On my last two trips to Hawaii, I heard a new song playing on KAPA (the Hawaiian station). It immediately struck me as perfect underwater-video music: perky, choral-esque, interesting rhythms, and in some tropical language.

Problem: although I heard the song five or six separate times, the title and artist were never announced. And since it wasn’t in english, I really couldn’t even guess at a title to search around online.

Well, apparently Jeff set himself a goal to hunt down this album in time for my birthday. When we returned from the Kona Classic, he dug around online in search of a phone number for KAPA. It took a while, and several calls to the coroporate headquarters of the company that owns KAPA, before he finally managed to get someone on the line at the radio station itself. He described the song and mentioned the one word we could make out – something like “Tookie-tookie” – and the KAPA employee recognized it as “Tutuki,” by a South Pacific group called Te Vaka.

Then Jeff had to hunt down a place to buy the album. He finally tracked down a New Zealand website with Te Vaka albums for sale, and my birthday present was on its way.

This was all meant to be a surprise, but about this time he noticed that I was spending a lot of free time listening to streaming Hawaiian radio stations in the hopes of catching the song playing in real time, and looking it up. I wasn’t making much headway, but apparently Jeff had more confidence in my sleuthing skills than I did; he assumed I’d track it down before long, so he ‘fessed up that the album was already on the way.

All of this explanation is basically to say: I LOVE THIS ALBUM. I recommend it to anyone. The group has a website at www.tevaka.com with links where you can listen to songs and buy albums.

Best of all, the liner notes have lyrics – plus English translations. I’m never 100% happy with an album unless I can sing along. Mission accomplished!