FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 12, 2015
For more information contact:
Bill Wynne
Ho`olohe Hou Radio
609-477-2629
Giving New Life to the Forgotten Voices of Hawaii
The Surprising New Home of Hawaiian Music Radio Is New Jersey
Ewing, NJ – Enterprising Hawaiian music lover and musician Bill Wynne has launched Ho`olohe Hou Radio from the basement studio of his New Jersey home via internet radio platform Live365. Unlike any previous endeavor in Hawaiian music radio, the station features primarily out-of-print recordings from Wynne’s archives of more than 25,000 Hawaiian music recordings – in various archaic media dating back to 1906 – which he has spent thousands of hours painstakingly remastering. More than this, the station is a first-ever attempt at Hawaiian music “edutainment” with Wynne offering commentaries throughout each programing day on the historic and cultural importance of the music and artists heard on the station. Wynne timed the launch of the station to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the world-renowned Hawaii Calls radio program which premiered on July 3, 1935, and in its first month of broadcasting, the station has already garnered more than 8,000 listeners in more than 30 countries and the endorsement of some of Hawaii’s finest musicians and cultural practitioners. Now Wynne is seeking to fund the station for its first year of operation through a Kickstarter campaign.
For over 40 years Wynne has collected every record from or about Hawai`i that he could get his hands on – a collection which now spans two floors of his modest home. Entertainers from Hawai`i or their families have acknowledged Wynne as a “keeper of the culture” by entrusting to him unreleased recordings, home video, candid interviews, recordings from private parties, jam sessions, and even handwritten lyric sheets. All of these treasures Wynne has both studied and meticulously filed for future reference. Throughout 2014, Wynne wrote more than 750 pages on the history of Hawaiian music and its musicians and composers for his Ho`olohe Hou blog – information which in many cases could not be found previously in any other source. Wynne has revealed mysteries about Hawaiian music that even ethnomusicologists had not to date explored, and he has discussed the evolution of Hawaiian music and its relationship to jazz, pop, country, and other influences from outside the islands. And Wynne is uniquely qualified to do this since he is not merely a Hawaiian music archivist, but also a performer, having learned from an early age to play the instruments which help define the Hawaiian music tradition – ukulele, slack key guitar, and steel guitar – and sing hundreds of songs in the Hawaiian language – an amazing feat for a child born and raised on the East Coast and who boasts no Hawaiian lineage. Wynne’s specialty is the rare art of Hawaiian falsetto singing for which he was awarded First Prize in both the singing and Hawaiian language usage categories in the Aloha Festivals Falsetto Contest in 2005 – earning him a recording contract with Honolulu-based Hula Records.
Even Wynne’s approach to fundraising is unique. It is a rare Kickstarter campaign that guarantees funders a return on their investment as Wynne has already built and launched the station. The fundraising period concludes on August 31st, and because he has made a substantial personal investment in the station, it is Wynne’s sincere hope that the early interest in his experiment in Hawaiian music “edutainment” just as quickly translates into listener support.
Contact
For additional information about Ho`olohe Hou Radio or Mr. Wynne, visit the Ho`olohe Hou blog (www.hawaiianmusiclives.com), Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/hoolohehou),or Kickstarter page and video (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hwnmusiclives/ho-olohe-hou-radio) or call Mr. Wynne at 609-477-2629.