When people ask how long I have been involved in Hawaiian music, I tell them, “Likely since I was in utero.” For years before I was born, my mother and father led a music and dance troupe on the East Coast which performed solely Hawaiian music and hula. Hawaiian music – if not Hawaiian lineage – was in my blood.
I first stepped on stage with an `ukulele before I was three-years-old. By my teens my obsession became slack key guitar. By my twenties, I was focused on the steel guitar. But my first love has always been the Hawaiian song – the beauty of the Hawaiian language and the way the haku mele (or Hawaiian composer) weaves together words like so many flowers into a precious lei. I learned to sing more than a thousand Hawaiian songs, and I specialized in the art of Hawaiian falsetto singing – eventually taking first prize in both singing and Hawaiian language at the 2005 Aloha Festivals Falsetto Contest on O`ahu.
Today, I perform Hawaiian music up and down the East Coast and occasionally by invitation in Hawai`i. In my spare time, I am the Director of New Product Development for the world’s leading educational research organization. So I understand what “innovation” means and what it takes to bring a new product or service to market.
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