strictly my opinion (extended rant)

Some folks are of the opinion they can do whatever they want to do and call it Taiko. Play any rhythms, use any forms, do whatever they want…and it’s Taiko.

Sure. I can sit down at a piano and play any random notes I want and call it music. Or sit down with a set of congas and call it Latin percussion, or sit down with a djembe or a set of tablas or a changgo…

There. There’s a good example I can expound upon. I can’t whap out a smattering of rhythms on a changgo and easily say I’m playing Samul Nori…or adding to that particular genre of music…or perpetuating the tradition of that particular form of music in any way shape or form. I know a smattering about Samul Nori and the culture surrounding it and the culture it comes from, and someone who really plays has shown me how to  play a few rhythms, and sometimes I eat kalbi and kim chee and I know how to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in Korean…which is not even the level of…wait…that’s me about to say something catty…I’ll cease and desist.

Maybe it’s a bad example. The changgo is a difficult instrument to play, so what about the Puk? The word ‘puk’ like the word ‘taiko’ is a generic word for drum. The rudimentary rhythms are somewhat easier to play, but I can’t just sit down with a Puk and say I am a certified P’ungmul Nori drummer, either. Certifiable, maybe…and the folks who really know how to play them do some pretty slick, cool things with them.
The equanimitable me says: Ok…but contemporary Taiko has some of its roots in Jazz improvisation. So it’s Jazz and Jazz is about freedom and creativity. So that’s why it gets to be whatever it is I want it to be, because mostly no one has to learn how to actually play  an instrument they intend to use before they start to play Jazz…right?

Some kazoo player somewhere in the world is having a huge laugh at my expense right now.

I couldn’t just pick up a trumpet or a sax or sit down at a drum kit and do whatever I want and say it’s Jazz…or maybe I can define my own reality and say it is whatever I want it to be…but to what end and at what cost?

It’s easier with dance.  I can basically move my body with a beat and even get it to move in a semi-coordinated fashion, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am any sort of a real dancer. Yes, I love dance. Yes, on some level any time I move for the purpose of expressing myself in a non-utilitarian sort of way is dancing…but I am not a dancer the way someone who has put time and effort into studying any sort of organized system of expressive body movement is a dancer.

Ok, but there’s folk music and dance…people coming together and creating songs and dances to express themselves from the heart, to entertain themselves, to have fun and so on. So maybe that’s the best argument. You’re carrying on a folk tradition.

Whose?

Ok…or maybe you’re creating a new folk tradition…but then…does that make it Taiko drumming?

Taiko is so accessible, people often take its cultural roots for granted, and there’s this romanticized notion of playing and performing that places the drums in some other category rather than being musical instruments the same way one might see a snare drum or even, say…a guitar…and since it’s such a modern art form, a lot of what defines it all as an art form is more readily open to…interpretation. It is an instrument used in Japanese traditional folk music and folk festivals which evolved over time. So it’s a folk instrument…and that supposedly makes it ok to take the instrument and do whatever I want, however I want and call it Taiko. We are, after all, artists, and we are limited to a certain extent only by our imaginations and the physical limitations imposed by the shape and style of the instruments themselves. The argument could be made that at the very least we have the common denominator of using the Japanese-style taiko drum as an instrument so it is perpetuating the use of that certain type of drum, and if it had to be categorized somewhere, it would fall under the greater scope and spectrum of taiko…more than, say, afro-cuban.

How did we get here? (and this is by no means a scholarly approach to this subject…this is a pseudo-scholarly, biased and objective rant)

There is a Haniwa figure that was unearthed in Gunma Prefecture (from the 7-9th C) that is considered to be the oldest depiction of any sort of percussion playing in Japan. It appears to show a guy with a cord-bound wedge-tightened hip hand drum played with both a stick and his hand in a style very similar to some classical changgo playing and some styles of drumming found in China.

While it is possible some of the instruments in Japan are entirely indigenous, the approach of many museum curators, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists has been to look at where the different styles of instruments may have originated. This points us toward India for origins of the tsuzumi and to an area somewhere around the Black Sea for origins of the byou-uchi (tacked head) nagado (long-bodied) miya-daiko (shrine drums).

In villages all over Japan there are shrines and temples. In these shrines and temples there are often drums played to accompany prayers and chanting, a job often taken up by villagers, themselves. In these villages people often used drums in a utilitarian fashion, to call people together, to send out a warning, to coordinate work efforts, to scare pests away from crops, and of course to party…to accompany singing and dancing…all leading back to our Haniwa friend, “Man beating the Taiko.”

Someone had to have created or at least decided upon what rhythms would be used, when and how. Some were derived from other sources. Over time they became traditional…handed down from one layperson shrine attendant to another, one monk to another, one soldier to another, one farmer to another, one accompanist to another…and more uniquely Japanese (especially if you figure some rhythms came with the people who were potentially bringing the instruments in from other places).

Of all the religious rites and other activities, about 14 festivals and a smattering of folk songs throughout Japan ended up having more taiko-centric, distinctly recognizable styles. The roots are usually traceable from about 200 to upwards of 1200 years or so ago.

In the mid to late 40′s Daihachi Oguchi is in Suwa, where the Onbashira festival has been happening for about the last 1200 years. He was given some old gakufu that no one else could read or understand. He adapted rhythms from the notation and began to play the pieces, arranging them in a modern fashion. He broke up the rhythms and had different people play different parts, he put drums together in sets like in a western kit drum set. He did improvisation in between sets of fixed patterns. They played the drums during festival times and then they played them at other times.

Poof. Kumi-daiko is born. Lots of other folks in the Hokuriku region see what he is doing and they start doing it, too. They get drums together, they draw from their own traditional festival music and folk music…but then this is all within the context of most people having grown up hearing these rhythms their whole lives within distinct cultural and often religious contexts.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo there are these 4 guys who play Taiko for the local festivals (ohayashi and o-bon). Two of them also play traditional percussion instruments to the point of obtaining formalized training and professional names. They also decide they would like to play more seriously and more often (one of them, ostensibly, with the hope to look cool and meet more girls). They go on to compose music, based on the minyo drumming, shitamachi Oedo-bayashi and the traditional Gagaku and Bugaku they’ve been formally trained in, and they go on to become the first professional group because they get hired by NHK to play for different things and then get hired out to play at different events.

Both Osuwa-daiko and Sukeroku-daiko end up more or less formalizing their styles. Over time they make practical and stylistic decisions to make what they are doing more distinctive. They start to go around and teach other people, or other people come to them…and some people just see them and copy them, or get a video and copy them.

Along comes Den-san. He spends most of his time spurning modern industrialism and spends a lot of time walking all over Japan on foot. He hooks up with the communal artists of Warabi-za who initially are focused on traditional Russian folk music and dance, but then decide they want to focus on and preserve traditional Japanese folk music and dance. Den-san continues on his own path, drawing a group of people together on Sado Island where they take the name Ondekoza. They bring in teachers, they travel to the festivals, they train with different festival groups, they study other traditional Japanese instruments. Some of them are talented enough to play and do some things by ear, but they take traditional lessons with artists and teachers who do classical dance or play the shakuhachi or the nohkan…and they train their asses off…and they try to create something that exemplifies the spirit and culture of Japan and what it means to be Japanese…and then they start touring internationally…problems ensue…the group splits and Kodo emerges and then Kodo becomes so famous some people think it’s all called Kodo drumming. These groups also go around and perform and teach workshops and some people go to study with them…and some just buy the videos.

In North America, Tanaka-Sensei starts SFTD in San Francisco…and he brings over Osuwa and Sukeroku-based styles, influenced in part by a smattering of Gojinjo-daiko and his life experiences as both a semi-pro ball player and Karateka…and over time develops his own more unique style and pieces. Meanwhile Kinnara folks in L.A. were also deciding they didn’t want to just do Bon-dance drumming once a year and they were getting together and playing the drums and improvising and creating North American Buddhist Taiko which was carried forward by groups like San Jose and Soh Daiko…although…their founding members often studied and sometimes performed (or even just messed around while hanging out with) with groups like Kinnara and SFTD and Ondekoza and Kodo…and most of them were Japanese-American (or Canadian) and buddhist…so…within a definite (still related to Japanese) cultural context. Oftentimes people started playing taiko with the specific desire to explore and experience a part of their own cultural heritage as well as to express themselves as contemporary artists.

And it’s all sooooo coooool! And it’s relatively easy. Anyone with hands and basic physical ability can pick up sticks and beat the drums. It’s all very natural and so very primal and human…and so that’s taiko, right? I get a taiko drum and a pair of sticks and I hit the drum and that’s taiko. That’s all I need.

Well…not quite. It’s percussion, sure. It’s expression, sure. Is it Taiko?

The ‘traditions’ of contemporary Taiko don’t go back very far…50-60 years…but those original groups and especially the pieces they played mostly carry forward festival and cultural traditions that go back hundreds if not thousands of years.

Yes there are more modern compositions and pieces and yes those pieces draw from a multidisciplinary array of art forms and different musical traditions. Innovation is good, sure, but what are you creating if you don’t have a firm foundation in the roots of the thing you are trying to be innovative in? Is it enough to copy a videotape? Is it enough to see one cool concert of people from Japan and then find drum-building instructions online and build a drum and then just do whatever you want to do with it? Is that Taiko? To a certain extent, I am also of the opinion that the distinctiveness of Taiko is also at a bit of a risk of being homgenized to the point where it is just more of the hodge-podge of world music…that is only definable as sort of non-western. And it’s all cool, too. I like world music. But a lot of it, more and more, sounds exactly the same to me. Often fun to listen to, but…without a lot of really deep meaning for me.

Not that everything has to have deep meaning, either…but sometimes it’s nice if it is there. Some connection to something older…bigger…whatever.

I can remember seeing a bit of art made on a xerox machine. It was a word or perhaps even just a letter, blown up and copied several thousand times until it had lost its recognizable form. Yes it was expressive. Yes it was creative. Yes…it was cool…to me. I liked it. But it was unrecognizable as the thing it had once been and so far removed from its origins as to be something entirely new…and not…language. It was art. It was something else.

So why call it Taiko? A lot of what is happening with Taiko drums is not necessarily kumi-daiko or anywhere near close to wadaiko anymore. In some regards it’s world music or even performance art…but to me it’s just not Taiko.

No…you don’t have to be Japanese to play taiko or be a taiko drummer. I’m not Japanese. I’m not even 100% J/A, though I grew up culturally J/A, and in some respects I’m somewhat culturally Japanese, given my own personal character and the amount of time I have spent living and training there.

Many of my students aren’t asian. All of them, however, have a certain interest in and respect for Japanese culture and art. Aside from pursuing Taiko as something really cool and fun, they also do it because they want to experience this culture…learning about and from its traditions.

There are aesthetic values that go along with the kata and the rhythms and pieces. Yes, there is a place for innovation from within the styles and traditions…but there is a point, especially when the artist has a limited or even no foundation from within those roots, that what is being created is something else…not Taiko…just something else…some other performance art with a drum.

OOh…and I used the word art. Some people are under the impression that calling taiko a type of ‘ART’ is a bad thing, implying that it’s some exclusive thing and there can only be certain ways of doing it, and who the hell am I to try and define what anyone else is attempting to do!? (that’s another rant, actually, in which I blather about folks just putting out their ‘sensei’ shingle because they are ‘teaching’ taiko)

People want it to be accessible. People want it to be something they can participate in and experience. People want it to be something they can do…and when they discover it’s not so easy and when they discover it’s something beyond their own realm of understanding, they want it to be more about who they are and what they understand. They want to do it their own way…but then…what is it they’re doing? What are they accomplishing? What are they saying?

At a certain point it becomes homogenous glop. A copy of a copy of a copy, totally out of context, and totally separate from its original purposes and meaning. That glop can be a cool form of expression in its own right.

What do you want to create?