This story originally appeared in the Oakland Tribune.

Not long ago, East Bay native Patrick Landeza was the most sought-after slack-key guitar teacher and performer in the Bay Area. By 2006, the now 35-year old had released three albums and toured the country with the legends of Hawaiian slack-key.

His teaching schedule was full with people who would eventually go on to become performers and instructors themselves.

In January 2007, Landeza became the youngest person to receive the Kapalakiko Aloha Spirit Award, a Bay Area-based award given to those who have made a big difference in the Hawaiian community.

And then he disappeared.

Landeza says he dropped his students and quit touring cold turkey so he could spend more time with his wife and two young sons. 

But after more than a year, he’s ready to get back on stage with three Bay Area shows this week with slack-key great Cyril Pahinui — Wednesday at Sweetwater Station in Larkspur, Thursday at the Little Fox Theater in Redwood City and March 28 at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes.

“After touring with the uncles (Landeza’s term for the elders of slack-key guitar, who are now in their late 50s and 60s) and all my friends, I started getting homesick,” he said. “Four years on the road took its toll.”

Slack-key guitar has always been a big part of Landeza’s life.

The guitar-picking method can be traced to the 1830s when Mexican and Spanish pioneers came to the islands and brought the guitar with them. Hawaiians loved the new instrument and integrated it into the culture. The pioneers eventually left, leaving the interpretation of how a guitar should be played to the locals. In turn, Hawaiians came up with their own loosened tunings to match the range of their vocals. 

The style was called “ki ho ‘alu,” which translates to “loosen the key.”

Not an islander

Landeza is not a native Hawaiian, he likes to say that he’s from “the island of Berkeley, CA.” His parents moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s, and he grew up with his parents’ vinyl records and the few songs his family members knew. 

He did not begin to learn ki ho ‘alu until he was 16, and he ran into problems from the outset — there were no local slack-key instructors in the Bay Area, he says. 

His prayers were answered first when popular slack-key performer Raymond Kane, on tour in the U.S., told him not to give up; and then again in 1990 when he finally found a slack-key teacher.

In 1997, he graduated from Cal State Hayward with a sociology degree, and began a teaching career. 

“Real musicians have day jobs,” he says.

By 2003, he was an eighth-grade teacher and assistant principal at St. Martin de Porres School in West Oakland. His students knew little about his other jobs; that he was a music instructor and that he had already released two albums: “Pu’unaue” (“to share”) in 1999; and a holiday album, “Christmas to Me,” in 2001. 

A third album, “Ma ka Home” (“at home”) was released in 2004. Landeza has also released a slack-key instructional DVD and play-along CDs, and published slack-key lessons in Acoustic Guitar magazine. 

In 2003, he came up with his big idea and started the Institute of Hawaiian Music and Culture and a tour he called “Hawaiian Music’s Next Generation.”

“I’d been teaching and playing music part-time, but that was the first time I’d made a leap of faith as a full-time performer,” he said. 

His plan was to round up the uncles of slack-key, as well as his contemporaries, performers like Dennis Kamakahi and Cyril Pahinui, and take them on tour, where people who had never heard of the musical genre would not only see a performance but also learn from the legends at a workshop.

“I told the (uncles) that I felt teaching was going to be a whole other ball game,” he said. 

“We’d play in clubs and performing arts centers, and then on top of that we’d teach. These cats “… weren’t thrilled at first. You look at them now, and they’re doing workshops (all the time).”

The workshops, where people could learn a little slack-key, ukulele and Hawaiian song all in one shot, became so popular that they became the group’s sole focus. Landeza also ran the production company that organized the tour, booked the gigs and flights, and told the performers who would be playing where.

Time to rest

Eventually, that took a toll on him, and he developed diabetes and arthritis. There were times, he said, that his fellow musicians would need to get a wheelchair to get him onto the plane.

He also missed his family, and that’s why he quit touring in January 2007. He returned home, while many of the other musicians continued to branch out and teach slack key. 

“To them, the priority is teaching now,” he said. “It wasn’t like that before. If you weren’t part of the family or part of the circle, you weren’t going to learn from us. That’s the way it was then.”

Because of that, the slack-key community in the Bay Area has blossomed.

“I taught almost every single slack-key player that is here in the Bay Area, including the ones that are touring now,” he said. “I’m proud of that.”

He took six months off before accepting a position at St. Elizabeth High School in Oakland as the director of campus ministry. 

Most of his playing now takes place in the classroom, where his students have grown accustomed to him singing and playing for them between classes.

The music comes in handy and bridges the gap between him and them, he said.

Landeza continued to play occasional shows, but never considered seriously getting back on stage until he got a call from Pahinui, who invited him to play a few shows together. 

“I can’t say no to Cyril,” he said. 

All of a sudden he’s back in the game. It’s not just his three shows this week; he said there will be many more concerts this summer. He intends to return to teaching in the next two months, and a fourth album will be released in the fall.

“I’ve planted a lot of seeds in the Bay Area and I’m watching them grow,” he said.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.