Hawaii County Hawaii Ukulele and Slack Key Guitar Festival

Each November, a Waimea theatre stages a weekend built around two instruments that define Hawaiian music: the ʻukulele and the slack key guitar. The gathering is presented by Kahilu Theatre as a numbered annual festival, and its documented billings run from a fifteenth Annual in 2017 to a twenty-fourth Annual in November 2026. What the record never supplies is a first year, and this article does not invent one.

Waimea sits in the island’s upland north, far from the county government: Hilo, on the eastern coast, is the seat of Hawai’i County, and Waimea is not. Everything documented about this festival belongs to Waimea and to one presenting theatre.

About the Festival

Kahilu Theatre prints the festival’s name with Hawaiian styling as the ʻUkulele & Slack Key Guitar Festival, while ticketing and listing layers flatten it to Ukulele and Slack Key Guitar Festival. The two renderings are kept separate here, because neither layer borrows the other’s form. The title at the top of this page follows the listing version and adds a county and state prefix that belongs to this series’ filing, not to the published name.

The organiser is Kahilu Theatre itself. Its own event listings carry the credit “Presented By Kahilu,” and the festival sits inside the theatre’s presenting season rather than standing apart from it. Background on the building comes from a tourism-board layer, which describes the theatre as a not-for-profit community arts and education center founded by Parker Ranch heir Richard Smart. That founding belongs to the theatre’s own story; nothing in the gathered sources makes it the festival’s beginning, and it is recorded only as venue background.

The venue is the theatre in Waimea. Ticketing listing layers attach an address to it, 67-1186 Lindsey Road, Waimea, while Kahilu’s own listings name the place simply as Kahilu Theatre. Both presentations stand as their layers print them.

For a useful comparison, see the Hawaii County Hawaii Chinese New Year Festival for another county festival.

Quick Facts

Item	Detail
Published name	ʻUkulele & Slack Key Guitar Festival in the organiser’s styling; Ukulele and Slack Key Guitar Festival in ticketing and listing layers
Host town	Waimea, Hawai’i Island; the Hawai’i County seat is Hilo, not Waimea
Organiser	Kahilu Theatre, Waimea, credited on its own listings as “Presented By Kahilu”
Venue	Kahilu Theatre; ticketing layers print 67-1186 Lindsey Road, Waimea
Founding year	No source gathered states one; only annual billings are documented
Billings on record	fifteenth Annual (2017), sixteenth annual (2018), seventeenth annual (2019), twenty-third Annual (2025), twenty-fourth Annual (2026)
Documented span	November editions in 2017, 2018 and 2019, then 2025 and 2026 in the gathered layers
Latest documented edition	The twenty-fourth Annual, November 12–14, 2026, on the organiser’s pass page
Admission	Ticketed; the organiser sells a two-day pass and single-event tickets, but no organiser price was captured in the sources gathered
Attendance	No attendance figure for the festival itself is published in the sources gathered

History

The honest starting point is a gap: no layer gathered — not the organiser’s listings, not its season brochure, not the tourism-board or auction layers — states the year this festival began. What exists instead is a ladder of annual billings. A tourism-board layer bills the November 16–18, 2017 edition as the fifteenth Annual. The theatre’s brochure for its 2018/19 season calls the November 15–17, 2018 edition “Our 16th annual,” with individual performances on November 15 at 7 p.m., November 16 at 7 p.m. and November 17 at 4 p.m. A charity-auction layer quoting the theatre bills a seventeenth annual in November 2019 and describes that edition as falling typically on the Saturday before Thanksgiving — a pattern description belonging to that layer alone.

The ladder then jumps in the gathered record. Between the seventeenth annual of 2019 and the twenty-third Annual of 2025, the sources gathered here do not individually document the intervening editions; the numbering simply resumes at twenty-three. The theatre’s streaming layer documents that 2025 edition, listing Hoʻolauleʻa, Kanikapila and Hana Hou programmes for it, and the organiser’s listings document a twenty-fourth Annual in November 2026. Because the billings arrive without a stated first edition, they are reported strictly as billings. Counting backwards from a fifteenth Annual to reach a founding year would be arithmetic dressed as evidence, and this article performs none of it. The ladder proves a long run; it does not prove where the run started.

Two names anchor the recent programmes. Keola and Moanalani Beamer headlined the Hoʻolauleʻa at the twenty-third Annual in 2025, according to the streaming layer. For 2026, a guide layer names Ledward Kaapana, Jeff Peterson, Sonny Lim, Brittni Paiva, Jerry Santos, Kamuela Kimokeo and Taimane among the artists. Those names belong to their own editions and are never merged into a permanent bill.

What to Expect

The weekend’s architecture, as the organiser’s listings present it for 2026, opens on Friday evening with the Hoʻolauleʻa, a concert that launches the festival. Saturday splits into three parts. The morning belongs to master workshops led by the performing artists; the 2026 workshop titles include “Slack Key Essentials in G and C Tunings,” “Jam Without a Plan” with Brittni Paiva, and “All Things Bb” with Sonny Lim, printed here exactly as the listings give them and belonging to that year only. On Saturday afternoon comes the Kanikapila, a jam session with an unusual promise: audience members who bring instruments join the performers on stage rather than only listening. Saturday evening closes with the Hana Hou concert. The shape is not a one-year improvisation, either: the streaming layer lists the same trio of named programmes — Hoʻolauleʻa, Kanikapila and Hana Hou — for the twenty-third Annual in 2025, so the framework predates the 2026 edition in the documented record even though each year’s artists and workshop titles are its own.

Beyond the theatre’s walls, festival week carries the music into island schools. A tourism-board layer records that the visiting musicians give free concerts for schoolchildren during festival weeks and puts the reach of that outreach at about five thousand local students. That figure measures how far the school programme travels; it is a reach count for the outreach, and it is never treated in this article as attendance at the festival itself, for which no figure is published anywhere in the gathered sources.

Planning Your Visit

Tickets come first, because this is a ticketed theatre weekend rather than a walk-in fair. For 2026 the organiser’s listings offer a two-day pass alongside single-event tickets, and its pass page frames the twenty-fourth Annual across November 12–14, 2026. The public events the listings name begin on Friday, November 13, 2026, with the Hoʻolauleʻa at 7:00 p.m., and continue on Saturday, November 14, with morning workshops, the Kanikapila at 2:00 p.m. and the Hana Hou concert at 7:00 p.m.

One caution belongs in bold type. The organiser’s own ticket prices were not captured in the sources gathered for this article, so no price Kahilu Theatre charges is stated here. Secondary-market listing layers do print figures — ninety dollars for the Hoʻolauleʻa and sixty-seven dollars for the Kanikapila in 2026 — but those are resellers’ asking figures on listing layers, quoted once here only so readers recognise them for what they are. They are not the organiser’s admission prices and should never be read as what the theatre itself charges.

Players should note the Kanikapila’s open invitation before packing: bringing an instrument is part of the design. Workshop places, too, are tied to the Saturday morning programme the artists lead, so anyone hoping to study a tuning should treat that morning as a commitment rather than a drop-in. Earlier editions show the weekend has long rewarded staying for all of it — the 2018 brochure alone spread three performances across three days, two evenings and a late afternoon. Everyone should plan around Waimea’s upland setting and confirm the current season’s schedule with the theatre before travelling, because the documented record ends with the 2026 edition.

A Sample Itinerary

**Thursday, November 12, 2026** — The pass page’s window opens. Settle into Waimea and confirm your pass or tickets for the weekend; no public performance is listed for this day in the organiser’s material.

**Friday, November 13, 2026** — Spend the day in Waimea, then take your seat for the Hoʻolauleʻa at 7:00 p.m., the opening concert of the twenty-fourth Annual.

**Saturday, November 14, 2026** — Morning goes to the artist-led master workshops. At 2:00 p.m., the Kanikapila turns the audience into participants, instruments welcome on stage. The Hana Hou concert at 7:00 p.m. closes the festival.

**Sunday, November 15, 2026** — A slow departure from the uplands, with the weekend’s tunings still in your ears.

How It Compares

The name invites one persistent confusion, and it is worth dismantling plainly. A separate Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festival series, organised by Milton Lau and the Ki-ho’alu Foundation, tours themed editions of its own — a “Kona Style” edition billed as its twenty-ninth Annual on October 18, 2026, at an Outrigger resort in Kailua-Kona, and a “Kaua’i Style” edition on that island. A Kī Hō’alu Guitar Festival also exists at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center in Kahului, Maui. Different organisers, different venues, different islands, a different series entirely.

Sharing the words slack key connects none of them to Waimea. Kahilu Theatre’s festival is a single-theatre presenting-season event with its own billing ladder, its own workshop-and-jam format and its own November home. No date, price or lineup from the Lau series or the Maui event is imported here, and none of theirs should be read onto this one.

Checklist

• Decide between the two-day pass and single-event tickets before you buy
• Ignore resale asking figures when budgeting; they are not the theatre’s prices
• Bring your ʻukulele or guitar if you want to join the Saturday Kanikapila
• Book the Friday Hoʻolauleʻa and Saturday Hana Hou as separate evening anchors
• Allow a full Saturday: workshops in the morning, jam at 2:00 p.m., concert at 7:00 p.m.
• Confirm the upcoming season directly with the theatre, since no edition past 2026 is documented

Beyond the Festival

Waimea rewards the traveller who lingers. It is Parker Ranch country, a paniolo town of pasture and cool air that feels a world away from the island’s resort coasts, and the theatre itself is part of that ranching heritage through its founder. Visitors already on Hawai’i Island can pair the festival weekend with the island’s other November offerings, but should keep this event’s identity straight when planning: the slack key stages in Kailua-Kona and Kahului belong to other series, however similar the posters look.

The festival also radiates outward in a way most theatre weekends do not. The free school concerts attached to festival week put master players in front of island children who may never otherwise hear slack key played at this level, and that outreach is part of the event’s documented character rather than an afterthought.

Why It Matters

Slack key guitar and ʻukulele are living Hawaiian traditions, and this festival treats them as crafts to be handed over, not merely performed. Its format — concert, workshop, open jam, closing concert — moves knowledge from stage to audience and back again within a single weekend. A numbered annual run documented from 2017 through 2026 shows a small upland theatre sustaining that exchange year after year, even if the record never discloses where the count began.

There is also a quiet argument in where the festival lives. It does not belong to a resort lawn or a touring circuit; it belongs to a community theatre’s own season, in a ranch town, presented by the same house that serves Waimea all year. That rootedness is part of why the school concerts matter: the festival’s musicians play for the island’s own children in the same week they play for ticket holders, folding the next generation of listeners — and players — into the event’s purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the same event as the slack key festival series that visits Kona and Kaua’i?

No. That touring series belongs to Milton Lau and the Ki-ho’alu Foundation, with its own editions, venues and billings on other parts of this island and beyond. The Waimea festival is Kahilu Theatre’s own presenting-season event, and a shared instrument in the name is the only connection between them.

Why does nobody state the year this festival started?

Because the gathered sources simply do not contain one. They bill editions — fifteenth Annual in 2017, twenty-fourth Annual in 2026 — without ever printing a first year, and deriving one by subtraction would invent a fact the organiser itself has not published.

What separates the Hoʻolauleʻa, the Kanikapila and the Hana Hou?

The Hoʻolauleʻa opens the weekend as Friday evening’s concert. The Kanikapila, on Saturday afternoon, is the participatory jam where audience members with instruments join the artists on stage. The Hana Hou closes the festival as Saturday evening’s final concert.

Can I actually play alongside the performers?

Yes, within the design of one session: the Saturday Kanikapila is built for exactly that, inviting audience members to bring instruments and join the performers. The Friday and Saturday evening concerts, by contrast, are seated listening events.

What to Expect From the Next Hawaii County Hawaii Ukulele and Slack Key Guitar Festival

How often is Hawaii County Hawaii Ukulele and Slack Key Guitar Festival held?

Its billings describe an annual event staged each November, and the documented editions in the gathered record — 2017, 2018, 2019, 2025 and 2026 — all fall in that month. The annual wording comes from the festival’s own billing rather than from any independent count of editions.

When is the next Hawaii County Hawaii Ukulele and Slack Key Guitar Festival?

None is dated in the record yet. The latest documented edition is the twenty-fourth Annual of November 12–14, 2026, and no 2027 edition is announced in the sources gathered, so any future November date would be a new announcement from the theatre rather than a fact this article can state.

Will the dates change?

They have stayed within November across every documented edition, though the exact days shift with the calendar and the theatre’s season. Treat the month as the pattern and the specific dates as unsettled until Kahilu Theatre publishes them.

The festival’s paperwork trail is thinner than its music deserves — billings without a birthday, prices the organiser never had quoted back to it, a reach figure easily mistaken for a crowd. Held to only what the record proves, though, the picture stays clear: a Waimea theatre, a November weekend, and two Hawaiian instruments passed hand to hand, stage to schoolroom to stage, one annual gathering at a time.