Joss Jaffe & Jim "Kimo" West (Hawaii / USA)
- Nov 20, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: May 15
Joss Jaffe and Jim “Kimo” West are celebrated musicians known for their innovative and diverse contributions to world, new age and Hawaiian music. Joss Jaffe is a vocalist, tabla player, and multi-instrumentalist blending modern pop, reggae, and world sounds with ambient and meditative music. A regular performer at transformational festivals and yoga conferences, Joss captivates global audiences with his cross-genre creativity. Jim “Kimo” West, a GRAMMY-winning slack-key guitarist, is one of the foremost practitioners of ki ho’alu, Hawaiian slack-key guitar. With over 125 million streams, he has received numerous awards. Kimo’s work preserves Hawaiian traditions while engaging audiences at prestigious slack-key festivals worldwide.
Featured Songs:
Partially inspired by the Balinese water purification ceremony, “Water Blessing," featured on Putumayo's Global Yoga, is a soothing instrumental track that opens with the relaxing tones of the hang drum, a metal percussion instrument invented in Switzerland about 25 years ago. Kimo’s gentle guitar lines enter, followed by the kanjira, a frame drum from India played with the fingers.
“Banana Flower Honey” unites Jaffe’s meditative sensibility with West’s ki ho’alu mastery in a track that feels like a warm breeze off the Pacific. West’s open tuning creates a resonant foundation as melodic lines bloom unhurriedly from the strings, while Jaffe weaves texture around the guitar’s natural voice. Laid-back and luminous, this previously unreleased gem showcased on Global Guitars, is built around a simple, beautiful melody that lingers long
after it ends.
The Lotus Lounge track, “Across the Ocean,” is an instrumental collaboration featuring Kazu Matsui, a Japanese composer and shakuhachi flutist with a long career in film scoring and world music. The shakuhachi is a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute known for its breathy, meditative tone. Jaffe contributes tabla (South Asian hand drums), ngoni (a West African plucked string instrument), and shakers, while West layers acoustic and electric guitars, bass, keyboards, and E-bow, a handheld device that sustains guitar strings electro-magnetically, producing a smooth, cello-like tone.
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