Keola Beamer  Keola Beamer (born Keolamaikalani Breckenridge Beamer in 1951) is a Hawaiian slack-key guitar player, best known as the composer of "Honolulu City Lights" and an innovative musician who fused Hawaiian roots and contemporary music. Keola Beamer comes from one of Hawaii's most respected musical families. Beamer comes from a line of musicians five generations back, and can also trace his roots to the House of Kamehameha and Ahiakumai, 15th century rulers of Hawaii. His great grandmother was Helen Desha Beamer, an influential songwriter and hula dancer, and his mother, Winona Beamer ("Auntie Nona") has been one of the most important figures in the revival of Hawaiian culture since the 1940s: composer, dancer, educator, and coiner of the term "Hawaiiana," which describes the cultural-studies area she pioneered at the Kamehameha Schools. Beamer is also a cancer survivor. Beamer is a Hawaiian Music Legend. Beamer's debut recording in 1972 was headlined "Jack Mello presents Keola Beamer" and titled "Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar in the Real Old Style", followed in the same year by an album with his brother Kapono Beamer in 1972. This second album was headlined "Jack de Mello presents Keola and Kapono Beamer" and titled "This Is Our Island Home - We Are Her Sons," and subtitled "Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar in the Real Old Style". The album featured traditional songs as well as songs composed by Keola, Kapono, and their mother Winona. Keola and his younger brother Kapono performed as a duo, mixing traditional materials and styles with mainland pop influences. In the seven albums they produced over the next decade, they played an important part in establishing the style that came to be called "Hawaiian contemporary," rooted in Hawaiian language and tradition but open to influences from elsewhere: rock, pop, Latin, folk-revival singer-songwriter, Hollywood soundtrack, and so on. The title song of the brothers' 1978 LP "Honolulu City Lights" was an enormously popular single in the Hawaiian local market, and in 2004 "Honolulu Magazine" placed the album first on a list of the fifty most important Hawaiian albums. In the 1980s, the brothers went their separate ways professionally, each producing award-winning records. After several pop-oriented albums, Keola connected with George Winston's Dancing Cat recording project for five releases between 1994 and 2002, emphasizing slack key guitar and Hawaiian lyrics, but by no means abandoning "contemporary" influences.