Drumming Japanese traditions
Taikoproject mixes music, storytelling
Some kids are forced to take piano lessons and others are pressured to try out for the football team.
Bryan Yamami was compelled to take up Taiko drumming.
“I was involved in all that American stuff – baseball and soccer,” Yamami says. “My parents thought Taiko would be a way for me to do something that was more attached to being a Japanese-American.”
Yamami admits he didn’t much like it at first.
“I certainly didn’t think it was going to take over the rest of my life,” he says.
Yet that’s exactly what it did.
At 33, Yamami is the frontman of one of the country’s most exciting and innovative Taiko drumming ensembles, Taikoproject.
Taikoproject performs Saturday at Arts United Center.
Taiko, which means “big drum” in Japanese, really came into its own as a performance art in the 1960s, Yamami says.
After years of trying to hide their heritage, Japanese-Americans began to embrace their cultural history in various ways. One of those ways was Taiko.
“Taiko was one of the seeds of rebellion,” Yamami says. “It was a way for people to assert their Japanese identities.”
Of course, Yamami’s version of Taiko doesn’t just involve ensemble drumming.
Taikoproject incorporates drumming with storytelling, hip-hop choreography, multimedia elements and pop music.
Since its founding in 2000, Taikoproject won first place in the adult group category at the 2005 Tokyo International Taiko Contest and was featured in a medley of nominated songs at the 2009 Academy Awards ceremony.
“Robert Downey Jr. was watching us from one side of the stage and Christopher Walken was watching from the other,” Yamami says of the latter milestone.
Yamami likens a Taikoproject performance to a roller-coaster ride.
“I think people will enjoy the power and musicality of what we do,” he says. “And they will learn where Taiko came from.”
Innovators of any kind are not always liked by traditionalists, and Yamami says groups like Taikoproject are no exception.
Still, Yamami says, not a lot of people have found much to object to in Taikoproject’s forceful artistic farragoes.
The group will release its first CD this summer, and Yamami says he is always “trying to explore where to take this art form.”
Yamami has clearly come a long way from his adolescent disdain for Taiko and yet sometimes those days don’t seem so far removed after all.
One of Yamami’s current colleagues was one of his teachers more than two decades ago.
Yamami asked him what he was like back then.
“He said I was a punk,” Yamami says. “ ‘A 9-year-old kid with attitude.’ ”
Charles Shepard, executive director of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, says he and his staff “really pulled out all the stops” for this year’s Contemporary Realism Biennial.