Story By: Liza Simon Photos By: Marco Garcia
At this year’s Na Hoku
Hanohano Awards, Natalie Ai Kamauu
won an honor for lead vocals on her latest album and struck a catchy note in
her acceptance speech: “Thanks to the ‘Dave Tucciarone School of Music’ for all
this,” she beamed. Industry insiders at the gala event—Hawai‘i’s homegrown
version of the Grammys—know that there is no actual Dave Tucciarone School of
Music. There is only Dave Tucciarone, the recording engineer/producer behind
more than three hundred contemporary Hawaiian music albums and thirteen Na Hoku
awards. Still, for Kamauu and scores of other local recording artists, there’s
no denying the very real influence this metaphorical one-man music academy has
had on their careers.
Recording engineer/producer
is an elusive job title associated with a handful of towering icons like George
Martin, a.k.a. “the fifth Beatle,” and Phil Spector, who played the role to the
hilt and became more famous than some of the artists for whom he worked.
Tucciarone is one of Hawaiian contemporary music’s toned-down, self-effacing
versions of that. He’s a behind-the-scenes hit maker who takes the great voices
of the Islands, honed in backyard and beach-park jam sessions, and he helps
them achieve staying power.
The fact that many of the
artists on the transplanted New Yorker’s roster record only in Hawaiian, and
that Tucciarone speaks only English, is not a problem. As singer Hoku
Zuttermeister, winner of multiple Na Hoku awards himself, puts it, “Dave can
tell you everything about chords and harmonies, but he also has got a heart for
music, and Hawaiian music is best understood from the heart.”
Folding his rangy frame
into a chair at the Honolulu apartment that doubles as a recording studio,
Tucciarone shows his inclination to deflect praise. “Must be all those wads of
cash I hand out at the Hoku Awards,” he jokes. But he is profoundly serious
about his commitment to coaxing clients to “sing from an emotional center.” If
you don’t, “your recording is an inanimate object, and it has no life apart
from you,” he says. “It is falling on deaf ears.”
To get the best out of
each recording artist, he takes into consideration how fragile musicians’ egos
can be. It’s something he understands personally. He’s a songwriter in his own
right—he’s penned jingles for Reebok, Cadillac, Mitsubishi and other big brands—and
he’s a multi-instrumentalist with a formal music education that began when he
was a boy growing up on Long Island, New York. His deep theoretical background
is unlike that of his typical clients, who grew up singing and playing by ear
and might never have learned to read sheet music. But he is careful not be a
pedagogue in the studio; instead he tries to direct musicians inward to their
own rich cache of natural talent. “I don’t bombard anyone with music theory. I
just guide them to where they want to go,” he says.
This doesn’t mean,
however, that he is averse to doing what some have found to be a rite of
passage at the Dave Tucciarone School of Music: expulsion. “If you think you’re
emoting your socks off and you’re barely pushing the yellow on the meter,” he
says, “then it’s time for me to say to you, ‘Go home, think about what each
song truly means, recharge and return later.’”
Tucciarone’s approach can
be frustrating for artists. Just ask Natalie Ai Kamauu, who first walked into
his studio in 1995, fresh from winning the prestigious title of Miss Aloha Hula
and eager to make her very first recording. Tucciarone was impressed with her
voice, but in his soft-spoken yet straightforward manner he had to advise her
that she was blasting her pipes to the point of sounding off-key and harsh.
Kamauu, the prodigal daughter of two hula-master parents, had been performing
for adoring audiences her whole life. Fueled by the adrenaline of the crowds,
she’d gotten into the habit of, as Tucciarone put it, “putting the pedal to the
floor.” The feedback came as a shock to young Kamauu, as did Tucciarone’s
method of recording each musician separately and then layering all the tracks
into a final product.
Alone in a booth, Kamauu
heard Tucciarone in her headphones giving endless instructions aimed at helping
her hold some of her vocal power in reserve. Not being allowed to sing the way
she had always sung was hard for her. Some days she was nearly in tears. The
result of those initial sessions was a Christmas single that didn’t do much on
the charts. It did, however, have one long-lasting effect: It caught the
attention of ‘Iolani Kamauu, a disc jockey with Hawaiian radio station KCCN-FM,
who met and wed the singer before the next Christmas.
In 2004 a more mature and
focused Kamauu returned to Tucciarone’s studio, this time to do her first
album. It was still hard work. Every day she faced melodies in a different key
or time signature—, when she nailed one of the most difficult tunes with an angelic
timbre. When the album came out, simply entitled ‘E, Hawaiian music fans
embraced Kamauu for her deeply moving voice. Today, with five albums out—all
forged under Tucciarone—she credits the engineer/producer with teaching her
that live performance is very different from recorded music. “When you listen
to any one of my songs on a recording, you’ll believe that I’m singing to you
alone—because I am,” she says. “Dave’s scrutiny taught me this lesson.”
From 1986 to 1994
Tucciarone operated his own three-thousand-square-foot recording studio in an
old pineapple cannery in Honolulu. Because he started it with the help of a
generous loan from his father, he named it Fortunate Sun Studio, hoping that
the luck would radiate and shine on everyone. For the veteran songwriter and
musician Bryan Kessler, Fortunate Sun was like a “magic sanctuary where
everyone bonded.” This had a lot to do with Tucciarone being a musician
himself, and one who knew how to do everything from tune instruments to create
orchestral arrangements. “He could make performers feel comfortable during the
long hours,” says Kessler, who hunkered down in the studio with the other
members of the Hawaiian Style Band and conjured the loopy swing rhythm that
became the group’s signature groove. “The outside world seemed to vanish, and
the creativity shone through,” Kessler recalls.
Tucciarone presided over
Fortunate Sun with discipline—especially when it came to punctuality—and
everyone knew it. If he set a recording session for 8 a.m., musicians began
lining up in the halls at 7:30 a.m., prepared for the doors to open.
A raw, young band named
Kapena, which had electrified stages with a pioneering mix of reggae and
Hawaiian that kicked off the “Jawaiian” craze in the 1980s, learned to buckle
down at Fortunate Sun. “We were just out of high school and didn’t know right
from wrong,” says the band’s lead singer, Kelly Boy. “In fact, we didn’t even
know there was a right way in music.” He laughs, then he adds that Tucciarone
was tactful in informing them that they were often “under or over the music,”
meaning flat or sharp in tonality.
For a while times were
good for the cresting wave of the local music industry, and Fortunate Sun
prospered. Then came CD burners, which enabled the home recording and
duplication of products. Tucciarone says this was a turning point. Next came
the corporate consolidation of radio stations and along with it the purging of
local recordings from radio playlists. What fans couldn’t hear, they would not
buy. It was systemic change in the music industry that led to the shuttering of
recording studios from Los Angeles to New York City. Honolulu, too. Not one to
fight a losing battle, Tucciarone closed Fortunate Sun without regret.
Today his home recording
studio is composed of compact digital equipment, which takes up a fraction of
the space his old audio mixing boards did, and at a fraction of the cost to
recording artists. He believes that digitally recorded music has less warmth
than its older analog counterpart. But this trade-off is acceptable to many
artists because pop music is no longer a giant vibration emanating from
boomboxes and meant to envelop collective ears. It now comes via cyberspace and
is consumed in solitude through earbuds. At the same time, the intimacy of the
digital music experience gives renewed meaning to Tucciarone’s guidance to
musicians to find their emotional center and connect with the audience
genuinely, one listener at a time.
The downgrade in studio
venues hasn’t halted the stream of artists seeking to record with Tucciarone.
When Maui musician Kalani Pe‘a decided it was time to go from the stage to the
studio, the social media buzz told him that Tucciarone would be the best
producer/engineer he could find. But Pe‘a was trying to do something musically
different, and he wasn’t sure Tucciarone would be interested. Over the phone,
Pe‘a described himself to Tucciarone as a “Hawaiian contemporary soul singer
and a Hawaiian cultural educator” who wanted to record the soulful,
velvet-smooth hits of Luther Vandross in the Hawaiian translations he’d crafted
himself. Pe‘a sweated it out for a long moment of silence before Tucciarone
said, “Ok, let’s talk story.”
Pe‘a flew to Honolulu for
a meeting. Flush with excitement but twenty minutes late, he parked his rental
car outside Tucciarone’s apartment building. Tucciarone met him at the curb. “As
your first-ever producer,” Tucciarone said, “I am compelled to advise you that
you have parked in the fire lane.” After that was straightened out the two
talked. Tucciarone saw that Pe‘a wasn’t simply being novel for the sake of
being novel. He was being true to himself—a central tenet of the Dave
Tucciarone School of Music. “If you’re going to do something different, you
have to be capable and comfortable with it in your own skin, otherwise you may
be committing career suicide,” he told Pe‘a. The young singer’s debut album, E
Walea, went to the top spot on the iTunes world music chart in 2016.
Still, Tucciarone is not
one to tell artists to curb their enthusiasm for the sake of the status quo.
Just ask the fiercely independent Raiatea Helm. “He’s a cool cat,” she laughs,
adding that he is one to lift the mood in the studio by telling corny jokes.
Moreover, when she decided to include the sultry soul/blues classic “At Last”
on a recording of what were otherwise all Hawaiian songs, Tucciarone didn’t
flinch. And luckily so. The album, Sweet and Lovely, came out in 2006, just in
time to be nominated for a Grammy.
Speaking via Skype during
a tour of Japan, Helm tells me that Tucciarone helped her by not cramping her
creativity. She felt encouraged by him to look at Hawaiian contemporary music
as something more than just art or entertainment. Then she apologizes if what
she is about to say sounds “off the deep end,” but she and a group of other
Hawaiian musicians are performing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they can feel
residual grief from the holocausts unleashed on those cities in World War II. “But
being from Hawai‘i,” she says, “we know that there is healing in the culture of
the music we bring.”
Even so, she has to remind
herself of this often. This is a new era for Hawaiian music, and Hawaiian
musicians need to know not only their audience and their identity, but who in
the business to trust. Professional relationships are vital to happiness in
music, she says—“and Dave had my back.” |