Teresa Bright

As John Berger wrote in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser… Teresa Naniali ‘i Bright grew up in He`eia on O`ahu’s windward side and graduated from Castle High School with hopes of a career in music. The daughter of hula dancer Carol Bright and musician Daniel Bright, she was performing as one-half of a duo when she got her big break: Her partner didn’t show up for a job and Bright’s brother-in-law Steve Maii came to her rescue. Steve was once the bassist for musician/activist George Helm as well as having worked with Keola and Kapono Beamer and Melveen Leed.

The year was 1981, and Steve and Teresa as they would become known were performing at Pat’s at Punalu`u.

Engineer Rick Keefer had just moved from Seattle to East O`ahu and a town called Hau`ula. Just a few days later Steve and Teresa cut their first album at Rick Keefer’s studio. The entire job was finished in less than three hours. As the guys at Aloha Got Soul so rightly said, the resulting album gave Hawai`i one of its greatest musical gifts of the 20th century – “Catching A Wave,” which would be covered countless times in the four decades since its debut. Steve and Teresa would do more two albums – “Ocean Blue” (1983) and “Intimately” (1986).
 
But it was not “Catching A Wave” that would first bring that angelic voice to my attention.
 
How did I discover Teresa Bright while living more than 5,000 miles from the islands? A calabash uncle would send me tapes he recorded off of KCCN radio. And I recall popping one of those tapes into the player and pressing “PLAY” and extolling – possible out loud – what the hell am I hearing? The year was 1990, and it was a cut from Teresa’s first solo album, Self-Portrait, which would go on to become a huge seller filled with one radio hit after another and which garnered six prestigious Na Hoku Hanohano Awards including “Album of the Year” and “Female Vocalist of the Year.”
 
The Hawaiian music-loving world lost Teresa Bright on September 1, 2024. So I feel compelled to pay tribute to the voice that has very much been the soundtrack of my life. As with so many artists I spin at Ho`olohe Hou Radio, much of Teresa’s music is “out of print” – no longer available on most of the digital platforms despite that it was recorded in the digital era. Such a sad irony. And as she had a huge following in Japan, much of Teresa’s music was recorded specifically for the Japan audience and never released elsewhere. So, unlike many of my programs where I play a little music and talk about it a lot, this show is going to be a little different. I feel the need to give this beautiful music back to the world. So, I am going to recount Teresa Bright’s career chronologically and play a mix of the radio hits and likely a great many recordings you have never heard before. And because, like so many others, I need to find a way to begin to heal from this tragic loss, I am going to just put on these albums and let them play and rediscover Teresa’s amazing catalog along with you.
 
So here is that voice just as I first heard it more than three decades ago on that old KCCN radio tape. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Teresa Bright.