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”Butterflies Live’ Anuhea (Mailboat)
"Live" albums can be throwaways done for contractual reasons, or they can be recorded and produced to capture the excitement an artist generates outside the sterile environment of a recording studio. Maui resident Anuhea Jenkins and her co-producers, Dean Pond and Ron Ruff, create that feeling with "Butterflies Live."
Pond and Ruff stitch together songs from five shows in Colorado and California with such skill that the brief breaks between numbers are easy to ignore. With 10 songs total, one featuring a guest appearance by Justin Young, and a running time of 56 minutes, the "live" performance approximates the length of a complete set played in a nightclub, bar or music festival.
Add a second disc of studio recordings and a colorful booklet of liner notes, and "Butterflies Live" is certainly not a throwaway.
Anuhea and her musicians open the show in full Jawaiian mode. The opener, "Come Over Love," is her remake of a hit by English R&B/pop diva Estelle and Sean Paul (who recorded it in 2008 as "Come Over"). "Crown Royal," an original, is a shout-out to her favorite whiskey. Her final "hana hou-hou" number, "Simple Love Song," closes the "show" with one of her best Jawaiian originals.
But Anuhea doesn’t only do reggae. "Ultimate Insult," performed as a duet with percussionist JP Hewett, is an ear-catching departure from Jawaiian rhythms, and her delivery of a poetic spoken-word passage is nicely done. She slides into acoustic pop/blues territory with another original, "High on Love," and reveals her unabashed love of ’90s-vintage hip-hop with "Here I Go," which includes the entire first verse of Salt-n-Pepa’s 1993 hit, "Shoop." Yes, she looks like a "white chick from Hawaii," but she can get down.
The "live" format works especially well in allowing Anuhea to add context to another original, "Fight for Me Tonight." She introduces it with some advice for lonely single men: "If a chick no more one promise ring, chick no more one wedding ring, or at least in Hawaii, if she no more get one guy’s name tattooed on her neck or something — go talk to her!" But despite the song’s title, Anuhea isn’t saying that men should "scrap" over women in bars and nightclubs.
Two of the "bonus tracks" are studio versions of "High on Love" and "Forever Summer," her duet number with Young; they sing it beautifully in the studio. The third, "Perfect Day," is an imaginative trilingual R&B/pop collaboration with Maori singer-songwriter AWA. He sings part of the song in Maori, she sings part of it in Hawaiian and they both sing part of it in English.
Hawaii lags far behind Pacific island nations in writing and recording contemporary songs in mainstream music genres that have lyrics in the indigenous language. All going well, "Perfect Day" is a preview of a larger project by Anuhea and AWA that will inspire others.
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