Makana bringing slack rock to Tucson

A strange thing happens when you’re sitting in the audience of a Makana concert.

Your eyes tell you there is but one man on stage, but your ears will deceive you into believing there’s a full band.

The celebrated slack key guitarist/singer-songwriter has heard it before from audience members.

“It is a very symphonic style that I play. … I don’t use loopers or fancy technology or computers,” Makana, 37, said during a phone call late last month from home in Hawaii. “Everything you hear is created by me in real time, but it sounds like a full band. It sounds like two, or three, or four people. A full spectrum of sounds comes through.”

Tucson gets its first experience of Makana on Wednesday, March 16, when he plays a show at the Sea of Glass Center for the Arts. Although he’s played a number of Phoenix-area shows — and has an upcoming gig at the Arizona Aloha Festival in Tempe on Sunday, March 13 — this is his first-ever stop in Tucson.

Makana, widely regarded as the world’s greatest living slack key player, described his show as an amalgam of styles and genres.

“I’ve taken what the traditional masters of slack key do and I’ve kind of combined it with the Leo Kottke and acoustic Jimmy Page kind of vibe,” he explained. “So it’s got bluegrass and blues and even Indian raga. There’s all these other styles. People call it slack rock. It’s very intense and exciting. It’s very different and original.”

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Makana’s music is equally diverse, ranging from traditional Hawaiian folk songs to his self-penned politically charged anthems.

“It’s so diverse. It goes to many emotions, many places. Of course I do my Hawaiian music and my slack key guitar, which can be incredibly peaceful all the way to shredding and high intensity,” he said. “I do songs that are satirical and make people laugh. I do folk songs. I do a few key covers from the ’60s like James Taylor. ... There are a lot of different styles I go through. I sing in multiple languages. I tell a lot of stories.”

One of those stories he’s likely to recount Wednesday is about how YouTube in late February yanked his pro-Bernie Sanders video just as it was on the verge of going viral. YouTube contended that a snippet from “The Fire is Ours (Feel the Bern)” — two seconds from a Sanders rally — violated copyright laws. The site restored the video, which Makana edited, last week.

“(Sanders) represents a lot of the issues I’ve been singing about since I wrote ... ‘We Are the Many,’” said Makana, who made headlines in 2011 when that song went viral and became the anthem for the Occupy movement. “Basically (‘The Fire is Ours’) and the video ... is really a criticism of how mainstream news attempts to distract and create divisiveness in our society rather than focus on issues of relevance.”

Makana has been an activist since he was 12 and he protested coastal development in Oahu. He also has gotten involved in environmental issues. But don’t expect to hear him go on a political diatribe.

“In my show, the way I frame things in a performance isn’t a political kind of thing,” he explained. “I am very inclusive of people. I don’t push my views on them. But I use my art to encourage people in enlightening dialogue and inspire people to kind of consider other viewpoints they might have not considered before.”