The art & history of japanese drumming

This pack was recorded at the Kaoru Watanabe Taiko Center, a Japanese drumming studio in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with composer and musician, Kaoru Watanabe. Featuring several Japanese percussion instruments, it centers around taiko.

In Japanese, taiko literally means "drum," though the term has come to refer to the art of Japanese drumming in the West, also known as kumi-daiko. According the Stanford website, Centuries ago, taiko was used predominantly in the military arena. As it evolved, Japanese Buddhist and Shinto religions gradually began to take it on as a sacred instrument. Historically, it has existed in a multitude of other environments including agrarian, theater, and the imperial court.

The art of kumi-daiko, performance as an ensemble, originated post-war in Showa 26 in 1951. It was created by Daihachi Oguchi, a jazz drummer who serendipitously stumbled across an old piece of taiko music. Wondering why taiko were never played together, he broke with tradition by forming a taiko drum ensemble. More recently, taiko has enjoyed not only a resurgence of interest in Japan, where there are over 4,000 taiko ensembles, but also transplantation and evolution in North America.

Taiko emerged in the United States in the late 1960s. The first group, San Francisco Taiko Dojo, was formed in 1968 by Seiichi Tanaka, a postwar immigrant who studied taiko in Japan and brought the styles and teachings to the US. A year later, a few members of the Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles led by its minister Masao Kodani initiated another group called Kinnara Taiko. Introduction of the taiko continued to spread from there.

After graduating from Manhattan School of Music with a BA in jazz flute and saxophone, Kaoru Watanabe moved to Japan and joined the world-renowned taiko performing arts ensemble Kodo, the first non-Japanese to do so. He spent close to a decade performing with Kodo as well as acting as artistic director of their world music festival, Earth Celebration where he curated works with such esteemed guests as Zakir Hussain, Giovanni Hidalgo, Carlos Nunez, and Yosuke Yamashita.

As a passionate educator, Kaoru has taught courses at Princeton University, Wesleyan University, Colby and Dickinson Colleges and has been a faculty member at Tanglewood Music Festival and the Silk Road Project's Global Musician Workshop at DePauw University. Kaoru is an instructor for kaDON, an online Japanese flute and percussion resource presented by preeminent taiko maker Miyamoto Unosuke Shoten of Tokyo.

These sounds were recorded on AKG C414 overheads, Sm7, and Re20 microphones into an Apogee Element 88.