Page 14 - MidWeek - March 9, 2022

14 MIDWEEK MARCH 9, 2022
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She’s Letting The Music Play For Today’s Youth, Kūpuna
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Astonishingly, this brave soul decided to launch her venture right in the middle of the pandemic.
“I guess it was the scari- est time to open a business,” admits a chuckling DeLima, whose school began offering private and group lessons in vocals and instrumentation (‘ukulele, bass, guitar, pia- no) last July within the mall’s 2,500-square-foot space pre- viously occupied by BedMart Mattress Superstores.
(Left) Student Jaxon Saavedra follows along as instructor Bowe Souza leads a piano lesson. LAWRENCE TABUDLO PHOTO (Right) Kelly Boy DeLima supervises an ‘ukulele class for youth with the help of several teaching assistants.
PHOTO COURTESY KALENAKU DELIMA
“But for me, I thought it was also the best time be- cause it seemed like we were just coming out of COVID, and I was thinking that it would be the perfect time be- cause all of this was going to go away and everything was going back to normal.”
tal and educational wellness of the youth in our commu- nity,” says DeLima, noting that most of her students range in age from 9 to 17, but she also has pupils “in their 70s or 80s” who take part in the school’s kūpuna ‘ukulele class on Saturday mornings.
The pressure only mounted when Kapena’s other original members — brothers Teimo- mi and Tivaini Tatofi — left the band, thus providing her father with the opportunity to chart a new course for the group, one featuring he and his children.
began her classical training at age 10 under acclaimed coach Eunice DeMello and counts several local songstresses — Raiatea Helm, Aunty Genoa Keawe and Amy Hanaiali‘i — among her strongest in- fluences growing up.
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“But when you’re in this family, you don’t dabble. You’re either good at it or you don’t play.”
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Of course, when the con- ventional didn’t return imme- diately, she wisely adjusted her sails. To help her student vocalists learn proper singing techniques, for example, De- Lima had large plastic barri- ers installed in private rooms so that the students’ masks could be briefly removed and “we could see how their mouths were moving.”
“I’ve heard so many of our teachers say, ‘Wow! When you see that you taught them something and then they actu- ally learned how to do it and that you literally changed the trajectory of their life just from taking 30 to 60 minutes a week with them, that makes this all worth it.’”
“It is true that there was a lot of pressure to succeed,” DeLima admits. “I think a lot of people expect that because you come from two parents who are musical, and because my older brother (also named Kapena) is so talented — he’s a recording engineer, he can play any instrument, you give him anything and he’ll figure it out in 10 minutes ... he’s that guy! — that you’ re ex- pected to be really good real- ly quickly.”
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If she and her siblings have been particularly ex- ceptional at something be- yond music, it’s been in their willingness to support one another in all tides. But that familial reliance also left DeLima feeling a bit adrift when she chose to set out as a solo pianist at The Moana Surfrider a few years back.
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“For vocalists,” she contin- ues, “how your mouth moves is very important in how you sing.”
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aised in the town where her school is berthed, DeLima is
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Today, the school boasts an enrollment of about 250 students while registering six new pupils each month — impressive numbers when considering that DeLima and staff perform almost no mar- keting other than through word of mouth and “promot- ing and boosting posts” on Instagram and Facebook.
the second of three children born to musicians Kelly Boy and Leolani DeLima. Her fa- ther is the founder and front- man of the well-known island music outfit Kapena (mean- ing “captain” in Hawaiian) and growing up in such an atmosphere naturally brought with it expectations of being exceptional in entertainment.
To her credit, DeLima chose to stick to her strengths — singing, and playing key- boards and ‘ukulele — de- spite being capable of back- ing up her brother on drums and percussion (“I’ ll keep the beat, nothing fancy. Just don’t give me a drum solo!”) or younger sister Lilo Tuala on bass (“I don’t usually like to tell anyone that I play bass because it’s nowhere near what Lilo can do; I mean she’s one of the best”).
“When I stopped perform- ing with my siblings and I started performing solo, my first instinct was, ‘Oh, my gosh! I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be on stage by myself,’ ” she explains. “There was this fear of, ‘Are they going to like me? Am I any good without them?’”
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“We were all called up on stage from when we were really young,” she recalls. “In the third grade, I danced Ulupalakua for May Day and I also learned how to sing it. Every single performance af- ter that, my dad would call me up on stage to sing that song.”
When similar doubts sur- faced just prior to and im- mediately after starting her school and left her in desper- ate need of a blast of wind in her sails, DeLima found strength in knowing that sup-
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“What we learned in this process after such a short time is how worth it this all is. The school has a mission to enrich the emotional, men-
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“I can dabble in oth- er things,” continues the school’s voice instructor, who
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SEE PAGE 15
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