by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday night, with Stephen Colbert’s show delayed by
something I had utterly no interest in — a CBS-TV special featuring highlights
from the Masters’ golf tournament (held at a country club in Augusta, Georgia
that’s so racist Tiger Woods had to sue them to be allowed to play in it) —
and, when it finally aired, turning out to be a rerun anyway, I ran a Live
at the Belly Up show featuring a
surprisingly engaging Hawai’ian performer named Willie K. The name is short for
Willie Kahaliali’i, and he’s considered enough of a virtuoso on the ukulele
he’s been called “the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele.” This is pure hype, but
Willie K. — he’s clearly on the cusp between middle age and senior citizenhood,
though his Wikipedia page doesn’t give a birthdate or an age — turned out to be
a quite engaging musician with a wide variety of styles, though probably most
strongly influenced by American blues. His opening song on Live at
the Belly Up, “Talk About the Blues,” was
quite obviously a tribute to the original blues musicians from the Mississippi
Delta, and he stayed with electric guitar for that one and his next three
songs, “Hour of Tears” (a quite moving memorial to the victims of the mass
shooting at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting on October 27,
2018), “Katchi Katchi Music” (which started as a song in traditional Hawai’ian
style but got transformed into a piece with elements of blues, flamenco and
Mexican music — remember that Hawai’ians got exposed to the guitar from Mexican
workers who were imported for jobs on the islands and brought guitars with
them) and “Standing in the Rain.”
Then for the song “Howling at the Moon” he
put away the guitar and brought out a larger-than-normal ukulele, which he
played with a slide like a bottleneck blues guitar — though the songs still
paid tribute to classic blues artists: “Howling at the Moon” was obviously
inspired by Howlin’ Wolf (and one could readily imagine him doing it!) and
“House of the Sun” Willie K. said was inspired by the classic country blues
artist Son House. Then Willie K. showed off his multicultural chops by playing
an instrumental ukulele medley on Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malagueña” — a song about
the Malaga region of Spain written by a Cuban composer and bandleader (who fled
the island when Fidel Castro took power and lived an uncertain two last years
in New York before he died in 1961) — and the traditional Jewish song “Sholem
Aleichem.” Then he switched back to guitar for a song in Hawai’ian style (with
what I assume are Hawai’ian lyrics, though some of them sounded Spanish to me)
called “Palolo,” which I think he dedicated to one of his kids, and after that
he did an extended version of “Amazing Grace,” starting it in the traditional
slow tempo and speeding it up until it was as fast and as swinging as the
oddball version by the Fairfield Four from Bullet Records I’d just heard on my
collection from that label.
The show closed with “La Grange,” a song by Z. Z.
Top at their most John Lee Hooker-esque (Hooker actually did make an album with
the blues-rock band Canned Heat and one could readily imagine him covering this
song, as well as Mink DeVille’s great “Cadillac Walk”), and Willie K. did well
by it. Willie K. is one of those legendary artists who had somehow escaped my
notice until now — not only is he a remarkable musician with a powerful command
of a wide variety of styles (traditional Hawai’ian, flamenco, bottleneck
country blues and Chicago-style urban blues), the band members he brought with
him to the Belly Up, bassist Jerry Mayer and drummer Kris Thomas (a man, though
the spelling of his first name is more common for a woman), were absolute
dynamite and managed to sustain and underscore the high energy level of Willie
K.’s music. During the show Willie K. mentioned in passing that he’d received a
diagnosis of cancer (according to his own Web site it’s lung cancer and he made
the announcement on February 3, 2018), but it was clear he didn’t want to make
a big deal of it because he didn’t want his audience to listen to him and
think, “Pretty good for a dying man.” Willie K.’s music is pretty good for anybody
— there are probably players out there in
their 20’s who wouldn’t be able to keep up with him — and having the chance to
hear a legendary artist I’d never encountered before was a real joy.
