Six-thirty on a Friday evening in early September, and the grass in front of the bandstand at Kalama Park is already filling in with blankets and low-back chairs. Kids drift toward the playground between sets. Someone's dog is asleep under a beach towel. Ron Kuala'au is playing the third and final free Sunset Tunes show the County of Maui's Department of Parks and Recreation booked for this year, and the crowd knows exactly when to show up because the county put the dates on its website months ago.
What most of that crowd did not know, unless they also follow the Kihei Community Association, is that the night before, on September 3, the U.S. Pacific Fleet Rock Band played the same bandstand for free at 4:30 p.m. That show never showed up on the county's own Sunset Tunes page. It surfaced on gokihei.org, the Kihei Community Association's news feed, tagged explicitly as not a KCA event but shared for community awareness. Same stage, same DPR involvement behind the scenes, two completely different places you'd have had to look to know it was happening.
That's the actual story of Kalama Park in 2026. It isn't short on programming. It's short on a single source of truth for that programming, and if you live in Kihei and treat one calendar as the whole picture, you will keep missing things that happen ten minutes from your front door.
What the official calendar covers, and what it doesn't
The 2026 Sunset Tunes series was three Fridays: August 21, August 28, and September 4, all 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Kalama Park bandstand. Kason Gomes opened it. Ikaika Blackburn and Sean Parks played the second date. Ron Kuala'au closed it out on September 4. The county's own notice asked attendees to bring blankets, low-back chairs, and snacks, and was clear that there would be no alcohol, smoking, or drugs at the venue. Questions went to the DPR Permits Office at (808) 270-7389.
That's a clean, three-date arc, and if you searched "Kalama Park events" this summer, it's what you'd have found. But it wasn't the full extent of what happened on that stage. The Pacific Fleet Rock Band date landed in the gap between the second and third Sunset Tunes show, at a different time of day, under different sponsorship logic, and it never got folded into the county's own listing.
| Date | Event | Where it was announced |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 21, 2026 | Sunset Tunes, Kason Gomes | County of Maui DPR |
| Aug 28, 2026 | Sunset Tunes, Ikaika Blackburn & Sean Parks | County of Maui DPR |
| Sept 3, 2026 | U.S. Pacific Fleet Rock Band (free concert) | Kihei Community Association (gokihei.org) |
| Sept 4, 2026 | Sunset Tunes, Ron Kuala'au | County of Maui DPR |
If you only bookmarked one of those two sources, you missed a free show. That's not a knock on either organization. It's just how a public bandstand works when a military band, a county parks department, and a neighborhood association are all capable of putting something on the same stage without checking each other's calendars first.
The practical takeaway for anyone who lives near the park: follow both. The county's parks page (mauicounty.gov/parks) is where DPR posts its own booked series. The Kihei Community Association's news feed at gokihei.org is where things get flagged even when DPR isn't the one organizing them. Neither one is redundant with the other.
The bandstand is the smallest part of what's out there
Kalama Park itself runs about 36 acres along South Kihei Road, with a second access point off Piʻilani Highway, and the bandstand is really just one corner of it. The rest of the park is built for people who show up on non-concert nights too.
The skate park sits inside the same grounds and is built as a transition-oriented street course, meaning banks, quarter-pipes, roll-ins, and spines rather than a flat plaza layout. It also has a small concrete bowl designed to feel like backyard pool skating, plus a 9-foot vert ramp connected to a 24-foot mini ramp. That's a specific combination of features, not a generic "skate park" amenity, and it's why the park draws a different crowd on a Tuesday afternoon than it does on a Sunset Tunes Friday.
Beyond the skate park, the park layout includes tennis and basketball courts, athletic fields, a multipurpose field, picnic pavilions, and a shaded children's playground, all inside the same 36 acres that hold the bandstand. It's a working neighborhood park in the fullest sense: leagues use the fields, skaters use the ramps on their own schedule, and families use the picnic tables independent of whatever is or isn't booked on the gazebo that week.
The shoreline itself is a different animal from the programming. Kalama's beach frontage is rocky rather than sandy, which is exactly why the paved walkway at the park's south end connects toward Cove Park, the small, protected break just past the property line that's known as the easier spot to actually get in the water, particularly for people learning to surf. If your plan for the evening is sand between your toes, Kalama isn't it. If your plan is sunset, courts, and a walk that ends somewhere you can watch a lesson in the water, the two parks function as one continuous stretch.
What's across the street, and why the whale statue matters as a landmark
Directly across South Kihei Road from the park sits Kihei Kalama Village, a 3-acre shopping and dining cluster that locals have nicknamed "the Triangle." It holds roughly 48 retail shops and 14 bars and restaurants packed into a compact, mostly shaded footprint. If you've been told to meet someone "by the whale statue," that's the landmark businesses in the Village use to orient people, since South Shore Tiki Lounge lists its own address as sitting directly across from that statue and the park's playground.
South Shore Tiki Lounge runs live music from 4 to 6 p.m. daily, ahead of its DJ nights Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9 p.m. to midnight, and the bar is explicitly kid and dog friendly with lanai seating. That means on a night when the bandstand itself is quiet, there's still a live set happening across the street at a hour that works for people who'd rather not be out past 8 with kids in tow. The Village and the park aren't really two separate destinations. They function as one loop, and depending on what week it is, the more reliable live music might be on the Village side of the road rather than the county side.
The one habit worth building
None of this requires a subscription or an app. It requires checking two specific things on a rotating basis: the county parks page for anything DPR has officially booked at the bandstand, and the Kihei Community Association's news feed for anything that gets posted as community awareness rather than an official county event. The Pacific Fleet Rock Band show is proof that the second category is real and that it won't always show up in the first.
If you're the kind of Kihei resident who treats Kalama Park as background scenery rather than a place worth checking on, this is the season to change that. Sunset Tunes will likely return in some form next summer, the skate park's features aren't going anywhere, and the bandstand will keep hosting things that don't always make it onto the calendar you'd think to check first.
If you're weighing whether South Kihei Road living fits the way you actually spend your evenings, whether that's a bandstand within walking distance or a Triangle full of options across the street, Christian Slocum can walk you through what different pockets of Kihei offer beyond the listing photos. Reach out for a consultation or a home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
