TVD Live Shots: Holo Holo Music Festival at Great Park Live, 4/18

WORDS AND IMAGES: SEAN McCRACKEN | There is a specific kind of afternoon that only island reggae can build—warm sun, grass underfoot, a horn section drifting over a picnic blanket, and a whole field of people who look like they have no interest in being anywhere else. That was Great Park Live in Irvine on Saturday, April 18, where the Holo Holo Music Festival rolled through town for a lineup stacked top to bottom with heavy hitters of the genre.

Headliners The Green and SOJA brought the full weight of modern island reggae to a 10,000-capacity crowd, but the real story of the day was how much depth sat underneath them. Iam Tongi, Three Plus, Joseph Soul, and Bo Napoleon each turned in sets that could have anchored a smaller festival on their own. If you love this genre, this was the room to be in.

Great Park Live turned out to be a great place for the festival to land. Fans had the run of the field—spread out on a blanket, hold the rail for a full-stage view, or drop into one of the chairs the venue provided. The warm spring afternoon did the rest. By the time the first act took the stage, the grounds already felt like a backyard party that just happened to have a professional stage at one end of it.

Bo Napoleon opened the day and set the tone immediately, easing the crowd in with “Alcoholic” and “Nice to See You Trying.” What most of the crowd may not have realized is that when he closed his set with “Wade in Your Water”—a song widely associated with Common Kings—he was playing his own song. Napoleon wrote both “Wade in Your Water” and “Alcoholic” for Common Kings back in 2010, and those songs helped earn them a Grammy nomination. Hearing the songs delivered by the man who put them on paper, in a warm afternoon slot at an island reggae festival, was one of those low-key moments of ownership that reward the fans who know the history.

Joseph Soul kept things moving. The Maui-born, Voice Season 19 alum performs as a one-man band—singing, looping, DJ-ing, and playing multiple instruments all at the same time—which is a very different kind of stagecraft than anything else on the bill. He rolled through originals like “All My Love” and then leaned into a reimagined cover of Justin Bieber’s “Yukon,” flipping the R&B of the original into something a little more soulful and island-inflected. It worked.

Between acts, the stage was turned over to the Moana Nui School of Polynesian Dance, which performed a program of dances from across Polynesia. It was a genuinely thoughtful piece of programming—a reminder that “island reggae” is a living cultural context, not just a genre label—and the crowd gave the dancers their full attention.

Three Plus followed and turned the field into a sing-along. The Honolulu band has been at this since 1999—they won the Na Hoku Hanohano Award for Reggae Album of the Year in 2003—and their catalog has the kind of built-in familiarity with West Coast island reggae crowds that is hard to fake. “Cool Operator,” “Undercover Lover,” “Mystic Man,” and “Two Person Party” all came out, and every one of them was a word-for-word sing-along from the front rail back to the lawn.

Iam Tongi was the act that many people came to see, and he earned that attention. The American Idol Season 21 winner—the first Hawaiian and first Pacific Islander to take the show—has grown into a real live performer in the couple of years since that win, and it showed. He opened with a cover of Kolohe Kai’s “Cool Down,” then moved into originals “Why Kiki?,” “Eyes For You,” and the title track from his debut album, “Good For My Soul.” He closed on a slow, reverent take of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love” that drew the biggest sing-along of the afternoon. His voice has that warm, wave-washed rasp people keep trying to describe, and in a live setting, it lands even heavier than on record.

SOJA took the stage as the sun began to set, and the whole day’s energy shifted with it. The Grammy-winning, Virginia-based eight-piece has been at the top of American reggae for more than two decades, and frontman Jacob Hemphill knows exactly how to pace a festival set. “She Still Loves Me” and “Back to the Start” hit the crowd like they had been waiting for them all day—and then, in the middle of the set, something unusual happened. Most of the band put down their instruments, hopped on drums, and built an extended percussion breakdown from scratch. It was the kind of moment that only works live—no recorded version of it exists—and it was the clearest signal of the night that this was a festival, not just a series of concerts stacked on top of each other.

The Green closed the night as headliners, and they earned every minute of that top spot. The Oahu six-piece is built differently from most reggae bands—four lead singers trading verses, passing melody like a basketball—and that passing game makes their live show feel bigger than the stage can contain. They moved through a run that included “What Will Be Will Be” and dug into the deeper catalog fans had been waiting for. The high point of the set, and probably of the day: Jacob Hemphill walked back out to join them for a song, turning the headliner slot into a full-bill collaboration that felt like the natural ending to an afternoon about community. If you looked around during that moment, almost everybody in the field was singing.

Keeping it all stitched together between sets was Western Conference—BigBodyCisco on the mic and Westafa on the decks—who handled the changeover music and crowdwork with the kind of easy chemistry that tells you they’ve done a lot of these festivals. A good hosting duo is the difference between a festival that drags between acts and one that never loses its heartbeat; Western Conference kept it beating all day.

Overall, it was a great day of island reggae music—warm, well-paced, and deeply connected to the culture the genre emerged from. “Holo Holo” means “to travel, to sail, to move,” and on April 18, Great Park Live felt exactly like all three.

BO NAPOLEON