Kau Ka Pe‘a

Kalani Pe‘a treats the Hawaiian mele as a living language capacious enough to swallow Broadway whole, and on this Grammy-winning set he proves it by singing 'Bring Him Home' as if it had always been a chant for the islands.

The trick is how little he strains to make the two worlds meet. 'When I Fall in Love' arrives folded inside 'E Mau Ke Aloha Ē,' Amy Hanaiali‘i answering him in a duet that lets the standard bend toward the falsetto and vowel-work of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i rather than the reverse. Set against a title track built on the ranging harmonies of Kimie Miner and the Pandanus Club, those imported songs stop sounding like borrowings and start sounding like translations. Pe‘a's argument, sung and won, is that aloha travels in any tongue and comes home speaking his.