FROM THE MOMENT Seiichi Tanaka answered the phone in his San Francisco home, the musician's pet parrot chirped incessantly in the background, quite as if he were the one being interviewed. Until, that is, I asked the man known as the Father of American Taiko about his supposed reputation as a strict, demanding teacher. The bird fell strangely silent.
Women are tapping into the
By Scott Vogel
empowering art of taiko, adding
more beauty to the beat
Star-Bulletin"Now I am soft, but I used to be difficult," admitted Tanaka, who founded North America's first taiko ensemble, San Francisco Taiko Dojo, in 1968. And now, as he prepares to bring his troupe to tomorrow's Hawaii International Taiko Festival, Tanaka can take at least partial credit for the more than 150 taiko groups actively performing in the United States and Canada. The explosion of interest in this ancient art is remarkable, as momentous in its own way as, well, the beating of a barrel-sized odaiko drum.
It may well be true that the taiko success story might never have happened without Tanaka and the drill-sergeant approach he favored a few decades ago. (Rumor has it that warm-up sessions once included 400 push-ups.) Still, are his bellicose days really behind him, I wondered?
Concert time: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow Hawaii International Taiko Festival
Place: Neal Blaisdell Concert Hall
Call: 526-4400
Cost: $19-$29; workshop fees are $15-$25
Pause.
"Hard work, I believe, is beautiful," he said at last, unapologetically. "It takes a lot of practice. Blood on the stick is a good sign."
Another, uh, good sign is the trio of ensembles that this year's festival will unite. Tanaka's Taiko Dojo will be joined by Okinawa's Zampa Ufujishi Daiko, an energetic group of young drummers, and Honolulu's own Kenny Endo Taiko Ensemble. Endo in particular has become a bonafide star in the taiko firmament, celebrity drummers being one more sign of taiko's growing mass appeal. Revered in both Japan and the United States, Endo has encouraged the music's evolution, often pairing the drums with Western instruments and music. This spring, for instance, Endo will perform as a guest soloist with the Hong Kong Philharmonic in a concerto for taiko and symphony. He still finds taiko an "eternal challenge," as much a fascination as it was in 1973, the first time he saw Tanaka's Taiko Dojo perform and was immediately hooked.
Even among its greatest practitioners, the art form's appeal is difficult to put into words. Most agree, however, that this particular form of drumming, born on the battlefield and employed for purposes as various as shoo-ing insects and flood warning, is as mentally rewarding as it is physically demanding.
"It is a very simple, ancient instrument, but there's so much to it," said Endo. "Anyone can pick up a stick and make sound, but to make it an art requires years." In its higher forms, he said, taiko becomes much more than music. Like opera, it can be a kind of total art form, both a visual and aural treat. At the same time, taiko players have accompanied instruments as various as the saxophone and the marimba, provided the soundtrack for films as different as "Return of the Jedi" and "Apocalypse Now," and invited dancing as different as jazz and hula.But as anyone knows who has watched the pleasure a baby takes in hitting a bowl with a wooden spoon, drumming alone is often enough. The joy we take in percussion starts at the very beginning and is as much a part of human nature as breathing.
"You can express your identity through drumming," said Tanaka, of taiko's primal quality. "Drumming goes to the human being's roots, the heartbeat."
Expressing their identity through taiko in ever-greater numbers is a group that would never have banged the drums in days of yore: women. In fact, according to Endo, the gentler sex now accounts for 60 percent of the taiko population in the United States; even in more traditional Japan, women drummers now outnumber men. For some clues as to why this might be, Kenny Endo passed the phone to his wife, Chizuko, herself an accomplished player.
"Taiko is very fluid and graceful and powerful," she said. "It fits in very well with today's modern women." If "fluid" and "graceful" are not the first words that come to mind when you think of a 6-foot diameter drum, you're not alone. I think of "awesome," both in terms of the rafter-rattling sound it produces and the strength required to produce that sound. And yet, according to Chizuko Endo, a great many women can beat the big drum with the best of them.
Yuumi Maeda and Mari Ueno are two such women traveling to this weekend's festival. Both San Franciscans, each is a member of what Seiichi Tanaka calls his "Rising Star Dream Team," and neither is a stranger to baseball bat-sized drumsticks.
"I've played them during practices," said Maeda of the odaiko, though "in performance the bigger guys usually play them."Just 17 years old, Maeda has played taiko for 11 years. Her enthusiasm remains unbounded, especially for someone who took up the sticks simply because taiko was "something really different." Most girls start taiko for the exercise, she said, but stay for the friendship and camaraderie that an ensemble provides. One of those friends is Ueno, 21, for whom the initial attraction of taiko was the chance to "scream, yell and do other kinds of stuff that I didn't usually get to do."
Watch for Ueno's odaiko solo during tomorrow's concert. The college student, who transfers to the University of California-Davis this fall, has suffered many blisters and aches on the way to this moment, and it's one that she both anticipates and fears. Ueno is a shy person by nature; she believes that taiko gave her a self-confidence that would have been unthinkable otherwise. Drumming, it seems, can be a kind of alchemy.
"You also learn discipline," she noted. Ah yes, discipline. Which leads us back to the formerly fearsome Tanaka. Has her teacher indeed gone soft? And what about those push-ups?
"We do two sets of 40 push-ups and 40 sit-ups," said Ueno of pre-performance warm-ups. Maeda added that Tanaka also insists on a two-mile run. Still, both women confirmed that he can be quite a nice guy, even as they agree that their legendary mentor's ways can be exhausting.
"But that's what got him this far," said Ueno, a comment on Tanaka, certainly, but perhaps also on all of American taiko.
"If he didn't demand as much, we wouldn't be as good."
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