In the months prior to filming "The Descendants," director Alexander Payne often found himself crisscrossing Oahu and Kauai in a rental car with the music of Gabby Pahinui as a soundtrack to his Hawaiian immersion. The slack-key virtuoso’s gentle strumming and earthy voice moved Payne so much that the Oscar-winning director decided to make Pahinui’s work a unifying voice for the film.
It’s no surprise then that the late musician’s music figures prominently in "The Descendants’" soundtrack, which will be released digitally and on CD for $11.98 on Nov. 15, just three days before the movie’s theatrical release.
The soundtrack includes six songs by Pahinui as well as works of Keola Beamer, Sonny Chillingworth, Ray Kane, Jeff Peterson and Lena Machado.
Payne had already decided to score the film with Hawaiian music by the time he started scouting locations in late 2009. But Pahinui took him farther than he could drive.
"I fell deeply in love with Gabby’s music," Payne wrote in the liner notes to the CD from Sony Classics. "When I started playing Gabby, I felt the same chill as when at 18 I first heard Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue.’"
Although he suffered a fatal stroke in 1980, Pahinui remains a bona fide folk hero in the history of Hawaiian music. He brought to his music a voice that was at once raspy, guttural and falsetto — an instrument, one reviewer said, "that knows pain, sorrow and pleasure."
Dondi Bastone, music supervisor for "The Descendants," said Pahinui’s voice connects the emotional moments that Payne had created in the film.
"The rich soul of Gabby’s voice — it is so soulful — I think that is what really grabbed him," Bastone said. "It just resonated with him in a big way."
Don Wildman, host of the Travel Channel series "Off Limits," had never been to Hawaii when he arrived in late spring with a camera crew and his trademark sense of adventure.
The show, like Wildman, is driven by curiosity.
"We go to places that people can’t see in places that are familiar to them," Wildman said. "They are places they might walk by and not know are even there. It’s kind of a geography study or an anthropology study of places you know very well but through spaces you can’t locate or be able to get into."
His Hawaii episode, which airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday, includes a trip through the irrigation system of an old Kauai sugar plantation, a Pearl Harbor bunker and the H-3 tunnel control center, where he steps through a door that leads to a cliff above the freeway.
"I didn’t have any idea what was on the other side of that door when they said, ‘Go through the door,’" Wildman said.
But Wildman’s most fascinating discovery occurred somewhere beneath Moiliili — he won’t say where — when a local resident took him to a side street near the University of Hawaii.
They descended a ladder under a sewer grate and crawled through a tunnel that led to an enormous natural cavern. Scores of concrete pilings rose up around them and connected above them to form the foundation of an apartment building.
"I was waist deep (to) chest deep in water looking at fossils on the wall," Wildman said. "You could spend all day in this cave and never find the end of it."
And that’s a wrap …
Mike Gordon is the Star-Advertiser’s film and television writer. Read his Outtakes Online blog at honolulupulse.com. Reach him at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
