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LovinLK
Lokahi
USA
112 Posts |
 Posted - 08/13/2007 : 9:00:39 PM
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Was looking at the Star Bulletin and there's a huge article on Iz. There's music, stories, video, etc. Don't know how long it's been there but thought I'd post it anyway.
http://iz.honoluluadvertiser.com/
http://iz.honoluluadvertiser.com/videos.html
Israel's voice with a symphonic sound
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
Inspiration has come to him at night, sometimes quite late and often from some ethereal distance. He's not sure if it came from his subconscious or the hereafter, from a mind working overtime or the ghost of a giant.
It sounds crazy, and maybe it is. But for two years, music producer Jon de Mello flirted with obsession and the madness of art while creating one of his most ambitious albums: The symphonic arrangement of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.
The finished product — "Wonderful World" — is a 12-song collection of Kamakawiwo'ole's previously recorded work, available in stores beginning Tuesday.
The marriage of Kamakawiwo'ole's 'ukulele and an orchestra may seem unlikely, but not to de Mello. The producer views the blend as an artistic maturity that his favorite musician could not attain in life. Kamakawiwo'ole was 38 when he died in 1997 from complications of morbid obesity.
The new album was a difficult task. As he drove himself to finish the project — and especially when he was unsure of something — de Mello felt he was not alone.
"There are a lot of times when I am working on something and I really feel him," de Mello said. "There were times when I actually turned around, because
I could feel his breathing. It doesn't spook me, but it keeps me on my toes."
When de Mello struggled with the project, which consumed him seven days a week, around the clock, he often found himself talking to the huge Hawaiian. He'd go to sleep with an unresolved issue and wake up hearing Kamakawiwo'ole's voice.
He has dreamed of his friend four days in a row and watched lightning flash when he found the right note on his piano.
"As weird as it sounds, Israel talks to me," de Mello said. "I wake up in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden I am looking up in the air and he is saying something."
From Simple To Symphonic
De Mello is convinced that Kamakawiwo'ole would approve of the symphonic direction.
"I think he would go out of his mind," he said. "I really think he would start crying and make me cry, too."
The project had stewed in de Mello's mind for several years. By using technology that didn't exist when Kamakawiwo'ole died, the 59-year-old producer was sure he could do justice to his friend's rich sound.
"I had the potential, from a technology standpoint, to place Israel and his 'ukulele in a different musical environment," de Mello said. "And that environment seemed to me to be a classical orchestra, a symphony. It was big. It was warm. It was the same kind of texture that Israel sings in."
De Mello will know soon enough if he is playing with fire or the alchemy of gold. Fans around the world have come to expect a certain sound from Kamakawiwo'ole: His solo voice, his 'ukulele, a guitar and a bass as backup.
It was that way by design, de Mello said.
Beginning in 1993, de Mello and Kamakawiwo'ole produced three albums before the singer's death, and the pair worked to keep the music simple.
"In fact, it was so simple that there are only one or two songs that have even remote second-part harmonies," de Mello said.
But after the singer died, de Mello continued to revisit the taped recording sessions — he has more than 80 hours of material, including rehearsals, commentary and final versions.
Kamakawiwo'ole has 36 recorded songs in his catalog, everything from classic Hawaiian ballads to "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
"And listening to more and more of it, I was finding things that were really neat that Israel was doing that were really warm and wonderful and artistic and him," de Mello said.
De Mello began to rearrange the songs, stripping away — with the aid of new computer programs — any noise and instruments he didn't like.
At the same time, he scored new sections and asked orchestrators in the United States, Japan and Europe to record them.
They would e-mail the music to each other, call each other, overnight-express recorded discs. Using live musicians and recorded musical notes from an array of instruments, de Mello and his orchestrators blended the final arrangement.
"My biggest job was to keep everyone away from Israel, to keep him in front of the orchestra," he said. "I wanted to do it smooth and silky and I hope that's what we're hearing."
A Father's Influence
De Mello got help from his 90-year-old father, composer and arranger Jack de Mello, who brought a lifetime of musical knowledge to the project.
Now a resident of Las Vegas, the elder de Mello was at the center of the Hawaiian music scene for decades, starting in the late 1940s. He recorded Hawaiian arrangements with orchestras in London, Tokyo and Munich and released them on his Music of Polynesia record label. He blended soft, angelic voices with lush orchestral strings.
The elder de Mello said Kamakawiwo'ole's popularity has grown to the point where it demands what he called "orchestral colors." If the late singer's music were paired with country western or reggae, "we would get shot," Jack de Mello said.
"As long as you respect the talent of Israel, then you can't expect a negative reaction, because it is gorgeous music," he said. "But there are some purists who are going to say that maybe Israel is getting too snobbish for us. He is in a musical setting that is in a concert hall. There are some who might reject that, but I doubt many."
Gaps were also created in the music so Jon de Mello could insert brief Kamakawiwo'ole sound bites culled from the singer's recording sessions. There was a wealth of material from which to choose, from lectures on living right to 125 different kinds of laughter.
The new album is full of familiar hits, but its real triumph may be in the obscure.
De Mello took several unremarkable songs and gave them new life, songs the producer admits were filler. One of them is a classic Hawaiian standard — "E Ku'u Morning Dew" — that Kamakawiwo'ole performed during a 1995 outdoor concert in the Big Island fishing village of Miloli'i.
"This is a song that fell through the cracks," de Mello said. "No one connected this as a hit with Israel."
The sound system was poor and the recording badly done. When he listened closely, de Mello would wince. He could hear people, babies, honking car horns and the hum of a generator.
De Mello removed all that using his computer, then put his orchestrators to work.
"When I sent this out and got this back, I thought this is the new frontier," he said. "This is fresh. No one has heard it like this."
‘Messing With Israel'
Of course, that's the most terrifying part of a project of this kind. And some fans may not like de Mello's changes. It won't be "everyone's cup of tea," he said.
"Yes, there is a risk and I am scared," de Mello said. "I don't want to say it's sacrilegious, but it's messing with Israel at his primal level. But I believe it fits together. It's warm. It makes Israel sound wonderful."
A few weeks before the album was finished, de Mello cued up a track for Betty Stickney, one of Kamakawiwo'ole's closest friends. She had watched the singer in small clubs and seated before the Honolulu Symphony — when he quipped that he finally had the right backup band.
Her first reaction, before the music filled the sound studio, was one of apprehension.
"You can't improve on perfect," Stickney said.
She wasn't prepared for the new sound.
"It's absolutely unbelievable," Stickney said. "It's so beautiful."
Stickney thought a symphonic sound would swallow Kamakawiwo'ole's sweet voice and simple 'ukulele.
"It did not do what I feared it might do, that it would take over so much that you were conscious of the embellishment and not the artist," she said. "I thought they had done a really magnificent job of keeping that in the background, so you were not thinking what a magnificent orchestra. You were thinking I am being transported to another world."
Kamakawiwo'ole's widow, Marlene, experienced the same feeling when she listened to "Wonderful World." For Marlene, now a 45-year-old grandmother, the symphonic arrangement suits her time in life. Older, wiser, more mellow.
But she said de Mello has created something that will expand her husband's appeal, regardless of age and even among those who would never get off the beach and into a concert hall.
"It takes you to a new level," she said. "It's a little more mature, a little more upscale, but that's a part of life. We grow. When you are young, you limit yourself. I think this is a whole lot more to share. It sounds even crispier, sweeter, soothing."
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Lovin' Lee is my favorite pasttime!!
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