Kimo Nevius is a man of many, many trilbies. In the early afternoon on the third Saturday of each month, he grabs one of those trilbies, along with guitar, harmonica and tablet loaded with song sheets, drives across the Central Valley to the Wailuku Coffee Co. on Market Street and starts his sound check. And at the stroke of 2, he gets going with his long-running series, The Coffee House Sessions: Music for a Cause.
The next two hours are filled with songs and talk story — all free. Whatever cash finds its way into the tip jar goes, 100%, to whatever the cause is that day: the construction of a new school and orphanage deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the nonprofit Books Through Bars, which sends free reading and educational materials to prisoners on the Eastern Seaboard; and Hale Kau Kau, the “House of Meals” serving the homeless and homebound out of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in Kihei.
The haul to date exceeds $6,000, of which $1,000 and change was raised in a single day.
Typically, Nevius takes the 2 o’clock slot himself and at 3 turns the floor over to other talent of generous spirit. This coming Saturday, though, to celebrate the second anniversary of the Coffee House Sessions, the host is going it alone. The playlist, subject to change, includes the old standby “Man in a Hat” (what, not a trilby?), which has been out of the rotation for a while.
Nevius says he also has a couple novelties up his sleeve: “Wasting Away,” inspired, he says, by the Beatles, and the title track to his band’s upcoming release, “Celebrate! (Part 2).”
That new band, Promised Road, appears to be something of a work in progress. As Nevius confessed at last month’s Coffee House Session, it consisted at that point of him and his cat.
The recording industry being the shambles it is, Nevius releases his material mostly online. On kimo songs.com you’ll find a quite a mix. A cover of Bob Dylan (“With God on Our Side”) jostles carols for a troubled planet. Protest songs recall honorable leftie traditions going back at least to the Depression (remember “Joe Hill”?). If your news channel is Fox, you will for sure want to swipe left on “Puppet” (complete with red-white-and-blue cover art) and “Not My President.”
The Aloha State is the latest chapter in an odyssey that has covered almost as much of the globe as Capt. Cook’s. The son of an Episcopalian priest, Nevius was born in Columbia, S.C., but grew up in Oxford, England; Gettysburg, Pa.; Salt Lake City; Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; and Rome, where as a budding singer-songwriter he busked in the subway under the not-always-indulgent eye of the Italian police.
“The joke in the family,” he says, “was that Dad ran out of sermon topics every three years, so then we’d have to move.”
Two decades in New York City followed, where at first he shared a bedroom “the size of a small Cadillac, staring out at an air shaft.” Then he got married to Michelle Nevius, his co-author on two books that fold centuries of Big Apple social history into routes for architectural walking tours.
Then came 9/11.
“That attack made us think, ‘Life is short,’” says Nevius. “Everything can change in a moment. So, in 2007, after 20 years in New York, we moved to Maui. We’re very deliberative people. Six years is kind of overnight for us.”
The greenest of malihini, not yet adopted into the halau of the kumu hula to whom he owes his Hawaiian handle of Kimo (formerly James), Nevius was taking a noncredit course on local history at the University of Hawaii Maui College with Keli‘i Tau‘a when the class received a surprise assignment: Take some of the material you’ve learned, Tau‘a said, and turn it into a song.
“Many of the students were upset,” Nevius recalls. “But I took it as a challenge. I wrote ‘Maliko Gulch,’ about S.T. Alexander and H.P. Baldwin’s project to bring water from East Maui to the Central Valley so they could plant sugar cane there. Keli‘i, who’s a songwriter himself, though he hadn’t told us that, loved the song and took me under his wing.”
And so, a new phase of songwriting began, cresting last year with the release of the album “Rolling Down to Old Maui: New Songs About Old Hawaii.” Streaming audio is available online, but there’s also a physical package including a CD plus a 40-page companion book of lyrics and enlightening liner notes.
Several hard-chugging tracks tell of backbreaking work for meager pay on whaling ships and in the cane fields. Gentler numbers recall island royalty and companions in their ohana. “The Other Side of the World” strings together imaginary letters home from Capt. James Cook for a rueful farewell.
At the moment of truth, it’s amazing how much mutual misunderstanding can be packed into a single couplet. “We thought they thought we were heaven- sent,” Cook writes, speaking of the kanaka maoli. “I’m beginning to think we misread their intent.”
As a storyteller in song or speech, Nevius has an easygoing, by-the-campfire civility. Even when taking a stand against the toxicities of our day — mass shootings, global warming — he soft-pedals the righteous indignation.
“I guess I’m a bit of a fatalist,” he says. “I know I sing a lot about how hard life is. But at the same time, my outlook is that life can be pretty good if you don’t get too set in your ways.”
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THE COFFEE HOUSE SESSIONS: MUSIC FOR A CAUSE
Second Anniversary Special with Kimo Nevius
>> Where: Wailuku Coffee Co., 26 Market St.
>> When: 2-4 p.m. Saturday
>> Cost: Free (charitable donations invited)
>> Info: 495-0259 or wailukucoffeeco.com
Matthew Gurewitsch comes to Hawaii from three decades in New York as a cultural commentator for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other media. Browse his archive at beyondcriticism.com.
