Jeff Bridges is getting into an island groove.
“Aloha Twitter! I’m going to be performing on Maui on 1/23,” the Oscar-winning actor tweeted Jan. 8, posting a photo of himself in an aloha shirt and straw hat, playing an electric guitar. “If you’re ‘on island,’ get tix.”
Bridges will perform on Maui for the first time in a concert of his music Saturday as part of The Maui Celebrity Series.
The show in the Sheraton Maui Resort & Spa’s Maui Ballroom will be a solo performance in a venue with seating for 600.
JEFF BRIDGES
>> Where: Sheraton Maui Resort & Spa, Maui Ballroom
>> When: 8 p.m. Saturday; doors open at 7 p.m.
>> Cost: $95; VIP and meet-and-greet tickets available at $225, $650 and $1,000
>> Info: expedia.com, honoluluboxoffice.com or 550-8457
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Bridges won an Academy Award for his role as an alcoholic musician in the 2009 film “Crazy Heart,” and is forever known as cult figure “The Dude,” a bathrobe-wearing, White Russian-drinking slacker in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film “The Big Lebowski.”
He seemed to revive The Dude in 2015 with his release of “Sleeping Tapes,” an album of meditative music overlaid with the sounds of Bridges humming, talking to children, hiking and flushing a toilet to listen to it refill. (Download it and pay what you like at dreamingwithjeff.com, with all donations going to charitable organization No Kid Hungry.)
“I think that everything implies everything else,” he says in the introduction. “So, I hope you dig the sleep tapes, hope they inspire you to do some cool sleeping, some cool dreaming and some cool waking up.”
Reviewing the album on Pitchfork, the online music site, Philip Sherburne said, “His warm-hearted spirit — his evident joy at just being alive — is infectious.”
Aside from that dreamscape, Bridges has largely concentrated on pop, rock, country and blue-eyed soul music since recording his first album, “Be Here Soon,” in 2000.
He sang in “Crazy Heart” as the country-music character Bad Blake and wrote some of the songs for the movie soundtrack. After the movie was released, Bridges was signed to the Blue Note Records label and made a T-Bone Burnett-produced album, “Jeff Bridges,” released in 2011.
He often tours with his band the Abiders (a reference to his “Dude who abides” in “The Big Lebowski”). A live album of a Jeff Bridges & the Abiders performance was released in 2014.
BORN INTO a Hollywood family in 1949, Bridges first appeared in films as an infant and won a first Academy Award nomination for director Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” (1971). More recently Bridges picked up another Oscar nomination for his performance as ornery lawman Rooster Cogburn in 2010’s “True Grit,” another Coen brothers movie.
Singer Brian Evans, creator of the celebrity series, will open the Maui show along with Dayle Tejada. Evans is a big-band crooner in the style of Frank Sinatra.
“Jeff Bridges has always been one of my favorite actors. ‘Starman’ remains my favorite movie, but everybody loves The Dude on Maui,” said Evans, who opened the series with an appearance by William Shatner of “Star Trek” fame and is also known for his music videos made with celebrity participants.
A video for an original song by Evans, starring Shatner, Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and Beth Chapman, Leland Chapman and Paul Rodriguez and produced by comedian Carrot Top, is scheduled to be released in March.
Some proceeds from the concert will benefit the American Sleep Apnea Association (sleepapnea.org) and Mental Health Kokua (mentalhealthkokua.org), which provides housing for the homeless.
