Kalei Yamanoha is a native Hawaiian composer, multi-instrumentalist, and musical storyteller whose eclectic journey across genres, instruments, and performance settings has shaped a rare versatility and depth. He began his musical life at age nine, playing ʻukulele, Tahitian drums, and guitar alongside his father and extended family. By the age of 12, he was exploring electric guitar and punk rock, and at 15, a thrift-store accordion sparked a lifelong fascination with melody, texture, and inventive instrumentation.

By the age of 18, Kalei was leading a 12-piece brass band on tours across the United States. Since then, he has performed with more than twenty bands spanning folk, brass, rock, punk, experimental, and traditional Hawaiian music, gaining experience that honed his adaptability, improvisational skill, and collaborative instincts. In 2012, he began scoring theater with The Imaginists collective, live composing for The Ratcatcher with The Crux and releasing an album of the production’s music. In 2013, he founded his own band, Oddjob Ensemble, to showcase his original compositions and apprenticed at Accordion Apocalypse Repair Shop under master repairer Skyler Fell, deepening his knowledge of the mechanics and character of instruments.

Kalei’s compositional and performance work continued to expand with The Traveling Spectacular circus-vaudeville show (2016), solo scoring Magic Circle Cycle with The Imaginists on 10+ instruments (2017), and serving as Musical Co-Director for Flynn Creek Circus on a four-month tent-circus tour (2019). Immersed in New Orleans’ vibrant music scene from 2018, he absorbed its improvisational culture, before returning home to Hawai‘i in 2020 to reconnect with traditional Hawaiian music, steel guitar, slack key, and conservation efforts. A collaborator once described him as “a Swiss-army-knife musician,” a fitting testament to his adaptability, breadth, and creativity.

Today, Kalei brings all of these experiences to film scoring, theater, and live performance. His music blends cultural grounding, technical mastery, and imaginative breadth, capable of supporting narrative with nuance, tension, or cinematic sweep. Whether composing for orchestra, accordion, or an entire ensemble, Kalei creates sound worlds that are emotionally resonant, inventive, and uniquely alive.