The acoustic guitar trio Kohala will make a rare East Hawaii appearance with a 7 p.m. concert Friday, Dec. 5 at Kilauea Military Camp Theater in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. ADVERTISING The acoustic guitar trio Kohala will make a rare
The acoustic guitar trio Kohala will make a rare East Hawaii appearance with a 7 p.m. concert Friday, Dec. 5 at Kilauea Military Camp Theater in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve done a show there,” said Charles Michael Brotman, a Grammy winner and the group’s leader. “We did a show a number of years ago at the theater there in Volcano. It’s a nice, intimate little theater up there, and we actually enjoyed ourselves when we played there before, so we decided to do it again.”
Brotman and his band mates, Charlie Recaido and Rupert Tripp Jr., have a new CD, “Mana Road,” on Palm Records, released earlier this month in the U.S. and available on iTunes and at palmrecords.com.
“We’ll do the stuff from our new CD, of course,” Brotman said. We’ll do some music from our Christmas album. And we’ve released 10 CDs over almost 15 years, so we’ll just pick and choose our favorite stuff from those, as well.”
There will also be hula by Kahealani, Pualei and Layla Tripp.
Tickets are $15, available at Basically Books in Hilo, Kilauea Kreations and Kilauea General Store in Volcano and at the door.
Brotman described the “Mana Road” as “a little more upbeat” than Kohala’s prior offerings.
“Every song on the album has a groove. We’re trying to find music that’s fun for us to play live. That’s kind of the angle on this one,” Brotman said. “We’re keeping the group acoustic, but there’s a lot of percussion on this CD, like cajón. We also used some of the Hawaiian implements to do percussion, although they’re used in such a way that our fans on the mainland aren’t gonna really know what it is. It’s just going to sound like percussion. But I think people here will recognize some of the sounds, such as ipu heke and so on.”
The group’s has taken its unique sound, which fuses island and folk influences with smooth jazz, to medium-sized mainland concert halls — but its primary audience is in Japan.
“We really haven’t played much here in Hawaii. When we play in Japan, we play in 1,500 to 3,000 seat theaters that are sold out,” Brotman said. “We had a tour in Japan in the summer and we were there for a month. Our CD was released in Japan before our tour there.”
Brotman said the group is eager to showcase the new music for a local audience.
“It’s always a challenge for every band, for each CD, to try to create something that’s new and fresh, but that doesn’t lose their audience, their fan base from prior CDs,” he said. “That’s the big challenge, always, because you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again. But then, again, you want to grow without losing your audience and your identity. And I think we’ve been successful at that this time, because we’ve taken a bit of a stretch here, but it definitely sounds like Kohala.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
