This year’s second Waimea Valley Summer Concert will open with a bang on Saturday, when Bla Pahinui and his band, Big Knife, take the stage at 3 p.m. to kick things off with a set of rock oldies.

The band is part of singer, songwriter and guitarist Pahinui’s latest — and possibly last — musical project. An album of imaginatively rearranged rock classics he recorded with bassist Milan Bertosa, drummer James Geneko and guitarist Byron Lai, all Hawaii rock scene veterans, is scheduled to be released in August.

“It’s been a 2-1/2-year ride, putting this album together,” Pahinui said on Friday, speaking by phone from his North Shore home.

Few know that Pahinui, son of revered slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui, is a rock ’n’ roller at heart. But Bertosa, a friend and core member of Big Knife who is also a studio engineer, did.

“He knew there was something in me, and he was waiting and waiting until it comes out,” Pahinui said.

Pahinui, 73, has loved the classic rock of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s since the songs were new.

Long before he became known as a Hawaiian slack-key guitar master, he was playing rock shows in Waikiki with his band, the Playboys (no relation to the Playboys who played with Gary Lewis). However, while Big Knife’s repertoire includes “Mustang Sally,” “Insha Allah” and “In The Still of the Night,” the quartet is not a play-it-like-the-original-hit “oldies band.”

Pahinui enjoys finding new ways to approach familiar songs; his arrangement of “Fools Rush In,” for example, is played much slower than standard.

“The sound that we have on this album is a killer,” he said. “It has jazz, it has blues, rock ’n’ roll, boogie-woogie, doo-wop, fox trot. Byron asks me how I want him to play it; I tell him, ‘Don’t ever try to play it like me; I want to hear you.’”

Looking back on his life, Pahinui recalled his father saying something similar.

“All the years I played with my dad, that was the best time of my life and I never knew it. Now I know,” Pahinui said. He liked playing Hawaiian music – with his father, and with other musicians – but didn’t take being a musician seriously.

“My dad knew that. I was a party guy. Hanging around with guys, we drink and play music and have fun, but I never took it serious. Until one day, my dad, before he left, said to me, ‘When Daddy go, I want you to be you, not me.’ What he meant was that I didn’t have to play Hawaiian music, it was OK for me to play rock ’n’ roll.”

His father — Charles Philip “Gabby” Pahinui, recognized as the most influential ki ho‘alu guitarist of the 20th century – was first and foremost a jazz fan. He had all of Duke Ellington’s albums, and was also a fan of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, but was told he should play Hawaiian music “to put kau kau on the table.”

There wasn’t enough work for jazz musicians to do that here in the 1940s, Bla Pahinui said, so his father played Hawaiian music with Andy Cummings and made the first known slack-key recording in 1946. Gabby also supported his family by working on a city road crew and driving a city garbage truck.

“My father was very kind to me, which I didn’t feel at the time because I was a rascal kolohe kid,” he reminisced.

Gabby Pahinui was 59 and at the height of his fame as a Hawaiian cultural figure when he died of a heart attack in 1980.

Bla Pahinui turns 74 this year.

“I’m slowing down,” Bla Pahinui said, adding that he is uncertain how much longer he’ll play public shows like the Waimea concert. “This may be time for me to retire. What I really want to do is jump on a different train and work with juveniles, troubled kids. I connect with them really cool.”

Bla Pahinui has talked with kids who seemed on their way to prison or the cemetery and seen them turn their lives around and become productive citizens — just as he did.

By his own admission he was a handful and a “pain” for his father. He grew up “on the streets” of Kalihi, he said, and got a start in the wrong direction early on, running away from home for three months after he got drunk at around age 12 and lost a new ukulele his father had given him.

Although Gabby Pahinui forgave him for losing the ukulele and never mentioned it again, Bla Pahinui’s wild ways eventually got him a term in the youth prison known as the Koolau Boys Home. As he grew older, and with encouragement from his family, he turned a corner.

“Everything I do, I always think of my mom,” he said. “I was my mom’s pet. She told me, ‘Whatever you do, do not remove the kukui [light] from within you. You got to carry the light with you.’”

Emily Pahinui died in 1997; she was 78.

Despite Bla Pahinui’s youthful experiences, few Hawaiian musicians have a longer list of major credits and contributions to contemporary Hawaiian music.

In addition to playing with his father and several of his brothers in various combinations of the Gabby Pahinui Band, he worked with Peter Moon in an early version of the Sunday Manoa, and in the Sandwich Isle Band, a group that Moon managed in the mid-1970s.

He recorded a single album with his brothers, Cyril and Martin, in 1992, and several solo albums — one of which was part of George Winston’s Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters series.

“All the things I did from the past, with Don Ho and everything else, that was only the beginning,” he said. “Now I’m here – I’m happy right where I’m at.

“To pass all the hurdles, all the hurts, all the pains, is good. I’ve worked my way through the whole thing with my wife’s help,” he said. “She’s the one who lifts me up.”

Pahinui also credits his wife, Kathleen, for encouraging him to be true to himself, in a musical sense.

“I’m proud to be Hawaiian, I love my race and I love everything about it, but I’m a rock ’n’ roller,” he said. “I love Hawaiian music, but it’s the way I play it. Where I go, my band goes with me. My wife says, ‘Just be you, and never change.’”