Tropical winds of Hawaii blow through International Guitar Night with slack-key great Jim "Kimo" West
Hawaiian finger-style playing adds to other virtuosic traditions at the Massey Theatre
Vietnamese nylon-string specialist Thu Le, Roma jazz expert Lulo Reinhardt, Italian innovator Luca Stricagnoli, and Hawaiian slack-key specialist Jim “Kimo” West join forces at International Guitar Night.
The Massey Theatre presents International Guitar Night on January 28 at 7:30 pm
JIM “KIMO” WEST is a man of many hats—and we’re not just speaking metaphorically.
If you’ve been lucky enough to catch the Canadian-born, Florida-raised guitarist on tour with his employer of almost 40 years, “Weird Al” Yancovic, you’ve probably seen him don a big black Amish fedora, a red plastic Devo-style “energy dome”, or a rapper’s backwards baseball cap, rapid-fire costume changes being just part of the chameleon skills necessary to play in the parody king’s ace band. And when he’s not on the road, West has a number of other ways to spend his time, including running his Los Angeles recording studio, producing records for a variety of emerging artists, and crafting atmospheric scores for film and TV.
Given the option, though, West would probably be quite content to spend more time at his second home on Maui, watching the waves roll in from the shade of a straw Panama, and accompanying the surf on the strings of an open-tuned flattop.
That’s the side of his artistry he’ll have on display as part of the 2022 edition of International Guitar Night, in which he’ll be joined by an equally eclectic array of his peers: Vietnamese nylon-string specialist Thu Le, Italian innovator Luca Stricagnoli, and Roma jazz expert Lulo Reinhardt, grandnephew of the immortal Django. Despite his roots in the chilly North—Toronto, to be exact—West is recognized as one of the living masters of slack-key guitar, a Hawaiian style of finger-style playing that emulates the soft pulse of the ocean, the melodic cries of jungle birds, and the balmy perfume of the bougainvillea vine.
Remarkably, West discovered his favourite form of soul music almost by accident. As he tells it—on the line from Victoria, where he’s spent the day walking around the inner harbour—he was at loose ends following a 1985 tour with Yancovic, when a friend invited him on an excursion to Maui.
“We ended up staying in Hana,” he recalls. “It’s one of the most Hawaiian places in Hawaii, I found out later. Pretty remote: one gas station, a couple of little small stores, and that’s where I first heard slack key. I’d heard people playing it, but mostly I listened to these albums by people like Gabby Pahinui and Sonny Chillingworth, these legendary slack-key players. And I really took a liking to the sound. The sound of slack key, to me, just sounds like the way the place looks. You know, if you’re in rural Hawaii, it’s very green, it rains at night, there are waterfalls, and it’s very lush. And the music just describes that place perfectly.”
Indigenous Hawaiians are understandably proud of their culture, which has produced at least three distinctive musical styles: slack key, Hawaiian steel guitar, and an extraordinary if little-known tradition of falsetto singing that has its roots in Polynesian antiquity. But West says he was welcomed into the tight-knit world of island guitarists with remarkably little friction.
Jim “Kimo” West discovered the slack-key style on his first trip to Maui.
“Other slack-key players were just like ‘Hey, brah, thanks for keeping it going, keeping this tradition going!’” he explains. “They were appreciative of anybody who, you know, spreads slack key around, because it’s one of those art forms that could easily die off. So mostly it was a great reception. I even played a number of gigs with Cyril Pahinui, who was the son of [legendary singer, songwriter, and guitarist] Gabby Pahinui, and I remember once we were over on the Big Island at the Merrie Monarch Festival, which is the big festival of hula. We were just joking around, but then he got serious and said ‘Kimo, you one of us, brah.’ Which really brought a tear to my eye. It was like the ultimate sign of acceptance, to get one from Cyril.
“The Hawaiian people are so friendly,” West adds. “I mean, that’s what aloha really is. You accept everybody as your brother, as family. It’s a very accepting culture. I’ve always always felt that, anyway.”
Perhaps the guitarist’s Hawaiian peers appreciated that West was not only learning their culture, but adding to it. While several of his 11 releases focus on a traditional approach to slack key, two of them—Guitar Stories and More Guitar Stories— are considerably more expansive.
“On those records the idea was to take the slack-key techniques and tunings and apply them to different styles,” he notes. “So I intentionally created music that was a fusion of slack key and various other things: Celtic, Middle Eastern, Indian classical music, Americana, various things like that. That was sort of the game plan for those records.”
And while West’s contribution to this year’s International Guitar Night will include a nod to Hawaiian tradition, his duet and quartet performances with the other three virtuosos should benefit from his easy-going and adaptable nature. West naturally wants to keep the details of what’s in store under wraps, but you can count on being surprised—and on a madcap interpretation, he says, of “a famous Italian song”.
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