About Makana
Hometown
Hawaii
Genre
Worldwide
Widely praised for his mastery of the Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Oahu singer/songwriter Makana built a reputation around the turn of the millennium for his dynamic playing style that infuses indigenous guitar styles with rock, blues, and world music. Following his award-winning 1999 debut, he delivered a string of solo albums that mixed traditional slack-key instrumentals with original songs, later gaining wider notice for his contributions to the Grammy-nominated collections Hawaiian Slack Key Kings I & II as well as the soundtrack to the film The Descendants. As a performer, Makana's unique style has allowed him to share bills with an unusual array of artists from No Doubt and Common to Elvis Costello. He even performed at the White House. In the 2010s, Makana became known for his activism, particularly in regard to the Occupy movement. His later albums include 2013's Ripe and 2020's A Hawai'i Interlude.
Born on the island of Oahu, Makana began singing at the age of seven. At nine, he took up the ukulele, adding the slack-key guitar when he was 11 and studying with the late slack-key master Sonny Chillingworth. He had already turned professional by the age of 14 and begun incorporating various styles together, which he later referred to as "slack rock." Released in 1999, his debut album, Makana, won the Best World Music Album Award at the Hawaii Music Awards. It was followed by Koi Au in 2002 and Ki Ho'alu: Journey of Hawaiian Slack Key in 2003.
Makana contributed to the Grammy-nominated album Hawaiian Slack Key Kings in 2006, alongside acknowledged masters like Ledward Kaapana and contemporary songwriters like Jack Johnson. Later that year, Makana's fourth album, Different Game, was released and marked his first entirely original collection. After appearing on a second volume of the Hawaiian Slack Key Kings series in 2008, he returned the next year to issue a compilation of slack-key songs called The Instrumental World of Makana: Venus and the Sky Turns to Clay.
In 2011, Makana was included on the soundtrack to the Academy Award-winning George Clooney film The Descendants. Later that year, during a performance in Honolulu at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation event that was attended by, among others, President Obama, he played his original protest song "We Are the Many," which became aligned with the Occupy movement. In 2012, Makana received the Slack Key Legend Award from the Nā Hōkū Hanohano Awards, the Hawaiian equivalent of the Grammy Awards. His 2013 album Ripe featured a studio version of "We Are the Many." In 2016, Makana composed an award-winning score for the Visitors and Convention Bureau. He returned with his next studio LP, the tranquil A Hawai'i Interlude, in 2020. ~ Timothy Monger & William Ruhlmann
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