Search - Tau Moe Family, Bob Brozman :: Ho'Omana'o I Na Mele O Ka Wa U'i (Remembering the Songs of Our Youth

These are NOT vintage recordings - and they're great!

Francis Flannery | 06/02/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The reviewer below says that this album is made up of vintage recordings that have very poor sound quality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The entire purpose of this album was for Bob Brozman & the Tau Moe Family to perform songs that the Family had originally recorded during the Hawaiian Music boom of the 1920's - hence the album's title. In this respect, the CD could draw comparison to the much more famous Buena Vista Social Club project that Ry Cooder initiated in Cuba - younger student/musicologist type ventures to find much older musicians who made wonderful recordings years ago before moving into other vocations, and gets them to re-convene and perform their old songs, accompanying them with sensativity, and giving them an opportunity to record under conditions far more flexible (and high-fidelity) than had been previously available. The recordings on this album were made, I believe (I don't have the album in front of me), in the early '90's. The recording quality is wonderful, fully in accord with modern technology. The performances are ecstatic, joyous, and virtuosic - this is actually one of the finest CD's of Hawaiian music I have heard, from any era. As a technical note, there is one point in the CD where a vintage "scratchy" recording is used - the first 30 seconds or so of the final track are from a 1920's 78 RPM record of the Tau Moe Family - this performance fades into the Family's 1990's performance of the same tune, serving to illustrate how their original sound has remained intact through the years. Gimmicky? Maybe. But it's really not a big distraction - and it is only 30 seconds of the CD, which, if memory serves me correctly, runs over 1 hour. I have to wonder if the reviewer who said that this is a noisy CD of vintage recordings even listened to it at all - perhaps he has confused this album with something by Don Ho."

Classic Hawaiian music played by veteran performers

Joe Sixpack -- Slipcue.com | ...in Middle America | 12/17/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Guitar whiz Bob Brozman, collector of antique instruments and arcane musical lore, has probably done as much as any single person could to help keep the flame of old-fashioned Hawaiian music burning bright. In the early 1970s, he and his band, The Cheap Suit Seranaders, worked island music into their diverse blues and ragtime repertoire; later in the decade Brozman opened up his extensive collection of old 78s and made possible the first significant LP collections of classic Hawaiiana, issued on Arhoolie and Rounder record labels. He's kept at it over the years, and here is one of his most intriguing and endearing albums, a late '80s collaboration with the surving members of the Tau Moe Family, one of the hottest Hawaiian acts of the 1920s and '30s. Like Sol Ho'opii, Tau Moe took a lively, energetic approach to Hawaiian guitar music, though, outside of a few tunes on a compilation album here and there, his classic recordings are pretty hard to find. Thank goodness for this great album, recorded in the same style that took the Moes overseas and made them huge stars during the golden age of Hawaiian popular music. There's plenty of traditional material as well as original songs that the family has been singing for decades, all delivered with the same robust, playful kookiness that made them great to begin with. Brozman's accompaniment is great, of course, but it's also remarkable to hear Tau and Rose Moe singing their hearts out at age 80 and sounding as charming now as they did back then."