'Musical guy' has a slack key hobby

Guitarist Jim West admits he wears many different hats.

"I'm an all around musical guy."

There's an outlandish hat for his work as Weird Al Yankovic's guitarist. He puts on a more staid affair for composing commercials for Nike or Honda. In his free time he relaxes and slips into something comfortable, his coconut hat.

West named his 1999 album "Coconut Hat" along that theme. The album is a showcase for one of his favorite pastimes, Hawaiian slack key guitar, a musical genre growing in popularity in the mainland United States and the world.

"For me slack key guitar is a very warm, folky and relaxing sound. It's very organic," West, 48, said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "It's not about fancy playing, although there is that in slack key. It's really about playing from the heart."

West is on the verge of turning the hobby into something more and is beginning to play the music publicly. He will perform at 7 p.m. next Friday in the Silverthorne Theater on the Lewis-Clark State College at Lewiston.

"I just have to get over my stage fright," said the guitarist credited on two Grammy-winning recordings and 10 albums with Yankovic. "I'm used to playing in a band where you have the security of other musicians behind you. You feel a little naked up there when it's just you with an acoustic guitar."

In Hawaii, slack key guitar is "ki ho'alu" which means "to loosen the key." Slack key music is produced by a guitar that has had its strings dropped from their standard tunings.

"You wouldn't say it's off-key, just retuned."

West, who taught himself to play acoustic guitar around age 12, retuned his guitar to his own liking for years, so when he came across the slack key tradition on a trip to Maui in 1985, he was immediately drawn to its unusual rhythms. He played along with

records by The Sons of Hawai'i and Gabby Pahinui for fun and later wrote his own songs.

"It was just getting familiar with the Hawaiian way of doing it. Hawaiian music is its own thing."

Hawaiian music evolved in isolation and was directly influenced by visitors to the islands.

"Before Europeans came to Hawaii, they didn't have music as we would think of it. They had chants and drumming."

The tonality of music they learned from missionaries and other visitors carries over into various kinds of Hawaiian music of which slack key is one, West said.

Mexican and Spanish cowboys are credited with bringing the guitar to Hawaii. The cowboys were hired in the 1820s to teach Hawaiians to manage the growing herds of cattle that came as a gift from England. At night, around the campfire they played their guitars.

When the Hawaiians incorporated the guitar into their culture, they blended what they had learned of Mexican and Spanish music with their traditional chants and rhythms. They also retuned the guitars to their preference. Special tunings were often carefully guarded family secrets.

Slack key guitar gained notoriety in the mainland United States a mere decade ago, said West, when new age pianist George Winston created Dancing Cat Records, a label devoted to recording the great slack key guitarists.

"It's coming into its own as we speak. Just in the last couple of years we've started to see slack key concerts and events listed around the country. People are enjoying it. It's very infectious."

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West continues to play with "Weird Al" and compose musical scores for TV and film. Recently he wrote the opening segment of the Fox Teen Choice Awards. He's not planning discarding his other hats for his coconut hat.

"I do it for the love of it. Very few great slack key guitarists make a living at this in Hawaii. They do this in the evenings. Even though they are very well known and respected, no one is doing it for the money."

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More information about slack key guitar is available at www.dancingcat.com

Karinen may be contacted at jkarinen@lmtribune.com