Last night I attended a Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festival and it was fantastic!! The venue was a small dinner theatre type setting that seats about 500 - it was about half full which I suppose is good for a Wed night when it was 40 degrees outside - sure wish they had brought some of those Hawaii temperatures.....
The Festival featured Dennis Kamakahi, Bobby Moderow, Jr., Stephen Inglis, LT Smooth, and Paul Togioka. They mentioned the festival was supported by Taylor Guitars and they raffled off a GS Mini at the end of the night. Most of the participants used Taylor Guitars and Paul Togioka started the festival playing a gorgeous 600 series Taylor - most likely a 616. It was a beautiful guitar and sounded wonderful. Stephen Inglis looked like he was playing a 500 series - hog with cedar top, and Dennis Kamakahi played a Taylor but I couldn't tell what it was, it looked older and was covered in stickers.
I was not familiar with the Slack Key style of playing and discovered it is a method of playing fingerstyle in open tunings that originated in Hawaii. One of the participants told the story of how Hawaii had some Mexican cowboys come over to help wrangle the cows that were in HI and when they left they left the "gee-tars" behind. The Hawaiians picked them up and strummed them slacking the tuning keys until they got to a chord sound, hence the term "slack-key."
The show lasted about 3 hours with a short intermission and each artist played a solo set then the finale at the end featured all of the artists on stage together. Many stories were told and in addition to traditional Hawaiian tunes they played some Christopher Cross and even a Bob Dylan song....slack-key style.
It was a very nice evening and a bonus was that I got to meet up with a fellow forum member - imorroy. Ingrid can add some more details and she took a few pics so maybe she'll upload some....
