Lahaina is seen from the air on Aug. 10. Hawaiian music legend Keola Beamer and Kumu Hula Moanalani Beamer, whose Lahaina home was damaged but overall spared in the recent fire, will perform with Maui musician Jeff Peterson in a benefit concert for West Maui on Sunday that will include a 3D visual accompaniment by filmmaker Tom Vendetti. The concert was originally supposed to raise money to send ukuleles to Bhutan but pivoted to support the West Maui community after the fire. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo
Keola and Moanalani Beamer were doing wellness checks in their Hawaiian Homes community after the Lahaina fire when they came across a 94-year-old kupuna who couldn’t stop crying.
“Words could not console,” Keola Beamer said. “Moana held her in her arms. Our lives have forever changed. It’s about community now and the light of aloha.”
The Beamers were able to safely evacuate, though their home was damaged and “two houses away, there is total destruction all the way down Wahikuli,” with many neighbors and friends losing everything.
“Our town was completely destroyed,” said Keola Beamer, a longtime Lahaina resident and Hawaiian music legend. “My wife, Moanalani, and I are safe, although traumatized. We are incredibly grateful that our home was spared, and currently working to help our less fortunate neighbors, many left with only the clothes on their backs.”
Now the Beamers, who were set to play in a concert originally set to help raise funds to take ukuleles to Bhutan in 2024, are turning the event into a West Maui benefit concert at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center on Sunday. They will perform along with slack key guitarist Jeff Peterson, with 3D visual accompaniment by filmmaker Tom Vendetti.
“We’ve done a U-turn on the funding and it will all go to support the West Maui community,” Keola Beamer said.
It will include a live auction with a koa wood ukulele autographed by Keola Beamer and an acoustic/electric ukulele autographed by Jake Shimabukuro.
The performances will be accompanied by 3D visuals, which Keola Beamer said Vendetti came up with as a way to “increase the audience’s experiential learning.”
“So we began this journey of conceptualizing the music, providing more context of the music through 3D imagery,” he said. “I got involved in music and creating music, and all these Hawaiian songs are all stories, stories sometimes with double meanings. And the more I got into my work, the more I felt the power, the compelling power of mo’olelo, which means storytelling in Hawaiian.”
He recalled his grandmother telling him stories as a boy, the same way parents would read a storybook to their kids.
“But there was no book. It was just my grandmother telling me these beautiful stories about Hawaiian mythology,” he said. “So I created the image of these beautiful, mythological entities in my mind. I could see Pele and the lava erupting. I created my own imagery to these mo’olelo.
“The power of storytelling is transformative. In my own life, the mo’olelo of our family anchors me to my genealogy, it’s footing in this world. So I’ve always been interested in increasing that contextual learning around the mo’olelo, around the stories.”
The performances on Sunday will tell those stories — when Keola Beamer sings about Mauna Kea, “it’s going to snow.” When he sings about the island of Kauai, “you can sense the beauty and the strength.”
“A lot of people love Hawaiian music, but half the time they don’t know what it’s about. Now we can take the audience on a journey to support the music, to support the art, with another art form that really helps kind of lift and push it forward in the world. It increases the value of the story,” he said.
“It’s really an amazing journey. I believe that it’s an element that will help carry Hawaiian music into the future. My whole life I’ve loved and respected our ancestors, and I revere our music and our heritage. But also I love to surf the future, and this is a compelling step forward, I think.”
Vendetti is excited about the innovative production.
“I’ve been very excited about the opportunity to bring Keola and Jeff’s music to life with kind of more of an immersive feeling with the 3D,” he said in an interview prior to the fire. “It’s primarily focusing on nature. It’s very subtle in a lot of ways and hopefully beautiful.”
The MACC show will also include the screening of the 3D film “Flight of the Butterflies.”
“It literally follows the migration of the butterflies from Toronto to Mexico,” Vendetti explained. “It’s a really nice family film.”
Peterson will open the concert, “then Keola and Moana will do a performance together and then I’ll join them and we’ll do a series of pieces together,” Peterson said in an interview before the fire. “I love working with Keola. He’s one of my main inspirations for music.”
Besides preparing for the upcoming MACC production, Keola Beamer recently collaborated with two acclaimed classical musicians in a film highlighting Kalaupapa.
“I just completed a beautiful project in Kalaupapa, honoring our ancestors,” he said. “It’s a film that will come out later this year. A musical documentary with two excellent violinists from the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, Ignace Jang, the concertmaster, and the world-renowned Korean violinist, Chee-Yun. It’s part of a project called ‘Songs of Love,’ out of South Korea.”
“Akalau” — a 3D Hawaiian performance and 3D film “Flight of the Butterflies” will be presented at 3 p.m. Sunday in the MACC’s McCoy Studio Theater. Tickets are $40, plus applicable fees, available online at MauiArts.org.
Lahaina is seen from the air on Aug. 10. Hawaiian music legend Keola Beamer and Kumu Hula Moanalani Beamer, whose Lahaina home was damaged but overall spared in the recent fire, will perform with Maui musician Jeff Peterson in a benefit concert for West Maui on Sunday that will include a 3D visual accompaniment by filmmaker Tom Vendetti. The concert was originally supposed to raise money to send ukuleles to Bhutan but pivoted to support the West Maui community after the fire. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photoToday's breaking news and more in your inbox
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