 Thank you for joining us for another edition of Community Matters on Think Tech Hawaii. My name is Craig Weigeld and I'll be your host today as we spend some time with an amazingly talented young man. For those of you who haven't seen me before, today will be a departure from my usual format. For Hawaii's living legend lawyers, I've been interviewing attorneys who are nearing the end of their careers and have built legacies of helping their profession and the community. But today, our show is entitled Playing for Food and I'm getting a chance to speak with an impressive local musician in a band that is on the on-ramp to what they hope will be musical stardom and success. Jesse Sharoma grew up here in Hawaii, in Hilo actually, a local boy. Together with Jonathan, Brian and Ben, Jesse is part of the musical sensation known as Streetlight Cadence. From humble beginnings, playing on the streets in Waikiki for change to buy food, Streetlight Cadence has traveled the world. Has a regular gig at Disneyland and is setting up to have its own television series this fall on K-5. They've also managed to win two Nahoku Hano Hano Awards and a number of Battle of the Bands competitions. If you haven't heard Streetlight Cadence's music yet, you're missing something special. Their songs are fresh, unique and enjoyable and they perform with energy, optimism and a true love for what they're doing. Spending a little time watching these guys, it's hard not to become a fan. We caught Jesse Sharoma in town and I'm pleased to have a chance to sit down and talk with him here on Community Matters. Jesse, thanks for coming by today. Of course. Thank you for having me, Craig. And as we get started and before I ask any questions, I gotta ask you to give a shoutout right now to my wife, Debbie, who is like your biggest fan. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Debbie, for supporting us all the way. It's friends and fans like you that honestly keep us doing what we're doing day to day with a smile and loving it every step of the way. So thank you so much. We can't wait to see you again. All right. Thank you very much. Now, you play an accordion, I mean an instrument that quite frankly has been relegated usually to polka, which I think is, you know, was its highest mark. Did you lose a bet where your parents just cruel to you? Were you last in line to get an instrument at band camp? What happened here? Oh, man. All of those are better stories than true stories. I wish it was one of those. It all started right as I was leaving high school moving to college at UH Manoa. I played piano before that about nine or ten years, but it was parental enforced. Music rounds out a human being. So whether I loved it or not, they made me study piano, going through all the motions, and I thought every step of the way, I was a brat. But after that, once I stopped to the piano lessons, I thought music was out of my life. I thought band students were like the biggest nerds on the planet as I was in the Robotics Club the whole time. I'm like nerds. Lo and behold, though, fast forward a couple of years. I'm going into my freshman year of college, and I hear an old recording, and an accordion was on it. It was like a vinyl or something, like Edith Piaf, Lavian Rolls or something. And I was enraptured by the sound of the accordion. Something just clicked. Love at first hearing, you could say. So I run up to my parents, I'm like, Mom, Dad, I need to learn how to play the accordion. I need to get an accordion. Really? Coming from someone who has not touched an accordion, much less seen one in real life. So yes, the disappointment was real. My dad was like, cool, you don't want to play ukulele or Hawaiian slacky or something you have grown up around your entire life. My mom was just like, where did I go wrong with my son? But after enough finangling, I was able to convince my grandparents who lived in Reading at the time to find an old beat-up garage sale accordion, bring it over with them with their next visit. And with that, I started the slow, torturous process, mostly torturous for my parents of learning how to play the accordion in my room and just making a racket. Now I think a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate what's all involved with an accordion. We haven't seen one up close. But this has explained to me what you're playing. You're playing piano keys on one side, you have buttons, like, I don't know, what, 450 or something, buttons on the other side and then you've got to keep it moving in order to play. How does that work? It's not that complicated. It's only about 25 pounds hanging off your chest with 41 piano keys on one side, 120 buttons about the size of a thumbtack on the other side that you can't physically see. You can only play by touch, combined with 17 registers modifying the entire tone, opening and closing certain read banks. All the meantime, the only way they're making any noise is if you're squeezing air through it at the same time. So much as a violinist uses his bow to make his accents, we have to use our bellows. You know, it's not that complicated. How long did it take you to pick this up? You know, it's all, I believe you can pick up any skill, no matter how difficult it is, like, within six months, if you're willing to commit the time to it. And so while I was going to school, I would come home, wrap up my homework, and just sit down and I would find, you know, books on how to play it. I would look at sheet music, thankfully. Again, my parents having put me through piano lessons, I could read fluently and just, I studied, I put at least an hour every day in, you know, just like dedicated practice, no outside stimuli. And within six months, I was playing all the favorite songs I wanted to learn how to play, and then expanding my horizons from there. And you moved that and parlayed that into being one of the members of Street like Catons, maybe we can see a picture of Street like Catons up here. That's absolutely right. So during my freshman year of college playing accordion, one thing I wanted to start doing was playing with other musicians. I felt that playing with other musicians would give me an opportunity to expand my horizons. That being said, I would look at... And this is them, right? Oh, that's great. That is us in John's kitchen recording the video back in our DIY days. Tell me who the members are, what they're playing. All right. So that's me on the far left playing the accordion. To my, just right of that is Brian on his cello. As you may notice, Brian plays stand-up cello. That is, he will literally strap his instrument to him so he can walk around and be mobile. Comfortably seated on the kitchen island is our fearless leader, Jonathan Franklin, on the violin. And at the far tail end, kind of tucked in the back is our, actually our good friend, Chaz Umamoto, who is no longer with us. He recently left though to follow a career in production. He's still a very dear friend and we grab coffee every week in Los Angeles and complain about life like two old guys. Okay. It's great. Okay. And now, you've got Ben in there. Yes. And now, just recently, just a few months ago, we added our new band, Baby Ben, who is by far the most skilled and talented and lovable and likable guy. All of our fans actually like him more than us, but we're okay with that. Well, I don't know about that. I won't go there, but so how did this all come about? How did you guys come together and decide we're going to make this band? And I mean, it's an unlikely group of instruments to pull together. You're absolutely right. And none of it was planned. It all began with our friend, my Jonathan Franklin and our friend, Daniel Duncan, wanting to just start something for fun. You know, nothing was created yet, but they put an ad on Craig's list. It was in Goodness Gracious, eight or nine years ago. They put an ad on Craig's list. And if I remember correctly, it literally said, looking for weird musicians or musicians who play weird instruments, something along those lines. And as an accordion player in Hawaii, looking for people to play with, it was really hard. Let's be honest, no one wanted to play with an accordion player. Thankfully, I did a lot of searching on Craig's list for months at a time, and finally I came across this post. And it being Craig's list, I expected it to be, you know, a meetup. Old creepy person like, hey, man, this jam. But turns out they were right across the UH campus from me. It was this young guy, these two young guys who just wanted to make music, have fun. We kind of had similar music tastes and hobbies. And we started as a trio, right? They're on the sidewalks of Waikiki just for fun, make a little side money, maybe go to like Foodland or something and get that like after 6 PM discounted sushi, you know the kind where it's like, they need to get rid of it. But so it's like, you know, questionably healthy or whatnot, but we'll roll those dice when you're in college, you'll eat anything. Absolutely. Yeah. And it began there and fast forward, you know, nine years and here we are living in Los Angeles primarily playing at Disney, Universal Studios. We have a picture of that. I think that's picture number six. Can we take a look at picture of you guys playing downtown Disney? Oh, yeah. There you are. That's the downtown Disney main stage. You can catch us there later this month, actually. I thought I saw that on your schedule. So how often are you there? You know, we're very fortunate that we're there usually these months a week. We can be there multiple times depending if we need to fill in for other acts or for on tour. We might not be there for two, three weeks at a time. And on rare lucky occasions, you can actually find us in Disney California Adventure for special events, food and wine festivals or other festivals and whatnot. So it's just a really fun, magical relationship we have and we're just really thankful for it. Now you guys are centered in LA but you're traveling a fair amount now. That is correct. We moved to LA primarily because it does make it easier to make it around the continental US when we go on tours, travels, shows. Hawaii will forever be my home at the same time that six hour flight back and forth. If you're doing it every month or multiple times a month, you can honestly, where both yourself out physically is where you are financially. So, especially as an independent band, as you know. So moving to LA, we did that about three years ago. We'll make three years this October and it's crazy. Like LA, Los Angeles is everything you imagine it to be from the lights, the people, the action, the traffic. It's crazy but we love it. Our network of musicians and producers and friends has expanded exponentially and it's a great launch pad as an international destination to get out to other places as well and facilitate those trips abroad. OK, OK. Where this year? Where are you going? Goodness, this year has been a whirlwind already. We've been to Japan, the Bahamas. Of course, always good to come back home here. We're going up to the Pacific Northwest, potentially the South. We're looking at Texas and Texas is big so that's going to eat up a lot of time. But really, we'll be hopscotching all around the country throughout the later rest of this year. And we saw you earlier with John Cruz and others playing at the aquarium and that was fantastic. What an impressive opportunity. That was surreal. We may have moved away from Hawaii but growing up here, having the band start here, we've looked up to the musicians here, these legends, these iconic paragons of the music scene who belt the scene up and are just phenomenal songwriters on a national scale. It's the level of talent here is insane when you stack them up against the mainland US. It's just us being on an island. That music takes a little longer to disseminate across the waters. But to play with John Cruz and Barry Flanagan, it was, for us, it's surreal. We will forever be students of their craft and hopefully follow in their footsteps as long as we can. Well, they were very complimentary of you as well. That was fun to hear you get a chance to even play together with them on stage. Thank you. What keeps you guys going? Wow. Well, Debbie keeps us going. It's our friends and our fans and our community that rallies around us from the sidewalks to the stages. Just their support keeps us trucking. And if we do this to make friends, to lift people up, then as a DIY band, it's like you don't go into this expecting to make money. You don't go into this expecting like fame and riches. You know, it's a fight. It's always an uphill battle. But we have our friends, our fans, and especially each other exactly to collaborate. Now, this is a neat photo, in part, because I think I know where you are there. Is that at Mid-Pacific? That's correct. That's at Mid-Pac. Tell us about what you did there. Oh, we had this wonderful, it was like a combination of workshops, symposium, ending with a concert. And we just spanned so many fun topics. We had John teaching them how to write a song, how to play their violins, like ukuleles to strum them. We had Brian teaching the cellists how to strap their cellos up and create the next generation of stand-up cellists. And all culminated with this fun concert at the end. And to see these kids growing up and just performing these songs with us, it was so cool. And hopefully, we want to show them that you play these classical instruments and they seem, you know, you may be a lot, a lot of kids think they're locked into that world of classical music, but you can do anything with it. And look at what we're doing now with a violin, cello, and an accordion. So really, the options are limitless. And we hope to leave that lesson with them and that they will take what they've learned and just do incredible things. All right, well, when we come back, I want to talk about the television series that's coming up and where you guys are going from there. You're watching Community Matters. And I'm talking with Jesse Sharoma of Streetlight Cadence. We'll be back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. Do you watch my show on Tuesdays at one comfort zone? I sang this song to you because I think you either are cool or have the potential to be seriously cool. And I want you to come watch my show where I bring in experts who talk all about easy strategies to be healthier, happier, build better relationships, and make your life a success. So come sit with the cool kids at Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at one. See you then. Well, welcome back. I'm Craig Wagdoll. You're watching Community Matters on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm sitting here with Jesse Sharoma of Streetlight Cadence. They're talking about some of the neat things that Streetlight Cadence has been doing. I want to talk a little bit about where it's going now because we've got some exciting stuff coming up this fall. We sure do. Tell me about playing for food. We'll play for food. We'll play for food. I'm sorry. We'll play for food, which is going to be airing this fall on K5. That's right. And it is a reality TV show. What is it involved? How did you get this? I'm going to do it. Goodness gracious. So We'll Play For Food is our brand new TV series airing September 26 at 7 p.m. every Wednesday right after the news. And it's the culmination of a lot of things. It's a culmination of over a year of effort and, let's see, where did it begin with that? I guess, well, it just occurred to us as a band, having done this. We're completely independent, no manager, no booking agent. Some would say we're unmanageable. But as an independent band, we've always had to find interesting ways to survive, to get by, to squeeze through to the next goal, to hit to that next goal post. And so that would end up with us traveling on our own dime, figuring out interesting ways to travel, whether it's flying into Houston, Texas, and stealing John's mom's minivan to drive across the country, or walking into restaurants late at night and asking, we'll play a half hour set if you'll feed us. These little adventures, they always happen. And we remember them, make for good memories, good stories. And it occurred to us that this could be great. This could be another form of art to share our story, to inspire people, to lift people up. And we've also learned, in this day and age, as musicians, TV is a wonderful source of getting your content out, to get your material, your songs, your music. And we go to all of these festivals with musicians just starving to get their music on television. They'll meet music supervisors and be, please listen to my album, please listen to my music. I think this would go great in your new television series, airing on this big network. It's kind of the big hot thing now, to get your music on television shows. And we've gone to so many of these conferences and expos, and that we've always heard the same story over again. How do I get my music on there? And it occurred to us, well, if everyone wants to get their music on a TV show, let's make our own TV show. And we can put our own music on it. As a band, we've always, coming up from the sidewalks, every challenge is a gatekeeper. Whether you want to play in a venue, there's someone there saying, no, I don't like you guys. And because I don't like you, you're not going to play this venue, or you're not going to get this gig, or you're not going to be on this network, or you're not going to use your music on my TV show. And we have nothing against the gatekeepers. We see that as a challenge. And as such, with no hard feelings, we always will find our way around it and over it to keep going towards our goal. That being said, no one wanted to place our music at the time being on a TV show, so we figured, well, we'll make our own TV show. We'll just do it ourselves. That being said, here we have the advent of We'll Play for Food, which is the synthesis, you could say, of if you're familiar with the show, The Monkeys. The shenanigans of The Monkeys and the music. And parts unknown with the late great Anthony Bourdain. And because there's enough reality TV shows out there with rock and roll bands on the road, partying it up, just making complete fools of themselves, wrecking places, or just being complete and in compoops and making a scene. Like living the fast, hard rock and roll life or whatever, the star life. We want to be as far from that as possible because we love our music. We love what we do, but we also love where we go. And we want to respect the places we visit. And we want to learn more about that. That being said, We'll Play for Food. The primary challenge of this show, the premise, is wherever we travel, whether it's in the US mainland or internationally abroad, is we land in every destination without a dollar in our pockets. And we have to use our musical aptitude to feed ourselves, to survive. We will play for food, whether that means getting busted by the police in Japan because they're trying to figure out a good corner to play on. Potentially you actually did. You got stopped by the police there, right? We did. And they said, you know, this is cool. You know, it's not bad music, but you can't play for money here on the sidewalks. So we said, OK, cool. Like, we're sorry about that. Like, rewrite the plans. We think, well, we actually reviewed the laws. If you can't play for money on the sidewalks, can we just play for food? Like that being said, with the help of a friend who spoke English-Japanese, we made a cardboard sign saying, we'll play for food. We don't want your money. We'll play for food. We went to Shibuya. We set that out. And before we know it, people are bringing us bags of food. People brought you food, right? Totally fine. There's no money transaction. And the challenge changes wherever you go. Sometimes we're in small little towns where no one stops, where there is no one to play for. What do you do then? Do you go knock on someone's house and say, hey, can we have dinner with you if we'll play you a couple songs, have a house concert? Or what if we're in a city where there's really just kind of like sketchy, unsafe areas, but we have to somehow make that work? That being said, everywhere we go presents a new challenge. And it forces us to get creative with our music and with the people we interact with. And hopefully, through all of that, we're able to capture a raw, real visceral image of the city or wherever we are and to really can make that connection with our music, where we're at, and with the viewer. Is it fun? It's fun. Sometimes it is genuinely, the term reality TV is thrown around so willy-nilly here. But what we're doing is so genuinely real, sometimes my sweaty pits in some of those shots are genuinely sweaty. Because I am so worried we're going to get busted or we're going to get jumped or everything's going to go down in flames and it's all on camera. And that actually is a reality. In fact, at one time, I think Jonathan had said before he'd sort of gotten together with all you guys that he got jumped by somebody and took his money. That's correct. Actually, here in Waikiki, when he first, just months after moving here, playing on the sidewalks, he fell victim to it. He got just jumped in a complete freak random series of events and he got knocked out. And it was a really rough time for him. He was considering not playing out in public ever again until, well. Until he brought in, and you have a black belt of some kind and you were able to step in and be one of the enforcers. Exactly. At the time, I was like, well, do you need me to be your security guard or your bandmate? It's kind of hard to fight when you have 25 pounds of accordion hanging off you, you know? Well, that's the other thing I was thinking. I mean, I understand getting beat up because you have an accordion, but I mean, he was. Exactly. It's crazy, I tell you. But you know, and so that being said, though, we experienced scenarios. Maybe not as extreme as that, maybe so on these trips. And so hopefully, you know, once the show drops, you can tune in and we want to give the viewer something to look forward to. I mean, because doing what we do, there really is no easy ticket out to these destinations. It's always, always a hurdle to jump over. Oh, it's a challenge. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to see it. And you said, again, King 5 starts up this fall, September 27th, did you say? 26. 26. Wednesdays. Yes, sir. All right. Well, that'll be a fun show. Do we have a shot of the full band on the beach there? I think it's one of their promotional shots. I don't know if we can pull that one up. And I think that one has Ben in it. Yes. We'll see if we can take a look at that. This is the band. There you are. We'll play it for food. So that's Jonathan, right? Yep. Ben, you, and Brian. That's correct. And Brian plays the cello, but he wears it. It all began also, that was an invention. A lot of the things that you see with us now have been products, unless playing on the sidewalks in Waikiki. Brian playing the cello upright was primarily he hated schlepping a chair with him down to the sidewalks every night we performed. And we would do it almost every night. And he just hated having to bring a chair with him. So he did a little bit of R&D, figured out, well, guitar shop can go here. One can go here. And before you know it, he's walking around playing the cello like it's no one's business. Yeah. Well, I remember watching him show the kids at Mid-Pacific and the orchestra there how to do that. And for the first time, them sort of walking around and playing their cello. And it was quite an experience, I think, both for the kids. And also, you guys work wonderfully with kids. I think maybe that's because you're a little bit of kid yourself. Yeah, we're brats, what can we say? We have a little bit of growing up to do ourselves. But again, yeah, we've been fortunate that we've had a lot of great mentors and role models here in Hawaii. And ideally, as a band that's done it ourselves, we see nowadays, we feel like that should be invoked more in the younger generations that you can do anything. As long as you can visualize it if you want it and you put a plan together, you can make it happen. So hopefully, we can teach these skills to those interested and they can just do something. They can go above and beyond anything they dreamed of. So to see kids doing it younger than us, it's just like, yes, I've yet I've seen one person pick up the accordion because of me. So is that right? I'm a little slower than the stand-up cello students, but I'm working on it. But there aren't a lot of people teaching accordion out here, I wouldn't think. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I used to teach out here. Unfortunately now, most of my students have actually moved away, and I moved away ahead. OK, when you look 10 years down the road, where do you hope you guys are? Oh, my goodness gracious. Honestly, I just wanted to. I would like to be where we are now, but on a bigger scale. Hopefully, what can I say? At the moment, I make a living doing what I love with some of my best friends. From as a person, there's nowhere else I'd rather be. Admittedly, I would love to maybe eventually start being able to make enough to save up. Maybe eventually get a house, support a family. So at the end of the day, just to develop our platform, develop our band, develop our sound, maybe play bigger shows and play around the world, make friends wherever we go. And yeah, hopefully eventually rise above the poverty line. That would be nice. That is where I want to be 10 years from now. Above the poverty line. I like that. That's a good goal. Upcoming shows? Where are you playing? Oh, well, actually, August. We're going to actually be on the road for a bit. Half of the month will be up in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle and Portland. But in the meantime, we have a slew of shows at Downtown Disney and Universal Studios. You can find all of that on our Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter. We have all the dates listed up so you can find it there. Perfect. When do we get you back here in Hawaii? Everything works out. I do believe we'll be back for a week or two before September. We want to share a little hype. We may have a little launch party planned in store for our friends and fans here. So that's like a little shindig to kick off the TV show. How can they follow you? You mentioned Facebook, I assume Facebook pages. There's all kinds of social media. A simple Google search of Streetlight Cadence will bring you up to our website, as well as our Facebook, our Instagram, our Twitter, our newsletter. We want to make it as easy as possible to annoy you. So you can get in contact with us. OK. And you're the one that runs all that, right? That is correct. That is all me. So if you write to us on any of those platforms, I'll be happy to get back to you as soon as possible. All right. Streetlight Cadence. That's correct. And we'll play for food starting up in this September. Very exciting stuff. Thanks for coming, Jesse. My pleasure, Craig. Thank you. It's great to see you and you. And I hope that next time when we have the whole band in town, we'll get all of you in here. Oh, boy, that would be fun. I can't wait to get you to play us a tune. And that, unfortunately, brings us to the end of our show. We've enjoyed having you with us on Community Matters as we discussed playing for food with our special guest, Jesse Sheroma of Streetlight Cadence. If you're wondering, now, how can these guys possibly make me interested in hearing accordion music? Now's the time. Search the YouTube and listen to a few of their songs. There are certain people in this world who just want to see succeed. And wherever their talents and musical journey takes them, I'm confident the boys of Streetlight Cadence are in for a lot of success. Look for their television series This Fall on K5. And for those of you all tied into the social media scene, you can find them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all kinds of other places. Now, if you want to see this show again, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com or YouTube.com backslash ThinkTechHawaii. There you'll find a link to this show and many more just like it. As always, thanks so much to our studio staff and for all of you who watch, care, and contribute to ThinkTech Productions. My name is Craig Wagner. Aloha.