The Waitiki Festival of Music & Cocktail in Harvard Sq. Sunday

There’s nothing like a little tiki music and drink to cap off an early spring weekend.

This Sunday, head to Russell House in Harvard Square for the Waitiki Festival of Music & Cocktail from 6-10 p.m. The fest, an ode to Hawaiian culture, is fresh off a December stint at the famed California tiki joint Don The Beachcomber, where it drew raves and nods from publications like the L.A. Times and the Huffington Post.

Expect drinks strong enough to make you forget winter, live music from the Waitiki exotica band, and the DJ sounds of Jack Fetterman, Gina of the Jungle, and Brother Cleve.

The event is being organized by Opus Affair, a social group for young area professionals interested in the fine arts, and Waitiki International, a Boston-based collective that promotes the revitalization of mid-century tiki pop culture and exotica music.

Randy Wong and Abe Lagrimas Jr. - both Hawaiian natives who moved to Boston for school - started Waitiki in 2003. Their initial interest was exposing Bostonians to the sounds of tiki.

“Boston is a hub for world music,” Wong, who’s on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, said this week. “There are a lot of different cultures represented, but you don’t often hear about the Pacific Rim. Being from Hawaii, I’ve got to represent my people, you know?”

While the group was initially focused solely on tunes, it soon expanded to include drinks.

“In the last three or four years, there’s been a huge amount of attention paid to tiki cocktails because of the rise of craft cocktails,” said Wong, who in his free time serves as a bar consultant at Clio Restaurant in the Eliot Hotel. “The techniques that go into creating the recipes are actually very similar. Tiki drinks are infamously known for having a lot of ingredients, layers. And with the craft cocktail movement, you’re talking a lot about flavor profiles, dimensionality, housemade syrups and ingredients. A lot of that same effort goes into tiki cocktails.”

Wong said the tiki drinks of today - which you can find, expertly crafted, at such upscale area joints as Clio, Drink, Russell House and Eastern Standard - are different from the watered down, sweet beverages popular in the ’70s and ’80s.

“That’s when you started to get the bastardization of the Mai Tai,” Wong lamented.

Though they’re trendy, you don’t need to go to a fancy spot just to get a good, authentic tiki drink in Boston. Wong recommends a stop at Shangri La on Cambridge Street, where the guy behind the bar once worked at the original Trader Vic’s outpost.

So why the resurgence in all things tiki now?

“What drove tiki in the ’50s and ’60s?” Wong asked. “Escapism. They wanted to get away from America and get into other lands. Now it’s the same thing. We’ve been in a recession. We’ve been hearing about these wars and we want to get out of them. The way to do that is to have fun.”

So this festival is scratching an itch for an old-fashioned good time. Plus, a local Sunday evening soiree is a lot cheaper than a plane ticket.

“We’re better than some tropical paradise,” Wong laughed.

Can’t make the shindig Sunday? No problem. At the end of this post you’ll find recipes for the tiki drinks bartender Aaron Butler will be mixing at the Russell House event. Try them at home and share your favorite tiki recipes with a comment below.

And you can plan on attending similar festivals in the future. “This one at Russell House is the first of probably four this year,” Wong said.

If you do attend, there’s no cover charge, but organizers are suggesting attendees make a $20, tax-deductible donation for the musicians. If you RSVP early, you can count on swank swag bags and door prizes. Show up wearing an aloha-themed shirt and the hosts will hook you up with a vessel for tiki drinking, music downloads from Waitiki and copies of the comic book “Who Sweetened the Bitters of Okonkuluku?” while they last.

Koki’o Punch

2 oz. El Dorado 8 Year Old Rum
1 oz. hibiscus simple syrup
.75 oz. fresh lime juice
.5 oz. Batavia-Arrack
.5 oz. Velvet Falernum
2 dashes Bitterman’s Burlesque Bitters

Shake and strain over crushed ice.

Lokelani Cooler

2 oz. Montanya Platino Rum
.75 oz. fresh lemon juice
.75 oz. St. Germain
.5 oz. Rose Simple Syrup
.25 oz. Campari
Lemon Hart 151 Float

Shake and strain over crushed up. Float Lemon Hart 151 on top.