Hawaiian music, if it’s about anything, is about history and tradition. Now Kilin Reece, a luthier/music historian, has taken his passion for Hawaiian music to an intriguing level of discovery, revealing crucial linkages between Hawaii and the development of music worldwide.

Reece, a 44-year-old Kailua resident originally from California, has now formed an organization, the Kealakai Center for Pacific Strings, to promote further study and celebration of Hawaii’s music. He’s received the support of the Library of Congress, Bishop Museum and C.F. Martin & Co. (also known as the venerable guitar manufacturer Martin Guitars), among others.

The center will be holding two benefit events this weekend at the Cathedral of St. Andrew to support the organization: a Friday dinner/talk-story/concert, and a community concert on Saturday to “get the music exposed to all the people of Hawaii,” Reece said.

“I united a gang of musicians, from (former Royal Hawaiian Band master) Aaron Mahi to (singer) Raiatea Helm, (guitarist) Jeff Peterson, the Asing family, a bunch of symphony musicians, jazz violinists and jazz saxophone players, to re-create this monarchy-period, Hawaiian string-band ensemble sound,” Reece said. “We’ve been pulling from old archival sources, from newspapers and all the manuscript research I’ve done to re-create and re-imagine the music that was happening in the Hawaiian kingdom, for the first time in maybe 150 years.”

Reece’s interest in the music started with his work repairing guitars, which began when he received a broken-down 1934 Martin guitar. It led him to Mekia Kealakai, a guitarist for the Royal Hawaiian Band at the turn of the century and later the band master, who had ordered a special jumbo-sized guitar to be made for him to play in performances.

The Kealakai model guitar would become the basis for Martin’s “dreadnought” acoustic guitar, now the most widely imitated model for quality acoustic guitars (and the reason many Martin models are designated with the letter “D”).

Reece, however, sees Hawaii’s influence on modern popular music as going far beyond the dreadnought.

REECE THINKS Hawaii’s musical tradition, which arose during the 19th century as a blend of high-society entertainment like opera and waltz music and saloon and honky-tonk dance tunes, deserves recognition as a key contributor to modern popular music as a whole.

“Hawaii always gets talked about as what came to Hawaii and how Hawaiian culture learned from everybody else,” he said. “But let’s talk about what the world learned from Hawaii. … The brilliant thing about this Hawaiian comunity in the latter decades of the 19th century is that they’re synthesizing everything — the zither, the autoharps from Germany, with the violins, the trombones, the saxophones, with all the guitars, ipu heke (double gourd), the hula implements. All of these things are coming together to create this new concept of tone and sound.”

That sound first got exported overseas by Hawaiian musicians — trained by Henri Berger, an early band master of the Royal Hawaiian Band — who were banned from performing in Hawaii by the Provisional Government after the takeover of the kingdom in 1893.

“In order to feed their families and do what they loved, they left and went to San Francisco and started a yearlong railroad tour of the continental United States, and within a very short amount of time they were headlining above John Philip Souza,” Reece said. “Halfway through their sets, they would put down their brass instruments and they would play this glee-club, string-ensemble hybrid Hawaiian string-band music, and people would just be knocked out. This was in 1895.”

Reece describes their music as a “proto-jazz” style that blended brass and strings and reminds him of early Appalachian folk music. He found a recording of it at the Library of Congress and has re-issued it on a CD, which has prompted interest from farflung relatives of Duke Kahanamoku, former Royal Hawaiian Band members and others who trace their background to Hawaii’s musicians of the past.

“The story is just blossoming and exploding out of the community here, and I think that’s something that’s going to continue,” he said.