Kit Ebersbach

Most will tell you Kit Ebersbach’s done it all.

Jazz clubs and R&B groups in 1960s and 1970s Hawaii (his earliest recording were with Gordon Broad, Lemuria, and Babadu); forming the islands’ first new wave band in the following decade, The Squids, whose ethos of “best quality under the circumstances” resonated with passionate, tongue-in-cheek youth searching for something different. The 1980s also found Kit and his left-field cohorts Robert ÆOLUS Myers, Nelson Hiu, and Frank Orrall messing with music and the mind through performance art, technology and improvisation with the highly experimental group Gain Dangerous Visions.

In the 1990s, Kit teamed up with advertising exec Lloyd Kandell to recreate the sound of exotica with Don Tiki, one of the earliest groups to reignite the world’s fascination with 1950s pseudo-Polynesian lounge music. These days, Kit supports some of Hawaiian music’s greatest singers, including Starr Kalahiki and Teresa Bright, with his playfully calculated, carefully exacting approach as an arranger and an accompanist.