Taiko Conference!!

What a week!! I don't even know where to begin! Hope everyone made it home safe and sound from Los Angeles to all the points around the country (and the world) from whence we came. My dad developed a plan to get from LA to the SF Bay Area seamlessly. You leave at 4 in the morning and drive out of LA before the traffic starts up, and you get to the Bay Area just as the morning traffic is abating, and before the inland area gets a chance to really heat up. It was only 6:45 and my car thermometer was reading 80 degrees already. Driving back is one of the few times when I actually get to see the sun rise. There's this really beautiful place just after you get through the Grapevine and over the mountains and come into the flatflatflat interior. It's a broad plain bordered by mountains that is always beautiful no matter what season it is. In the spring it's a sea of green grass. Right now at the height of summer it's a golden yellow. By the time I got there, the sun had just peaked over the distant mountains, casting raisin-like shadows over the twisting face of the foothills. Lovely.

But that's not taiko at all! So on Monday (the 11th,--I've lost all sense of time right now), I started out the Summer Taiko Institute with a workshop by Shoji Kameda of the On Ensemble. Yeah, Shoji, sitting right there. He taught us to really listen to time. He is such a geek--the kind of geek that I can only aspire to be. He had his shiny silverMac Powerbook and his microphones and amplifiers and they were all hooked up to taiko. Then he recorded one of us playing and we sat there and analyzed how close the beats were to the metronome. I loved it!

Then for the afternoon session it was an Odaiko workshop with Tiffany Sensei of Sacramento Taiko. Man, can she play the odaiko. She showed us very basic techniques that I was so sorely lacking in. Just holding the bachi correctly and effectively is so important. She is funny and goofy in a similar way that I'm goofy. She'll just start jumping around playfully as she is explaining something. I really like that idea of playfulness. I think we sometimes take ourselves way too seriously when it comes to taiko.

Then the next day I had workshops with Michelle Fujii and Ann Ishimaru and Teresa Enrico of Portland Taiko. I so want to BE Michelle. She's graceful yet powerful. It's like she floats in mid air, yet she can still play the drums. Her background is in Japanese folk dance and she's doing some really innovative things with incorporating movement and dance with taiko. I have several pairs of left feet that I use when I'm trying to do movement or anything dancelike, but Michelle introduced some movements that I'd like to try out--maybe in a solo or something. Ann and Teresa showed us how we can all play together as a group without necessarily using verbal cues. They called the class "Taiko Telepathy" and I was pretty amazed at how well we all played together--beginners and old timers alike. They are excellent workshop leaders, and maybe I can try to incorporate some of the excercises and drills they used with us into some workshops with the beginners.

And on Wednesday I took the afternoon workshop with Tosha Sensei. He was a performing member of Oedo Sukeroku, the group that developed the slant stand style of playing taiko. I actually thought that the stands that we play that style on were called Sukeroku stands, but I found out that they're really called naname stands, although at E'ville we usually call them slant stands. I wonder if I can get people to call them naname? Anyhow, Tosha Sensei is really nice, but he has a slightly gruff Japanese-guy style that I know intimidated some people. I was intimidated too but I could just tell that he was a nice guy deep down. And funny too. Everything he taught us was exactly opposite of how we play at Emeryville so it was kind of awkward playing what he wanted me to do, but I think I got the idea. It's always good to learn things from different people.

On Friday, it was time for the Taiko Conference, where I met up with a few of my Emeryville Taiko classmates:



Then it was time to get down to business. The conference was set up so we took 2 workshops each on Friday and Saturday with time for concerts and shopping at the taiko marketplace. On Friday I took a workshop on shime tightening and a workshop on Hawaii Obon Taiko, both of which were really great. Now I have the courage to tighten my own shime (more on that later) and I'm going to teach the Obon rhythms to Emeryville. On Friday night they had a free taiko concert in the plaza that featured 10 groups! It was great to see so many different groups playing.



We were constantly surrounded by drums. Can you imagine spending a whole week just immersed in drums? It was like being in heaven!

On Saturday I started off with Elaine Fong's TaKeTiNa workshop, which incorporates movement, voice and rhythm--all at the same time! And then it was off to a discussion session. It was really hard to decide which session to sit in on since they all sounded good. I decided on a session on composition since I think that's what I would like to do in the future. Janet was one of the panelists, and I thought it would be interesting to see where she was coming from on that front. Later, it was off to a percussion workshop with Rachel Ebora of Portland Taiko. She was so hilarious! But she also really inspired me to try to incorporate more percussion into E'ville's reperatoire (spelling, I know).

After that I rushed back to the plaza to meet up with my family, since the plan was to meet up with them and have dinner before the big Taiko Jam concert. We went to nearby Olvera Street for dinner at La Luz del Dia, a restaurant my parents have been eating at since before they were even married. My mom says it hasn't changed a bit, except for a larger eating area. We even all of us took a picture atop and around the famous Olvera Street Burro. There's a long story about that burro--you'll have to look it up yourself sometime.

Then it was Taiko Jam! There were 4 groups and they were all amazing, but the kids of Zenshin Taiko totally stole the show. They have more genki in their tiniest tips of their little fingers than any one in that theater. They even stole the thunder of the infamous Taiko Project, which consists of all the major stars in the taiko world today. But everyone was impressed, including me and my family.

The next morning, it was time for the early morning taiko jam.

That's me and Keith jamming it up on the plaza. I don't know what the neighbors thought about all those taiko drummers making all that noise so early on a Sunday morning. But it was fun!

After the jam, it was time for a closing session and your last chance to buy good stuff from the taiko marketplace.

I know this blog entry was rushed, but if I don't get it all down now, I may never get this entry done. Taiko Conference was fun and totally worth it. Next conference is in 2007 in Seattle!