Great Lakes Taiko Center

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Thursday

18Feb2010

Raion Taiko in Concert, This Saturday (Feb 20)

Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 08:24PM

February 20th has nearly arrived. What's so important about February 20th? We are playing a major concert at Marshall Middle School, in Marshall, MI. The organizers are teachers at the school who are in charge of an exchange program between their school and a junior high in Shiga, Japan. They contacted me ... gosh ... I feel like it was almost a year ago, to see if we'd be interested in doing a fundraising concert for their students. Although we were still in Japan at the time and the only members of our group were me and my wife, I said we'd do it. Now there are five of us and our new members, Tom, Eileen and Larry, have worked hard to learn new music, as well as teach us a few new songs.

Last weekend we rented a local auditorium to do a run through on our own, with costumes and everything. (see the picture above) and now, we're ready to go. Friday night we'll pack up our drums and after Saturday morning taiko class, we'll head on over to Marshall for the concert.

We even got a write up in the Battle Creek Enquirer today:

If you're interested in coming out to see us, please take a look at the information on our Taiko Performances page.

We hope to see a lot of people there.

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Friday

29Jan2010

Taiko Classes and More Pictures

Friday, January 29, 2010 at 10:06PM

There are a few blogs I check every once in a while and when they fail to update them at least once a week, I begin to get frustrated. One of them, which promises to update every Monday, Wednesday and Friday has not updated for at least three weeks. I am on the verge of not checking it anymore because I wonder if it will ever update.

It has served as a reminder, though, that I do not update our own blog nearly as often as I should. Even if it is just to pass on information, I believe it is considerate to try to update it on a regular basis.

More Pictures

In my last post, I wrote about our performance at the Mochitsuki event at the Center for Japanese Studies (U of M) and posted a few pictures. I finally got the rest of the pictures from my dad and have added some of the better ones to our photo album. Be sure to check them out. Here is one to get you started ...

In other news, we began preliminary taiko classes on January 18th. So far we have had a good response and the two adult classes grew in number from week one to week two. We are now approaching capacity for both of them. If you have been considering joining, don't wait too long, as they may fill up.

We were very honored to host a special guest on our very first day of lessons. In attendance was Sumiyo Asano of Asano Taiko. It was exciting to have her there as we made these first steps to begin sharing the taiko drumming we learned at Asano Taiko over the past few years in Michigan. Thank you for your visit, Sumiyo-san. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Sumiyo-san is also responsible for one of the blogs on the Asano Taiko website. She also wrote about her visit, which you can read about and see pictures here: Asano Tsushin.

One change in classes to note, especially if you are interested in the Monday evening classes. We found that our planned starting times were too early for children getting out of school and adults getting off of work, so we have moved the starting times back slightly. The new times are as follows:

Mondays

5:00 - 6:00 PM Children's class

6:00 - 7:30 PM Adult class

We hope that this is more convenient and will allow more people to attend the classes.

Until next time (hopefully, it won't be too long)...

Brian

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Tuesday

12Jan2010

Mochi Tsuki at Univ. of Michigan and Performance at Northville High School

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 06:44PM

This was an exhausting weekend. We had events to play for on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. All of them went well. It was really exciting to finally get our drums out of the studio and share taiko with audiences in Ann Arbor and Northville.

On Saturday we were invited to perform at the annual Mochi Tsuki event hosted by the Center for Japanese Studies at University of Michigan. We played intermittently over an hour and a half in the lobby of the School of Social work. We arrived around 10:30 or so to unload and do a sound check. As I just mentioned, the event space was a lobby and it had a low ceiling, not really ideal for taiko drumming. You see, the sound has no where to go except out, and Asano taiko drums are probably some of the loudest around. We unloaded, set up and played through a couple songs. After playing a bit, worried faces began to appear on some of the organizers, volunteers, and on our own as well. Would it be too loud? It sure seemed like it.

We began to discuss alternatives in case the sound was too overbearing. We decided to cut a couple songs, hold back on the volume, take longer breaks between the songs and spend more time talking about the drums and taiko culture.

Our time to perform arrived. We got set up for our first number and I introduced our group, warning the audience that it might be a bit loud. Cautiously we began to play. We held back at least 50% and we cut the song a little bit short, but it didn’t seem nearly as loud as it had in the morning. All of the guests in the lobby seemed to be absorbing a lot of the sound. We reached the end of the song and received a healthy round of applause and smiling faces from the audience.

Maybe we can turn it up a notch… “Was it too loud?” we asked. “No, give us more!” was the response. We continued with our program, giving a little more each time, as long as the audience response was positive. We culminated our performance with a full volume version of Yatai Bayashi. By the time we were finished, there seemed to be smiles all around.

Almost 900 people attended the Mochi Tsuki event! We are really happy that we could share taiko drumming with so many people. I hope we will be invited back again next year.

A picture of me and my daughter playing taiko was posted at the Michigan Daily website. You can see it here

And there was an article about the Mochi Tsuki event on AnnArbor.com

Sunday was an audition for an event in May. I wonder if we were chosen....

Although we had our full five members for Saturday’s event, Monday’s event was during the day, so only Mayumi and I were able to perform.

We played a half hour concert at Northville High School for about 150 or so students. The response was very positive from the students and teachers. It was the first time, though, that Mayumi and I had performed 30 minutes straight, on our own, without a break. I ended up playing all three parts of Yatai Bayashi. It’s our own arrangement of the piece, so I started sitting style of playing, moved to shime taiko for the middle and ended on the Odaiko. I think it was about 10 minutes of strenuous playing. My arms felt like jello and my mouth was really dry by the time I finished, but I made it through.

I want to give a big thank you Northville High School for allowing us to share taiko with the students there, and especially to the World Language Department. The whole department made an effort to support us by attending this optional event with their students. One of the Spanish teachers even wrote up a quick blog about our performance at the High School. You can read it here

Now that we have finished our big performance weekend, we can relax a little. Wait! No we can’t, we are starting classes next Monday. We need to get ready for that! Interested in learning taiko? All the classes still have space. Check out our Taiko Classes page and drop us a line if you’re interested. (There may even be a special guest for the first Monday's classes!)

Finally some pictures from the weekend.

Before the Mochi Tsuki began, we thought we could draw some attention to the event by drumming out on the side walk. So we pulled out our Ojime daiko and two shime daiko onto the side walk in freezing cold temperatures (I think it was windy and in the teens.) We warmed ourselves up by playing Mushi Okuri a couple times through.

With four college guys to help us lift, it was pretty easy getting our Odaiko up on the stand.

Doing the sound check ...

View of us preparing for our first number from the audience...

More pictures from performances on our photo gallery page.

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Monday

28Dec2009

A New Year

Monday, December 28, 2009 at 10:23PM

2009 is coming to a close in just a few more days. I think I will remember this year as a transitional year for us. We made the move back to Michigan from Kanazawa, bringing with us our taiko drums. Much of the first half of the year was spent making preparations for that move. This fall we have kept ourselves busy with settling in and getting organized. It's been quite a year, with a fair amount of uncertainties, but nearly the same amount of excitement about all that we hope to accomplish in the coming year.

Since we returned in the fall we have had a few small performances, given a few group lessons, help support a group in Detroit get a taiko program off the ground, set up a studio, held an open house and expanded the members of Raion Taiko from two to five! (We'll have to introduce them soon.)

So far 2010 looks to be an exciting and promising one. We are on track to start a couple classes at the end of January. We just set up a page with information about when and what type of classes we will be offering. Please take a look at the Taiko Classes page for more information. If you are interested in enrolling, be sure to send us an email to let us know (raion.taiko@gmail.com).

There are also several performances coming up for Raion Taiko. We have confirmed performances in January, February, March, June and several more in the works. The January and February performance details are posted on our Performances page and the others will be put up as details are worked out. Please stop by and check out the dates and if we're performing in your neck of the woods, we would love to have you come out and see us.

Wondering what you might see if you come out? Here is a little clip from our last practice. We still have a lot of work to do and we haven't even made all the stands that we require for certain songs, but that's alright. Just remember, these are works in progress.

"Why the towels?" you ask? Of course, it is to cut down on the sound. Good for our eardrums and the neighbors. Still, I hope we won't always have to play with towels on the drums.

Happy New Year everyone! See you in 2010!

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