Stephen Antle has visited Cortes Island most summers for the past 20 years. He started coming after a family sailboat trip through Desolation Sound.

“The last two days of that trip were spent at Manson’s Landing and Gorge Harbour. And we just said, ‘holy cow, we’ve got to check this island out!’ So the next summer we rented Cedar Moon (AirB&B) for the first of many years and came up for one or two weeks, pretty much every summer since.”

Antle is also the lead vocalist in a band that plays traditional Hawaiian music and this Thursday, August 31 at 6:30, he will be performing at the Cortes Island Museum.

“I’d like to invite people to come and hear what I, a little hesitantly, like to call real Hawaiian music.  Many of the folks who might be coming have probably been to Hawaii, they’ve probably been to a bar, or a restaurant, or a hotel in Waikiki, or Kaanapali, or Kona, or somewhere, and they’ve heard some music, and they probably think that’s Hawaiian music.”

“That’s the music that the Hawaiians have created to sell to us. It’s not Hawaiian music. I’ve been going there long enough, I’ve dug deep enough into this music, I’ve got to know people enough to go beyond that and to learn the music that those same people who are in the bar in Waikiki, the music that those same people play when they go home, when they drive over the Koʻolau Hills to Waimānalo on the windward side of Oʻahu, and they throw a barbecue in their backyard on Sunday afternoon.”

“They’re not playing the music that they played at Waikiki. They’re playing different music, and that’s what I’m going to play.  This is the music of the Hawaiian people and most of it is going to be sung in the Hawaiian language.”

“I’ve hacked around on a guitar most of my life. My main guitar that I still play is a 16th birthday present from my mom and dad. I have had that guitar ever since and played it off and on.”

“There were long periods where it was off when I was in Toronto for three years, that guitar was in my grandmother’s basement in Vancouver, but I never gave it up.  About seven years ago, I retired after a 30 year career as a business litigation lawyer with a big national law firm, the first thing I did was get serious about music.  People who know me in my former life don’t understand, they can’t imagine how this could have happened. For me, I look at it as making up for lost time.”

CC: You also have a Hawaiian connection. 

SA: “Well, only the same kind that many people in this part of the world have. I’ve traveled there for 30 or 35 years.  Not every year, but many years.  I traveled there for many years before I knew anything about Hawaiian music, before I got interested in it or serious about it.

“The defining moment for me was, I guess I was in my early thirties, so 30ish years ago.  I’d recently come back to Vancouver after three years in Toronto, and started going to the Vancouver Folk Music Festival.  One year, I don’t even remember what year it was, but not long after we came back, I went to the festival as usual, and literally stumbled across a Hawaiian musical performance. I had no idea who these people were. I didn’t know they were going to be there. I wouldn’t have recognized them if I’d known they were going to be there, but I just sort of walked past their performance and stopped dead in my tracks and sat down and I was hooked right there.”  

There were three people: Keola Beamer (who became Antle’s first slack key guitar teacher), his wife Moana Lani and his mother, Aunty Nona Beamer, ‘who’s practically a cultural saint in Hawaii.’

“They were  on this little stage, 18 inches high in the grass, 25 people sitting on the grass in front, and they were doing  a multimedia performance of traditional Hawaiian music. Aunty Nona would tell a story about the song, Keola would play guitar and sing  the song, and Moana Lani would dance it. They would just give you this whole thing.” 

“I was just entranced, mostly by the guitar playing. I bought a couple of Keola’s CDs and started looking around online.  He had a couple of books out about how to play Hawaiian slack key guitar. He had a videotape – I still have this, I have an actual videotape, if you remember those – teaching how to play five songs. I still play one of those songs all the time.”

“So for 15 years, I don’t know, 20 years after that, I just very slowly taught myself how to play Hawaiian slack key guitar, just because I like the sound of it. I love being able to sit down and make that sound come out of my guitar, however, imperfectly. 

“Then I retired. Keola’s family, Beamer Ohana runs a music workshop in Hawaii every year. So the first thing I did when I retired was go to it.  I talked to some of the senior students, people who are way better players than me, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m loving this, how do I move it up a level? Like, how do we get an order of magnitude better than this?’ I asked three people, they’re all still good friends of mine. I asked three people independently, and they all told me the same thing. They said, ‘you need to play for hula dancers,’ and I’m like rolling my eyes going, ‘well, good luck with that in Vancouver, Stephen.’”

“But it makes perfect sense when you think about it, because if you’re playing for dancers, you have to play in time. You can’t let your tempo wander all over the place, or the dancers will kill you and never dance with you again.  You’re playing with other people, because you usually play in a band for dancers. It’s not just usually one person, so there’s all that musical dynamics about playing with other folks.  Then you’re playing in public. So it’s all like three huge skill sets that really improve you as a musician once you get a grip on it.” 

“It took me a year and a half to find hula dancers in Vancouver, but I did and they were tickled. They said, ‘Sure, come and play for us.’ I mean, this was just me just playing slack key guitar. ‘Come and play for us.’” 

“I played for them a couple of times and  their leader, Yoshi Yamamoto, said to me, “Do you know any bass players?” 

And I said, ‘Actually I do because one of my friends from the Aloha music camp played bass and loved Hawaiian music.’” 

So then there were the two of us and Yoshi would sit down and play ukulele. That was the band for the hula dancers. 

“Then Yoshi looks at me one day and says, ‘You can sing, can’t you?’” 

“I said, ‘Not a note.’”

He said, “But you’ll learn to sing, won’t you?” 

And I said, “I guess so.” 

“I’m 62 years old at this point. I’m learning to sing and I’m learning to sing in Hawaiian, but I did. So now we have this band. That’s  the connection. We go to these workshops twice a year, if we can.”  

“The last two years since COVID lifted, the band’s been active in public . We play 20 or 30 times a year with dancers whenever we can.  There’s a professional steel guitar player in Vancouver named Don Kellett, who loves Hawaiian music and will sit in with us because we’re the only chance he has to play Hawaiian steel guitar music.  We have  a new player who I just met at one of these workshops in June, a guy called Mark Sinclair who plays ukulele, who’s been sitting in with us a lot lately, so the band can be anything from what you’re going to see on Thursday, which is just me and a guitar, to a four piece with half a dozen hula dancers, just depends what we can put together for the event.”

CC: “Tell us about the three songs you are bringing to this broadcast.”

SA: “These are three of the six songs on a recording that Hoʻokani, the Hawaiian band that I play and made last fall.  We found we were getting lots of requests as you just did, saying, ‘have you got a sample of your music?”

“We wanted to have something to respond to those requests,  so we did it over two days, about a month apart, in a studio out in Port Moody. We tried to pick a variety of songs. There’s some faster ones and some slower ones, some songs that we liked a lot. Songs that we were playing all the time, so we didn’t have to do a whole lot of work learning them.”

“The CD is called Nā Punahele, which means ‘favourites’ and that’s exactly what it is. Those are six of our favourite songs.” 

“Koke’e is written by one of the great Hawaiian songwriters, Uncle Dennis Kamakahi, who died a few years ago. It’s a song about  the uplands on the island of Kauai and around the head of Waimea Canyon and Kōkeʻe State Park. It’s a very classic kind of Hawaiian song, a song celebrating a place. It’s called a Nā Mele Kana, a place song.  It’s a whole genre of Hawaiian music.” 

“Pua Līlīlehua goes back to the mid 1950s. It was written by the great musician Kahauanu Lake  for the hula dancer Maʻiki Aiu. They were both young people in Honolulu getting their start in the entertainment business. Kahauanu was obviously very taken with Maʻiki as a dancer, so he wrote this song. He wrote it in English and he took it to Mary Kavana Pukui, who was the doyen of Hawaiian language at the time. She’s the woman who wrote by hand, on legal sized pieces of paper, the English Hawaiian dictionary that we still use today. Nobody knew more about the language. He asked her to translate it into the Hawaiian language for him and she did. He then did a very Hawaiian thing. He took the song, and he played it for Maiki, and he gave it to her. It’s very common in Hawaii for songs to be given as gifts. Maiki loved the song. She choreographed a hula for it. She went on to become probably the greatest hula teacher in recorded Hawaiian history and that song was the signature song of her hula lineage. These dancers that I mentioned earlier that I found in Vancouver, and that we started off playing for, they are great grandstudents of Maʻiki Aiu. So they are in that lineage and we learned the song for them.” 

“The third song, E Pili Mai, is a song written by Larry Kimura, who is a teacher of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and Cyril Pahinili, who is a great slack key guitarist who died a couple of years ago. They wrote it, but it was made famous by Kealiʻi Reichel, who people may have heard of.  He recorded it a while back, maybe 20 years ago now. It’s interesting that we on the mainland think of Kealiʻi Reichel as a singer. In Maui, where he’s from, the part of Maui that burned, fortunately, he is primarily a hula dancer, and then a hula teacher, and then a songwriter, and only then a singer. This is one of the songs that he recorded, although he didn’t write, and  it’s a love song. E Pili Mai means something like, stay close to me.”

“So that’s the three songs, and the first one is more upbeat, and the second two are slower, and Pu’u Liliʻahu is a classic hula song. There’s of a variety of stuff there, that’s why I picked those three.” 

CC: You’re also going to be collecting money for victims of the fire in Hawaii. Do you want to talk about that?

SA: “Well, as I mentioned, the Beamer Ohana Aloha Music Camp is one of the workshops that I try to go to every year. The other one is called George Kahumoku’s Maui Slack Key Guitar and Ukulele Workshop. It’s  got the world’s longest name for a workshop. It’s held in Napili, in West Maui.  I’ve been to it for the last two years, and ,it’s just amazing, but  many of the musicians who teach at that workshop, all the staff of that workshop, and many of the local people who are students,  lived in Lahaina.

I advisedly put that in the past tense. The part of Lahaina that they lived in doesn’t exist anymore. Three weeks ago it burned to ash.  None of the folks I know were killed in the fire, but some of them have family members who were killed. At least two of them have lost everything but the clothes on their backs. They’ve all lost  their jobs, their income because they’re musicians. Their venues are gone. Their audiences are gone. In some cases, their instruments are gone. Whatever you may hear in the news, it’s going to be a long, long time before West Maui comes back to anything like normal.”

“George Kahumoku, who runs this workshop, and his wife Nancy, started this GoFundMe.   They’re administering it, specifically for this group of people, they call them the slack key ohana, the slack key family, the people who work at this workshop are students, or teach there. The money’s largely being raised from folks from the mainland who’ve attended this workshop. This is a fund that is being administered by folks I know for the benefit of folks I know, and it just seemed a natural.” 

“We have the same sort of thing happening here in Kelowna and Shuswap and Yellowknife. Just the way my life has unfolded, I don’t know those people. I know these people.” 

Top photo credit: Stephen Antle – submitted photo

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