Taiko

It's not every day that one decides to study to new art form. Sometimes it's an unexpected turn of events, and not "Gee, I always wanted to make pottery/poetry/paintings/paper/performance art." This one kind of snuck up on me.

I've been going to drum circles here and there for a year or so and having a great time just improvising. I'm not a "natural" musician, and I've never picked up an instrument quickly the way some people learn to play a guitar, for example, but I can usually keep time and follow a rhythm. I can't tell you what makes a rumba different from a samba or how a Cuban rhythm is different from a Jamaican rhythm. And it's been a long time since I was hanging with the bad boys in the drum section of the Burger Junior High School band - a long time. Color me 'novice'.

So I showed up at the once-a-month drum circles at the percussion store on High Street and had a grand time playing along with some experienced drummers. then, on a lark, I went to a taiko class that Eric "the Fish" Paden teaches at Capital University. I had never heard of taiko, but it sounded exotic and interesting when I saw it listed on an events calendar.

They have a lot of amazing instruments in the little old brick building nextdoor to the music department, and Eric clearly knows his stuff. To my surprise, this Japanese drumming form is all about movement and energy, in many ways resembling taiji, which I took up on another whim many moons ago.

We started with warmup exercises and learned the proper stance, and then we learned to shift our weight and move the arms and sticks in a circular path. So a lot of this is feeling very familiar. We tried to learn the Japanese words that punctuate a piece, and it's all very aural, so the words matter. Some of the beats coincide with steps and big, expansive gestures. In short, it was possible to graft parts of this whole new tree of information onto the rootstock of the existing body of information I brought with me, so even some fairly esoteric things started to make sense.

Ah, but there was a problem. I showed up in the first place at the taiko class only because there was a break between summer and fall sessions of my Monday night taiji classes at the local rec center. The start of fall quarter presented a schedule conflict, an ethical dilemma, and gnashing of teeth. I was committed to the taiji class, under contract, and a sufficient number of people signed up and paid their money to take it. So I would defer my continued taiko.

But wait! One of my new taiji students came to class exhausted from her dialysis earlier in the day and could barely make it through the hour. When I suggested that we change the meeting time from Monday to Tuesday, she and her husband were more than willing. The other students - also a married couple - indicated their willingness, and after a week of adjustment, we are making a successful transition to the new day and time, which is a miracle with most people's busy schedules.

Although I had missed a couple of taiko classes in the meantime, I was delighted to return, and the class welcomed me back. The other, more experienced, students are interesting people, too. A young man and his Japanese-American daughter; an older woman from Israel whose college-age daughter is spending the year in Japan; a mother and her daughter who attends Columbus School for Girls.

Can I keep up with them and learn the taiko form? Time will tell, but I'll be a fish out of water if I don't acquire the habit of practicing. That - and a poor memory, as well as lack of musical talent - is the present challenge.