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Mothers can have such an overwhelming influence on our lives. Their encouragement can send our spirits soaring and inspire us to be better at whatever we do. We talked with three people whose maternal figures — mothers and grandmothers — have passed on immense talent and provided remarkable memories. Their stories can remind us of that enduring bond between grandmothers, mothers, and the families that follow.
GENOA KEAWE, POMAIKA‘I KEAWE, AND MAILE AND ZIONA LYMAN
The legacy begins with Genoa Leilani Adolpho Keawe-Aiko, known professionally as Genoa Keawe. She was regarded as one of the greatest female Hawaiian falsetto singers of the 20th century.
Genoa’s oldest son, Gary, known professionally as Gary Aiko, is the last great baritone vocalist of the classic hapa haole era. Her youngest son, Eric Keawe, could have pursued a career in music but chose to keep it as an avocation.
Eric’s daughter, Pomaika‘i Keawe, inherited her grandmother’s talent as a vocalist and musician. Pomaika‘i’s daughters, Malie and Ziona Lyman, bring Genoa’s legacy forward another generation. Ziona, 14, is passionate about hula; she debuted at Merrie Monarch this year as the youngest member of kumu hula Hiwa Vaughan’s Halau Hula Ka Lehua Tuahine. Malie, 18, a senior at Kamehameha Schools Kapalama, is a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist.
Malie began steel guitar lessons a month before her ninth birthday.
“I actually didn’t have a choice,” she said, sitting with her mother and sister in the upstairs living room of the family’s multilevel home in Papakolea.
“My mother said that she wanted to either start me on piano or steel guitar, and because we’re connected to (steel guitar master) Uncle Alan Akaka, we were able to get lessons from him. Some steel guitars are really heavy, but they’re still easier to carry around to performances than a piano.”
Her answer brings to mind her great-uncle Gary’s tart explanation as to why he switched from a traditional full-size acoustic “stand-up bass” to acoustic bass guitar.
Nine years later, Malie has taught herself the basics of bass, guitar and piano, and she played alto sax in the Kamehameha Schools marching band.
And she plays ukulele. Of course.
A generation earlier, Pomaika‘i started playing ukulele “as soon as I could pick it up.” She joined Genoa on stage for the first time when she was six and began working professionally when she graduated from high school.
After college, she started sitting in with Genoa and her musicians at the Hawaiian Regent Hotel (now the Waikiki Beach Marriot). Genoa had a short list of friends she’d call on if she had to take an entire night off. The list got shorter as the years went by. Eventually, “the list” was Pomaika‘i.
“(The band members) were very accustomed to singing the regular songs, and that was how I learned the melodies and the lyrics,” Pomaika‘i said. “There were days when I did feel obligated (forced to perform). But I was quick to be put right back in my place and reminded of my kuleana (responsibility) in this legacy.”
Ziona was dancing by the time she was five. Her early memories include watching her mother’s shows in Waikiki and dancing hula for fun at home with members of the extensive ohana — Genoa was one of 11 children; she had 12 of her own.
In fact, old-timers will remember that for part of her professional life, Genoa operated what was then called a “hula studio,” the precursor of a halau hula.
Malie will take the family legacy to a new technological platform later this year when she continues her formal education at Honolulu Community College.
“They have the MELE program,” she explained about the Music & Entertainment Learning Experience. “I want to be a music producer, so I’m going to do the MELE program, and then hopefully I can record and release my own album. And if other people want to record, then they can come to me.”
It will be a natural progression since in her young life, Malie has already experienced recording music, as when the Keawe/Lyman ohana contributed a “generational recording” for Kamaka Ukulele’s 100th anniversary album in 2016. Malie has also performed and recorded as a member of Kimie Miner’s Haku Collective.
Amid all the singing, playing, dancing and recording in the family, it’s easy to trace back the lineage to Genoa. But Pomaika‘i said that’s just the surface of her grandmother’s foundation.
“My tutu’s legacy goes far beyond the music. She had 12 children of her own, which meant a lot of grandchildren and a lot of great-grandchildren. And her love for all of us is what we all have experienced and strive to emulate with our own families. She perpetuated love and aloha in her music, her home, in her faith, her belief in her Heavenly Father. In all of those things there was always love and true aloha. And so that’s the legacy of Genoa Keawe.”
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John Berger, Star-Advertiser
NATALIE MCMAHON AND ELLEN NICOTRA
Every night after dinner when she was about 8 years old, Natalie McMahon sat across the table transfixed as her mother created a bucolic landscape on an easel with every stroke of her brush.
“It was so fascinating to me to watch these scenes come to life, and the way she did her brush strokes. Then she started teaching me, telling me why she was doing what she was doing, you know — like laying the base coat, and the colors she would put on top the base coat — and it stuck!” said McMahon.
“I was always very artistic,” McMahon said. But her inspiration for taking up painting came from hours of watching her mom, Ellen Nicotra. By the time she was in her teens, McMahon was contributing her own work to arts and crafts shows. She gravitated towards acrylics and watercolors, while her late mother had painted with oils. But the foundations of painting she learned at Nicotra’s elbow — design, color mixing, showing shadows and perspective — still applied.
The best piece of advice from her mother: “If it doesn’t work out, you can always try again.… If it’s an idea that you think has worth, just keep trying until you get it,” she recalled. “And that is a life lesson, too, I guess!”
McMahon moved from Syracuse, N.Y., to Oahu about 35 years ago. She’d always wanted to live on a tropical island, an ideal source of the stunning scenery and flowers she favored in her paintings. Since she was a little girl, she had always marveled at the vibrant colors of flowers.
About 10 years ago, McMahon branched off into making jewelry with sea glass, but continues to sell many of her watercolor prints a few days a week at the Tropical Farms near Kualoa Ranch, a macadamia nut farm frequented by tour groups. She stopped selling at galleries, gift shops and online since her semiretirement in 2012.
McMahon said her mother, who raised three children and worked for a telephone company, was patient and taught her the value of persistence — “that has served me well throughout my 72 years, through all walks of life, through every job I’ve ever had. Persistence will get you a lot.”
Nicotra also emphasized being positive, which helped McMahon persevere at the lowest point in her career, when she had to get a job driving taxis. It was during the economic downturn caused by the Persian Gulf War in 1991 when she had to declare bankruptcy and lost the condominium she had for 12 years.
Her mom basically said “you just gotta suck it up, that there’s always something good coming around the next corner,” McMahon, said with a laugh.
“She was just so upbeat and positive, but she believed it … that things always change, things get better, sometimes they get worse but get better again.”
Though Nicotra was Catholic, she was not very religious. Still, “she’d strive in her paintings to show the beauty and miracle of life.”
“My mom would always say (to me), ‘You will always come out on top, you have a good head on your shoulders’ — all the rah-rah stuff, constantly. It was ingrained in me that I could do anything I wanted, so I just never gave up. I wanted to be an artist and that’s what I did.
“She was a remarkable woman.”
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Pat Gee, Star-Advertiser
NANCY MASAKI AND ELLEN MASAKI
In Hawaii, the name Ellen Masaki is synonymous with classical music. The longtime piano teacher, who died in 2009, taught many of the island’s finest young pianists, sending them on to study music in college or music conservatories, with many going on to professional careers as performers and teachers.
Her daughter Nancy Masaki runs into people all the time who remember her mother. “There are always people who say they studied with her, or someone in their family did,” she said.
Masaki is now a cellist with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra. She also runs the Masaki School of Music, which her mother had built it into the islands’ top music studio for pianists, expanding it to include instruction in string instruments and guitar in addition to piano.
Nancy Masaki remembers her mother’s devotion to her students. Her teaching day would sometimes begin at 5 a.m., before school started, and extend to late hours of the evening. Her demands on her students were demanding on herself as well, requiring them to call her when they began practicing and call again when they finished.
But she also brought humor to her teaching, creating a grading chart for students’ performances that went from “artist circle” for an “A+” performance to “closet circle” for an “F,” meaning “you should only play in the closet,” Masaki said. An even worse rating was the “Graveyard circle” for performances rated a “0.”
A student who showed extra motivation and talent would receive all the attention she could muster. One of those students, Sean Kennard, who has won awards at top-level international piano competitions, will perform next month at the Hawaii Chamber Music Festival.
“She would teach him sometimes until 1:30 in the morning,” Masaki said. “Once when she was sick and stayed home, he called her up and asked if he could have a telephone lesson. She was in bed and she was with him for three hours. He would play and she would make comments and then he would play again. I was always amazed at how far she would go for her students.”
Ellen Masaki’s support for the symphony, then called the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, and the touring musicians who came here to perform was also legendary. She regularly held fundraisers for the symphony in Waikiki hotel ballrooms, having her students perform for guests during the day and then having professionals perform in the evening. She invited many of the visiting musicians to dinner. The roster includes an impressive list of names — Vladimir Ashkenazy, John Browning, Lazar Berman, Vladimir Feltsman, Pinchas Zukerman, to name just a few.
Nancy Masaki began piano lessons with her mother at age 6, but it wasn’t easy. “She realized she couldn’t really teach us,” Masaki said. “(The relationship) was just too close.”
Her mother’s disciplined approach didn’t work on her. “She would always make a list of what we were supposed to practice, and we were supposed to check off what we practiced,” she said. “I would just check them all off and go outside and play.”
It got so bad that she and her sister would have to take a bus out to Ewa Beach to get their lessons with another teacher, making it a day-long affair. But cello lessons, which Masaki began at age 9, proved to be welcome release of the tension. By middle school, she was good enough to impress her cello teacher, Peter Mesrobian, then conductor of the Hawaii Youth Symphony, who recommended she stick with it full time.
“I felt in a way like I’d ‘won,’ because I could stop playing piano,” Masaki said with a laugh.
Her rebellious streak eventually softened as her interest in music blossomed, and her mother’s support never waned.
“She was always praising me, so much so that I wasn’t sure if she really meant it,” she said. “She was always saying how great this was. I think that was how she got such good response from her students. She was constantly encouraging. I knew she was proud of what I was doing.”
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Steven Mark, Star-Advertiser
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