For three decades the Brothers Cazimero celebrated May Day with Oahu concerts, encouraging everyone to “Make a lei, wear a lei, share a lei.” Kuana Torres Kahele has now taken on the kuleana (responsibility) of encouraging everyone, residents and visitors alike, to wear lei.

At Torres’ Sunday concert, dubbed The Night of a Thousand Lei, he is encouraging everyone to wear at least one flower garland.

“It ain’t that hard — we live in Hawaii, everybody should be able to go get something and make a lei,” Torres said Dec. 31, taking a break from his New Year’s Eve preparations — he was buying ahi at the Hilo fish market — to talk about the show and the Hawaiian tradition of lei making.

“Everyone says ‘It’s so hard’ or ‘It’s so tedious,’ or ‘I don’t have time’ or ‘I don’t live by the forest.’ That’s all excuses to me.”

A lei can be made of almost anything, Torres explained — flowers, leaves, shells, nuts, feathers, even yarn or paper. Pre-contact Hawaiians wore lei niho ilio (a necklace of dog’s teeth) and lei palaoa (a whale’s tooth suspended by two coils of braided human hair). The lei pupu (shell lei) of Niihau are treasured by those who know their cultural significance. Many other types of lei are treasured for their fragrance, or the beauty of the foliage and location where it is gathered.

Torres notes that if you don’t want to refer to “leis” when talking about more than one, the Hawaiian language has its own way of distinguishing between one item and several — one lei is “ka lei” and two or more is “na lei.”

Whether you wear ka lei or na lei on Sunday, Kahele promises a big and colorful celebration of Hawaiian music, hula and lei-making.

“We’ve got Lukela Keala from Maui and also Ata Damasco, and, of course, Maila Gibson singing ‘E Ku‘u Lei, My Love.’

“I’ve got a few special guest musicians who have lent their expertise playing for some of the CDs. I’ve got a piano player coming. I’ve got a few steel players coming. It’s super exciting,” he said.

Hula will also be represented by “people that are like family to me, that I’ve worked with, that we have history with,” Kahele said.

“These halau would include Kapua Dalire’s halau. We have a long history: I sang for her mother for years when Kapua was still a dancer for her mother.

“My calabash cousin Keawe Lopes and his wife, Tracie, they’re coming down, and we have history as well.

“We also have kumu Sonny Ching and Lopaka Igarta DeVera from Na Mamo o Pu‘uanahulu, and I’ve been good friends with them since, gosh, I can’t remember,” Kahele said. “And I got the two Miss Aloha Hulas coming down, TeHani Gonzado Pimental and Mika Mahealani Mika Hirao-Solem. It’s going to be fun.”

The ticket price includes a copy of Kahele’s DVD, “Make Lei,” a two-hour tutorial on lei making that he released in August.

As with all his Hawaii Theatre concerts, Kahele will stay after the show to sign all DVDs sold, for all who want an autograph. The last time he did a show at the Hawaii Theatre, he signed autographs afterward for more than an hour.

With a smaller show in Hawaii Public Radio’s Atherton Studio on Saturday, Kahele is off on another busy year of performing, teaching, touring and recording.

The first four albums in his ambitious Music for the Hawaiian Islands series were released on schedule: “Hawaii Keawe” for the Big Island and “Kahelelani” for Niihau in 2014, “Piʻilani Maui” and “Manookalanipo Kaua‘i” last year.

The fifth, “Lana‘ikaula,” newly written songs for Lanai, is due out in September.

Originally, Kahele had planned to do six albums. However, Kepa Maly, executive director of the Lana‘i Culture & Heritage Center, convinced him that Lanai had more than enough history and culture for an entire album.

“He was hanai by a native speaker from the island, and he’s gone to great lengths to show how rich the culture is on the island of Lanai,” Kahele said. “A lot of people think of it just a lot of red dirt and pine trees, and a lot of Filipinos; that’s just a facade. If you get somebody to take you past that, oh my god, they’ve got a ton of culture; it’s amazing. He’s taken me around that island; I’ve seen a lot of beautiful stuff. It’s truly one of my new favorite islands to visit.”

And so, there will be seven albums in the Music for the Hawaiian Islands series. The albums for Oahu and Molokai will be released in 2017.

Kahele envisioned the series as a new body of work for performance by halau hula. This year at least six halau hula are using songs from the first four albums in the Merrie Monarch competition.

“We have a bunch of people that’s doing a number of my songs this year,” he said. “As the weeks get closer to Merrie Monarch, I think there’s other halau that I didn’t know of.”

The appetite for and interest in Hawaiian culture is vibrant worldwide, Kahele said.

Later this spring he will be going to Europe to conduct workshops in hula, lei making and oli (chant) in Germany, Spain and Austria. In June he’ll present similar Hawaiian cultural workshops on the mainland.

“You’d be so amazed to see the kind of stuff I see when I travel around — how super, super into it they are,” he said. “They eat it, they breath it, they live it, they want it.

“Some people may look at it as Hawaiians selling out their culture, but I totally don’t. To have another culture love your culture that much — that is frickin’ awesome, and I would never deny them the chance to learn.”