"Time flies" might seem like a flippant cliche, but there is certainly a sense of time passing as Makana celebrates his 25th anniversary as a slack-key guitarist and almost that many years as a professional entertainer.

Hawaii has watched him evolve from "boy wonder" status as the Ki Ho‘alu Kid, a professional musician working late nights at Duke’s Canoe Club in Wai­kiki while still in high school, into the sophisticated and the deeply philosophical musician/ singer/songwriter he is today, building a career with little or no radio play.

Makana will celebrate his 25th anniversary Sunday with a party and the Hono­lulu release of his new double CD, "25."

One disc, titled "Raw," was recorded "underground" in Chinatown and shows his range as an acoustic pop composer and interpreter of other artists’ hits. The other, "Root," was recorded at Pierre Grill’s Rendez-Vous Recording in Manoa and is predominately Hawaiian and hapa-haole.

This is the first time Makana has put out an album with such a wide range of musical styles. His six previous albums were either Hawaiian or non-Hawaiian in format, although he has used slack-key tunings and techniques on both.

"This is the first time that I’m really literally bifurcating my music, because I’ve gotten to the point where compositionally I’m so prolific," said Makana, 36. "I’ve literally written so much that I haven’t released yet that it’s becoming difficult to move forward without putting it out.

"I put a quarter-century into slack-key guitar. That’s my passion and my roots. It’s not going to stop, but I’m going to be creating some other identities to start releasing a lot of the material that I’ve been sitting on that doesn’t fall into that world."

"25" has been sold at Makana’s concerts and will be offered at the release party, where he will play selections from the new album. (It will be available on the Big Island on Friday and Saturday when Makana headlines a two-night tribute to Sonny Chillingworth at Kahilu Theatre in Wai­mea. For more information, call 885-6868 or visit www.kahilu­theatre.org).

Makana also created the music for the new Hawai‘i Visitors and Convention Bureau media campaign #LetHawaiiHappen that has been running on select cable networks.

No one except maybe Makana himself could have anticipated all this in 1987 when 9-year Matt Swa­lin­ka­vich (his birth name) took his first ukulele lesson from Roy Sakuma. Two years of ukulele lessons later, the Hono­lulu youth discovered slack key.

His first slack-key teacher was Bobby Mode­row Jr., who is known today as "Uncle Bobby" Mode­row of Mau­na­lua. Mode­row was a student and protege of slack-key master Raymond Kane, and Makana will never forget the day Kane mentioned them both on the radio.

"The deejay asked him if there are any young slack-key guitarists that Uncle Ray sees fit to carry on his style, and Uncle Ray mentions Bobby and ‘that young boy, Bobby’s student, I think he’s Rus­sian.’"

From the beginning, Makana was determined to go his own way and work on his own timetable. He was 13 when he applied for and received a grant from the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts to study with Sonny Chillingworth, another of Hawaii’s great pioneers of 20th-century slack key.

At 14 he turned down a record deal with a major local label, saying he wasn’t going to re­cord until he had something to say.

"Either you approach everything through a filter of fear — ‘I better take my chance as soon as someone hands it to me’ — or you believe in yourself. It’s one or the other," Makana said. "It’s always been the latter for me. I don’t let other people determine my schedule and destiny."

An invitation from Ledward Kaapana to sit in at Duke’s Canoe Club got him a steady job playing slack-key standards and whatever else caught his fancy in Wai­kiki’s foremost beachfront bar. He was 15, still in school and several years away from the legal drinking age.

"Duke’s was my college. I saw it all. Everything you could imagine, I saw at Duke’s as a child," he said.

He learned how to get people’s attention and how to deal with the unexpected, how to improvise when someone requested a song he didn’t know, and to engage the audience.

"For me being on stage is more about singing songs. It’s connecting with people. It’s telling stories. It’s creating a contextual world for the songs to live in. A lot of young artists lack that skill. I’m 36, but I come from the old school where we honed our craft in bars with beer bottles flying and people not paying attention. When you have an Internet audience, it’s very different."

Makana recalled another profound learning experience, this one in 2005 when burglars stole the guitar he had relied on for more than 10 years. At first he was devastated. A year later, in the liner notes for his fourth album, "Different Game," he thanked the thieves.

"They didn’t steal my guitar, they stole my dependency, my belief that I was dependent on that physical thing," he explained in an interview last month. "They gave me the greatest gift I could have been given by stealing the thing that I was attached to the most. When I finally healed and let go and saw the perfection in that situation, I realized that I could go up and play a $5 guitar or a $10,000 guitar and get a standing ovation. It wouldn’t matter because I surrendered to this mana that was coming through me. I wasn’t dependent on the instrument any more."

Looking forward to the next 25 years, Makana said he plans to continue on the path he has set for himself.

"A very famous musician in Hawaii once told me that someday I would have an aural signature and then everyone would recognize me instantly. That wasn’t my goal. I don’t want people to recognize a song and go, ‘That’s Makana.’ I want them to say, ‘Wow, that song moved me. Who is that?’

"Music isn’t something to reinforce identity. It’s to challenge and create movement emotionally," he said.

"In my art, in my philosophy, in what I do from lecturing to performing to writing, I try to change the frame of perspective. I think art’s power to bring about a revolution of perception is something that is essential and something to be reckoned with."