Owana Salazar - Singer, Slack Key & Steel Guitarist

Aloha, Mobile

Hawaiian performer, on way to New Orleans festival, pays a visit to her Mobile kin

Mobile Register
Thursday, April 29, 2004

By LAWRENCE SPECKER
Entertainment Reporter

You could say that Owana Salazar just stopped by on the way to New Orleans' Jazz Fest to visit some cousins, but there's a little more to it than that.

For one thing, Salazar came all the way from Hawaii. And for another, she brought the music of the islands with her, giving a few lucky Mobilians the chance to hear some exotic sounds played locally by someone to whom they are as natural as the Hawaiian language itself.

In Hawaii, Salazar is known as a professional performer, a vocalist and master of what's called "slack-key" guitar, as well as the distinctive form of steel guitar used in Hawaiian music. A recent Honolulu Advertiser review refers to her as "an acknowledged Hawaiian favorite."

She's also the great-granddaughter of Robert Wilcox, a man who made a considerable mark on Hawaiian history. At the end of the 19th century, Hawaii's independent monarchy was being overwhelmed by American interests; the process eventually led to the islands' current status as an American state.

Wilcox was heavily involved in three failed coups against the so-called "Bayonet Constitution" of 1887. In 1900, he nonetheless became the Territory of Hawaii's first delegate to Congress. His campaign for home rule continued until his death in 1903.

Wilcox was one of six children whose mother was of Maui royalty and whose father was a New England sea captain. One of Wilcox's nephews, Robert Gohier, brought that royal heritage to Mobile.

In spring of 2003, Mobile attorney Tracy Guice, who was about to take a family trip to Hawaii, traced the kinships back through the years. Finding Salazar was a cousin, she began an exchange of e-mail; they met face-to-face last May.

Such e-mail exchanges and rare meetings might have been the extent of it, but in November, Salazar let Guice know that she'd been invited to perform at the 2004 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. As far as she knew, she was the first Hawaiian act to be featured there.

"When I got the invitation, I was jumping out of my skin," she said. "This one is the festival."

Guice replied, naturally enough, that this was a prime chance for Salazar to visit her many relations in Mobile. The upshot is that Salazar, who travels to New Orleans today for festival performances on Friday and Saturday, has spent a whirlwind week in the Port City.

"I wanted her to come to Mobile to meet her family," Guice said. "I just think it's wonderful to have a relative from Hawaii who's got such talent."

"I'm really, really glad that I came early," said Salazar, who said she'd been treated "like royalty."

At a family gathering over the weekend, she met numerous cousins -- though, as she noted, the Hawaiian language has no native words for "cousin," "aunt" or "uncle." As she explained it, Hawaiian relationships are traditionally tighter, so that cousins think of themselves more as siblings.

So even if we might talk about distant cousins twice or three times removed, the actual family feeling was stronger for her, she said.

"We don't count these things," she said. "The distance doesn't count."

"They really want to know more about their Hawaiian heritage," she said of her local family. "They know it's there, but my coming has made it more real."

Salazar also had the opportunity, last weekend, to scope out the New Orleans festival before she plays there.

"Oh my God, I just don't have enough superlatives," she said of her initial impression. "What a production."

Most of all, she said, she was struck by the "wonderful vibe" shared by festival audiences.

She'll get her chance to contribute this weekend. In the meantime, she's been spreading a few good vibes of her own.

Last Thursday, she played a show at Charlene's Spirit of Mobile, a Dauphin Street restaurant. On Monday, she performed for the students of St. Luke's Episcopal School. (Another cousin, Patsy Hamilton is assistant head of the school.)

Each gave her a chance to introduce folks to both some classic Hawaiian sounds and to her own innovations.

Salazar's local performances featured two instruments: The first was a standard guitar that she played in the slack-key style, in which special tunings and rhythmic fingerpicking are used to create gentle, flowing accompaniment to vocals, usually sung in the Hawaiian language. (There are exceptions, though, as when Salazar borrowed some lyrics from Jimi Hendrix for her hybrid tune "Hi'ilawe/Waterfall.")

The second was an odd-looking variant sometimes called a "frying pan" guitar -- a heavy, small-bodied, eight-stringed instrument that lies across a performer's lap rather than hanging from a strap. Where notes on a standard guitar are usually controlled by the performer's fingers pressing directly on the strings, a Hawaiian steel guitar player slides a steel bar across them.

This produces clear, sustaining tones that shift fluidly from note to note as the slide is moved. The sound is somewhat reminiscent of the pedal steel guitar common in country and western music, though country artists generally favor a twangier sound.

"It's sweet, it's round, it's whole," Salazar said of the Hawaiian instrument's sound. "You can get everything out of this that you can get out of the pedal, you just have to work harder."

In fact, Joseph Kekuku, the Hawaiian man who invented the technique while still a boy, is credited as a predecessor of the pedal-steel sound.

"Part of my evangelism is to spread this word that this instrument, this slide, was invented in Hawaii," Salazar said. "A creative idea is universal."

The traditional music certainly seemed appreciated in Mobile, as did Salazar's own "Hula Jazz" approach, which puts the steel guitar in a jazz format.

"Where I'm taking it is where I hear it," she said. "This is something that's been on my mind for some time."

This weekend, she'll get to share what's on her mind with audiences at the Gulf Coast's biggest music festival. If Monday's show at St. Luke's was any indication, she'll make quite an impression: A number of younger students were drawn to her after her performance, as starstruck as if she were a celebrity they knew from television.

For them, she had a message.

"I want to let them know they can do anything they want to," she said. "If they want to play more than one instrument, they can."

Hamilton said the students were "mesmerized" by the performance, from the aspiring guitarists in the upper grades down to the little ones.

"They were inching up every chance they got, that kindergarten class," she said. "It was so cute."

At a family get-together over the weekend, relatives had been just as charmed, she said.

"We're just thrilled to meet a cousin we didn't know," she said.