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Steamboats—a very famous club in Waikīkī—and he would just be around these masters. Eddie Kamae and the Sons of Hawaii, all these great musicians. They probably thought he was just some punk kid in the corner, but that punk kid in the corner was paying attention to what they were doing. He would try to imitate them, which is what we all do until you get to a certain stage and launch your own spaceship. In only about 10 years, he was skilled enough to do that, and joined the Makaha Sons of Niʻihau.
Skippy, Israel’s older brother, was the leader and the conceptual developer of that group, and they had these very smooth three- or four-part harmonies—very traditional, but with an increasingly contemporary edge. At the time, everybody was doing that—it was part of the Hawaiian renaissance, which Eddie Kamae and Gabby Pahinui started in the late ’40s—and it just morphed into this new kind of Hawaiian music. But the Makaha Sons had an enormous impact, and Israel really changed Hawaiian music forever, even before he branched out on his own. And at that point, when he really wanted to produce and organize his own music, he came to me.