can't find the disc.

So now he's giving the old songs to younger singers who pronounce Hawaiian correctly and who promise not to change the melody. Two weeks ago, he gave Keali'i Reichel 18 songs. Tony Conjugacion received 30 songs. Kaiwa named eight other recipients of the songs.

Some of the songs are included in "Buke Mele Hawaii" (Book of Hawaiian Songs), a collection put together by Mrs. Joseph Nawahi, widow of a prominent Hawaiian-language newspaper editor who was active in the 1890s. Waterhouse passed the song book on to Kaiwa. He said it is one of four known to survive.

Kaiwa said he believes he has the biggest collection in the Islands of old Hawaiian songs. Other valuable repositories are the collections of Nina Rodrigues and Eddie Kamae. Most of the songs in Kaiwa's collection contain only the words. The melodies are in his head.

As for Hawaiian songs now being written, Kaiwa said, "Dennis Kamakahi is one of the best writers going today. I like Robert (Cazimero), but he's a little too advanced."