Kalai Tour Dates

Bio

Kalai is urban vintage. The Hawaiian Born, Alaska raised, 26 year-old, is an old school young buck with do anything, anytime, at any level, musical talent. Besides being a lyrical BIGfoot, instrumentally this guy puts the “Z” in skillz. His music ranges coast to coast with soft ballads, edgy blues, straight jazz, acid jazz, and yeah buddy, a little bit of his own thing. If Dave Mathews, Paul Simon, Ben Harper, James Taylor, John Mayer, Bill Murray (Yes, the comedian.) and Béla Fleck had a baby it would surely be this guy! One might say you have to hear him to believe it, but chances are, even once you do, you won’t. Just Listen.

Kalai was born “Kaniela Ka Lei Ali’i ‘O’ Kalani Kala’i ” Dec. 18, 1979 in Kailua, HI. He was then raised in Anchorage Alaska from age 2 on up, as a son of a broken home with a future under construction. He began singing to “Bell Biv DeVoe” and “Boys II Men” as a young one. Then much later, Heavily influenced by James Taylor and The Beatles, he picked up the guitar at age 16 focusing mostly on folk and rock during his fledgling pursuit of musical development. With the prolific nature of a rabbit he wrote, literally, hundreds of Songs and compositions by age 20. Since then he’s surfed the shallows of “indie” labels, swam with the sharks in the industry’s deep, and finally landed home safe on the docks of the free market (Note: if any ”sharks” are reading this, we didn’t mean you.). Though nearly all of Kalai’s work can be found on iTunes and a few other internet locales, his latest national release “Crows Feet” can be found under severe demand in stores everywhere. So it would seem that in all his analogous sea travels through the time warping, ear infecting, self-plugging, shame throwing, peaceful valley that is the music industry, Kalai’s ship has come in. As a matter of fact, it has and the door is wide open. For the price of an admission ticket and a CD you can climb aboard the coolest cruise since Tom Cruise, preY2K. It changed some people.

So there it is. As a baby he was short and fat like everyone else except for having an enormous hemangioma on the entirety of his left hand earning him his plumber given nickname, “The Hand”. Why does Django Rheinhardt come to mind? The hemangioma, coupled with a failed surgery, left Kalai’s hand largely deformed and permanently pain prone, or at least until he breaks it off in a careless, fame driven, helmet-less motorcycle accident that somehow kills his drummer. As a teen he was a lanky, guitar playing identity mess like everyone else except for the fact that he played that guitar on bloody fingers and a fat hand over 8 hours a day. As a man he is a 6-foot, dream-wielding, American like everyone else except for the fact that he can sing like the King of whatever kingdom Prince is from and he can jam like a jelly sandwich.

The Future is in the hands of the clocks, and who knows what will come next. All I can tell you is that Kalai and Crows Feet are on stage now.

-Anonymous-

Categories: Music | Reggae | Folk