Kaihealoha
Kaihealoha, the eclectic, exotic, gothic, trip-hop, and Middle-Eastern-vibing recording by a colorful yet mysterious musical force known as Manko Eponymous, is a true labor of love documenting the incredible joys and pains the artist shared with his soul mate and creative partner Kaihea from their first encounter in 2005 through their battle against her cancer to her brave final days.
Driven by a concept surrounding its intriguing Hawaiian sounding title—it combines her name, the word “heal” and another word that means hello and goodbye but also “I Love You”—the fascinating collection has its roots in the Washington, D.C. belly dancing community, where Kaihea—who indeed grew up in Hawaii—was running DC Tribal, an organization dedicated to bringing world-class belly dancers to D.C. to teach and perform, as well as developing new performance venues for the burgeoning art form and providing scholarships. Despite the darkness that crept in, Manko’s extraordinary world fusion venture is a celebration of life best captured by what he wants his listeners to do: “Dance To This!”
Backtracking a bit, the Manko story goes something like this: Since he began
playing gigs at age 11 with a bluegrass band, he’s dabbled and drifted between
myriad styles of music with over a dozen groups, including a bossa nova drum n’ bass trio, a protogoth
calypso band with a Schoenberg protege, folk punk,
art punk, psychedelic grunge, a Neil Young tribute band, laptop electronica, indy folk, spoken
word, and Afropop (including two wonderful years in
the house band at a hotel bar in Lesotho). All of these projects grew out
of his desire to explore and ignite the unique humanity of music as the pulse
and soundtrack of a community, whether that community be
Basotho tribesmen in
And thus the Kaihealoha story begins...Manko met Kaihea on her 30th
birthday when they were both summoned by a mutual friend to start a bellydance band/troupe inspired in part by the
"progressive world fusion" of bands like Ekova,
Thievery Corporation, Djinn, and Raquy
and the Cavemen. While DC's tribal belly dancers often perform to an eclectic
mix of sounds from bhangra to hiphop
to rai, nothing compares to the intoxicating
chemistry of skilled belly dancers playing off of skilled live musicians, and Manko, Kaihea and their
co-conspirators tried to provide the best of both worlds: the spontanaeity and chemistry of improvisational live
performance combined with the eclectic soundscapes of
world fusion electronica.
It only took a few months of sipping this heady brew together for Manko and Kaihea to find themselves deeply in love. Then disaster struck -
Kaihea was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006, and doctors
told her she’d never be able to belly dance again. Ever a stubborn woman, she
went on to not only recover her strength and technique, but also pour the
emotional intensity of her ordeal into riveting, powerful and beautiful
performances in venues ranging from Burning Man's Opulent Temple to the Virgin
Festival, firedancing in front of Smashing Pumpkins
and The Police. While Manko was soon too busy
managing her medical care and other needs to keep working with a band, he continued
to produce original tailor-made music for her dance performances in his home
studio.
When Kaihea became too ill to dance, the belly dance
and Burning Man communities she so loved danced for her, holding benefits
throughout 2008 in San Francisco, D.C., Charlottesville, Pittsburgh and even
Mexico City to help raise funds to help with the mountain of debt her medical
expenses and daily living costs had brought crashing down on them. In her last
months in the hospital, Manko finally finished
compiling a CD of the tracks he had composed and recorded in his home studio
for her. She listened in her hospital bed to the finished product on a boombox borrowed from a nurse, and through the thick fog of
painkillers, her hands and feet started moving one last time to the music she'd
danced to so many times before. The next day doctors found her
unresponsive, and, surrounded by her loved ones, Kaihea
quietly and gracefully passed away.
Highlights include "Pura Dai” (a hit on MySpace, from Kaihea’s 2007 Tribal Pura performance); Firesong (which Manko performed at the Fire In The Belly 2 benefit show at DC's Palace of Wonders); “The Melodia Song” (which Manko jokes is “possibly the best song I ever wrote about pants!"); “Alive” (from Kaihea’s performance at the 2007 Belly Horror Show); “Fire And Ice” (from her performance headlining the Field Stage with Flights of Fire at Virgin Festival ‘07); and “Black Rook” (from Bloodmoon ‘07, the Burning Man Opulent Temple ‘07, and Virgin ‘07).
“Kaihealoha
is as much a tribute as a benefit,” says Manko,
“since none of my previous four solo CDs had sold enough copies to pay for a
single night's hospital care, much less make a dent in the massive costs of
fighting cancer in the