Odaiko workshop with Yoshikazu Fujimoto!

Last Thursday, through KASA, TAIKOPROJECT and Bombu members had the opportunity to take a workshop with Yoshikazu Fujimoto. Yoshikazu, one of the founders of Kodo, is the senior most performing member of Kodo. He is also the featured Odaiko player for the group so when I heard he was giving us a workshop on odaiko at our practice space (Higashi), I was super excited! Little did I know what kind of workout I was about to get.

To put it briefly, his workshop consisted of learning an Odaiko song through kuchishoga, air bachi, and then playing it on the drums. He taught us his style of playing and then we played... and played... and played. I'll only speak for myself, but I thought my arms were going to fall off. haha!

After the workshop, Yoko Fujimoto performed for us. She sang a lullaby from Japan. There's something about her amazing voice that really moves people. Then, Yoko and Yoshikazu sang a duet for us. Yoshikazu started off singing Kiyari and Yoko came in with Hachijou. They both have super powerful voices and to hear those songs live only 10 feet away from you was quite an experience. Then they did a more upbeat, festive song for us.

What's a taiko gathering without food and drinks! We stayed afterwards and ate yummy snacks. Throughout the workshop, I couldn't help but think how lucky we were to take a workshop. Recently, it's been TP that gives workshops (which we love to do) and we rarely taken any. So, when the opportunity comes, you can count me in!

Thanks Donna for setting this all up for us! Yay! I had so much fun and it makes me want to play Odaiko more!

I didn't get to take too many photos, but here's one!
Maz, Yoko, Yoshikazu, Bryan, me, and Courtney.

:)

TaikoProject goes back to school!!

UC Irvine to be exact. Home of Jodaiko and the alma mater to many of TP’s current cast members. This Memorial day weekend marked the 15th annual Intercollegiate Taiko Invitational where 14 schools from all over the country gathered together for a jam-packed weekend of fun, friends, food, and most importantly.. taiko.

It was a star-studded weekend with workshop leaders Kenny Endo, Kodo’s Yoshikazu & Yoko Fujimoto, Shasta Taiko’s Russel Baba & Jeanne Mercer, Portland Taiko’s Michelle Fujii, On Ensemble’s Kris Bergstrom and Maz Baba, San Jose Taiko, and Kinnara Taiko. TaikoProject had the honor of being among these taiko greats, leading two different workshops themed Sling Okedo and Syncopation.

And just when you think things couldn’t get more exciting, each day ended with a 2 hour concert emceed by Maz. Debuting this year was CSU Long Beach’s Umidaiko and Brown University’s Brown Gendo Taiko!

Congratulations to Jodaiko for a successful invitational! A huge kudos to Sylvia Gunde, Invitational Coordinator for all her hard work and dedication. I wish i had my own pictures to show instead of stealing them from facebook...

My favorite moment of the weekend?
The creative way that collegiate taiko spends their downtime: The Ninja Game. If you don’t know what it’s all about, ask any collegiate taiko player to fill you in.

The Windy City and some artsy stuff

TP traveled to Chicago to perform on May 9th for the opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing! Bryan and Jason made the long drive in the van with all the equipment. (Thanks guys!) The rest of us flew out on Thursday. Courtney, Kevin, Jenny, Emily, and I flew out of LA, while Kelsey made the flight from Seattle.

This was Jenny’s first time performing for TP, how exciting! Emily graciously took time out of her schedule (ie: skipped classes) to help us for this gig. Also, this was the first time several of us had the opportunity to perform with Kelsey. Good Stuff!

After arriving in Chicago, we checked into our hotel, The Palmer House® Hilton. We were only a short walk from the Art Institute, so we all checked out the stage we were going to perform on. Finally, we ate some grub at Miller’s Pub and called it a night.

Friday was a loooong day of rehearsal. In the morning, we brought all of our equipment to the stage so we could set everything up. We had a loading crew help us, which was nice because we needed to drag everything up the stairs. Once we had all the drums in place and did sound check, we had a chance to meet the members of Project Bandaloop, the group of dancers that would be performing to our music. These were no ordinary dancers though. They don't like dancing on floors... that's too boring. So instead they would be rappelling from the top of the newly constructed building and performing mid-air on the wall! This looked like a lot of fun and Emily really wished she could also hang 50 feet in the air on a little rope to try it!



When we had breaks from rehearsing, we would head back to our green room to take a load off. We were fed quite well here with a plentiful bounty of fruits, veggies, crackers, snacks, and juice along with our meals. They also had the world's greatest granola bar for breakfast! I'm a big granola bar fan, and these things were just stupendous! Unfortunately, the staff took them away before lunchtime so I only got to eat one... and I didn't even take a picture of it!

Before the end of the day, we had finalized our song/dance arrangement and needed to run a dress rehearsal. The girls were fitted in the morning for their custom outfits, which were red and delightfully shiny. The guys wore the oh-so-comfortable fundoshi. Our run through went well and we were finally done after being on site for over 12 hours.

Saturday was our performance day, but we had a few hours of free time, so we became tourists and walked around town. Kevin really had the urge to get high, so first we walked to the Sears Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the United States. A little factoid I learned was that it will be renamed to Willis Tower this year :( Well... at least we can say we were here when it was still Sears Tower. The elevator going up to the Skydeck was super smooth and fast. It took us to the 99th floor in about a minute and a few birds even gave us a brief history about the building. I was disappointed because usually it goes to the 103rd floor, but it was closed for renovation.



View from Sears Tower - Nice shot of Lake Michigan huh?


Great views in every direction! While I was commenting on the nice ocean view, Kevin gave me sort of a "you're an idiot" look. Apparently Chicago is not near an ocean... and the large body of water turned out to be Lake Michigan. Who would've known?

We also saw Buckingham Fountain and walked in Millennium Park where we saw a large wall fountain with faces that spit out water (artistic!), and my personal favorite, a large metal bean called Cloud Gate. It doesn't sound exciting, but not only was this the biggest bean I've ever seen, it was also mirror surfaced! Genius!



The face on the wall changes and sometimes spits out water! No joke..



Cloud Gate - The greatest Bean I've ever seen

After our sight seeing, we ate and got ready for the 10pm performance. This night just happened to be one of the coldest nights of our trip, so we ended up performing in 40 degree weather wearing very little clothing (almost nothing...) I guess that made for an exciting experience! Everything went well and the audience enjoyed it. Once we warmed up and packed our equipment, it was finally time to eat some Chicago pizza! We strategically waited until AFTER our performance to indulge in this food!


In front of Buckingham Fountain.

Chicago was an awesome city and we had a great trip! The only thing I regret was I didn't eat a Chicago-style hot dog! What was I thinking? Oh well, next time...

SB Show... and wine tasting the next day!

Friday morning, Bryan, Maz, Jen, Jason, Courtney, and I did a school show for about 1200 kids! They all came into the theater. I must say, I think it was the biggest school show I've ever done!

The rest of the cast drove up and met up with us at the theater... just in time for some lunch!
We had our sound checks and cue-to-cue rehearsal and then, it was time for the show!


This is how some of us get ready before a show...



Hair and makeup time!!



Ready!!

Show Time~! Yumi, Courtney, Jen, and me



Then, we did our show!! Sorry, no pics from the actual show... Thank you everyone who came out to see us!

The theater after the show.



Load out...





The next day, we woke up... and went wine tasting! We hired Captain Jack's Wine Tours to take us around to 4 places (Summerland Winery, Santa Barbara Winery, Live Culture, and Kalyra).

Wine tasting with 14 people! We had a lot of fun.





And then, we went home! :) What a fun weekend!

We're in Santa Barbara!

Bryan, Maz, Jen, Courtney, Jason, John, and I drove up to Santa Barbara to prep for our show, which will be tomorrow night. Chiemi came up with us, too! Scott met up with us at the theater and while the rest of us got lunch, Bryan, John, and Scott stayed to begin some of the tech work.
After lunch (pho!), we all started unpacking and finished all the spiking and went through tomorrow morning's school show before calling it a night.

Tomorrow night is the show! Come by if you're close by! I hear the show is almost SOLD OUT!

The rest of the cast will drive up tomorrow!


Time to sleep! Good night!!

Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival 4/19

So this past Sunday TP, Bombu, and Kitsune did a joint performance at the Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival. Yay! It was great to share the stage with the TP famiily...I think the last time was last year's Rhythmic Relations show.

Anyways, we got there around 12:30PM to unload, set, and change...in the ridiculously hot sun! Yes, if you haven't been around SoCal the last few days it was HOT!! but nonetheless everyone did a great job and delivered a high energy performance :-D

After the show, we packed up and took a group photo in front of the trailer (see over there <--)...it was still really hot! Some of us had to stay for another performance so we decided to get some food. I had shaved ice (which needed a bit more syrup) and chili rice! mmm yum!...it was still hot...

Yup...if I haven't said it enough...this weekend was quite hot....which leads me to the TP lesson learned for the week...don't leave the kane sitting out in the hot sun...Bryan said it was very hot when he touched it haha...makes me wonder if we could have cooked an egg on it....oh, and also, my lesson learned was don't lean on the black case with metal edges that's been sitting out in the sun...ouch :-/

Thanks for reading!

DVD Creation: Behind the Scenes

Hi everyone,

Well, this isn't a touring post, but something I thought I'd share in the eve of our forthcoming new DVD, our third one, in fact, and I believe our best DVD yet. Anyways, TP is a very DIY (do-it-yourself) kind of group, and thusly, for all our DVDs, we have done everything ourselves (except shoot the footage). I thought it would be fun to show how it all gets done, since it's a creative endeavor just as playing taiko is, but as far as I know, we're one of only a handful of taiko groups who actually produce their own DVDs. Anyways, a little tour of the programs we use to get it done....

Usually the first thing we do is get the video footage from whatever videographers shot our shows--in the case of our current DVD, that would be Akira Boch (a great local videographer and filmmaker who also works for JANM, and incidentally is married to one of our Bombu Taiko members!), as well as the staff at LA36 (a local tv channel that records shows at the Ford Amphitheatre, where we have produced shows in 2006 and 2008). After getting the tapes digitized and onto hard drives, we begin the editing process...



As a lot of taiko players will tell you, videos of taiko groups edited by non-taiko players are okay, but a lot of times, it'll focus on someone playing the basebeat in the back while a fabulous solo is being played in front. Editing is hard to do, because unless you know each song from front to back, you don't know how to edit it to show the song and the group in its best light. It's with this idea that I first told myself, "Well, I'll just learn to edit video myself." I am by no means a pro editor, but I can at least edit our footage so that it shows the best parts as much as possible, and I think for the most part it's pretty good. Anyways, above is a screenshot of the Final Cut Pro interface--the top two windows with video are your viewers where the video plays back, to the left of that is your list of "assets" or video files for the most part, and then the strip along the bottom is your timeline, where you can edit video and audio files to your heart's enjoyment. It's good fun.

Next, we add in title text files, basically text that identifies songs in the show, or in various sections, tells you what's going on, or who is being interviewed, etc, etc.



This is the interface from Motion. This program I know even less than Final Cut, but I know just enough to do a decent subtitle. The titles for the first two TP DVDs were done in LiveType, but I think that's becoming defunct, so I started using Motion. Nothing too exciting about this part of the process, you just have to choose font size, type, and then align it where you want, and then determine timing and how it will appear and then disappear. There's a million and one cheesy ways to have text come in and out--we usually keep it pretty simple and clean.

Next up, also pretty boring, but we process the audio files with A.Pack:



Basically, what this program does is to compress audio files into a smaller file so that it will fit on your DVD and you can put more video footage on your DVD. You just click and drag your audio file into the boxes on the left, hit 'encode' and a few minutes later, you have an .ac3 file. Voila.

The last part of the process (almost) is to author the DVD. For this, we use DVD Studio Pro 3...



In this program, you can author your DVD however you like--design DVD menus, determine how people will navigate through the menus, how things transition once you click a button, what colors for buttons are before being selected, when they are selected, and then when they are clicked. All this stuff is done in DVD SP. And of course, my personal favorite...you can add easter eggs into your DVD here. More on that later, for now I'll explain the interface....

In the upper left box, you see a list of your content--First there are menus (in the RR08 DVD, there are three, a main menu, a song selection menu, and a bonus videos menu. Under that you have your tracks--videos, and then scripts (I don't use it...uh...dunno really what it means), Slideshows (for prior DVDs we've had slideshows, for this one, we filled it up all with video footage), and Languages (but for our DVDs we pretty much just do it in one language).

In the middle top box, that's your viewer, where you can see what your menus or videos will look iike when people pop your DVD into their DVD player. It's like your canvas in which to create. The blue lines outlining it show you your "safe area"...as in, don't put anything outside of this area or it won't show up on some tvs. Good to know. On the right top are your template, which I usually don't use too much, and bottom right is a detailed menu where you can adjust details for various assets in your DVD--it changes whenever you click on something else. And on bottom is your timeline, where you can adjust videos and slideshows, and add stuff like "chapter markers," basically where you would advance to in a video when you click to the next track.

If you can see the colored meter at the top, you might see that it says 4.6 GB--a normal DVD holds 4.7 GB worth of information, so we filled this one as we did the last two, to the brim with content! Also, a note on easter eggs--these are hidden features that you may find on DVDs--showing hidden videos or features that aren't listed on the menu. We have included four easter eggs on the new DVD, so look for them, because....well, why not? They're fun to watch! Another thing...there are easter eggs on ALL the TP DVDs...have you seen them? Or have they been hidden away on your DVD...still waiting to be watched...? Search and you shall find...

The very last step in the whole process is to design the packaging, which was done for this DVD by the fantastic Deborah Laux of RosesRoad.com (also known as Claire's mom--Claire is one of our Kitsune Taiko kids). I'm out of time for this posting, but I'll do another one soon to show you how it's turning out--in the meantime, the DVD is at the production house, so in a couple of weeks, it'll be back on its way and ready to sell! We are taking pre-orders right now, so check out www.TAIKOPROJECT.com for more info!

-Bryan

4/11/09

(*In a deep, dark voice*)
Hello, and good evening...and welcome to... DRUMS OF DAAAARRRKNESSSSSS!











This past Saturday, TP returned to Hollywood's own gothic club, Bar Sinister, for the third time! While some of the more veteran members were already accustomed to the scene from previous performances, I was giddy with anticipation and just a touch of apprehension as to what the audience was like.

It was my first time at a goth bar, so Jason, Tomomi, and I decided to head to Hot Topic for some appropriate attire. What we found was something like Def Leppard mixed with Judas Priest. I think it worked nicely. Everyone had similar ideas: basically anything black (minus Jason's pants).

















Here's a close-up of the girls. Fierce!

















After we got all made-up (thanks to Yuri's excellent make-up skills!), we headed out to the stage.

The crowd was dressed mainly in black, although there was a giant pink bunny sighting. Several attendees had mohawks which complimented the spikes very nicely.

We were greeted very warmly with a rich "YEAAAHHH!" and throughout the set the crowd was extremely mobile, expressive, and generally seemed to enjoy themselves. At one point, several of us were worried that the bunny was going to climb the fence on to the stage during Jason's fundoshi-odaiko solo.

After our encore performance we went back stage, got changed, and went to the dance floor where we got DOWN!

















As dawn was approaching, we were told we could finally load-out around 2am. Not wanting the night to be over, we decided to head to BCD's for some 3am korean food. It was spiiiicy!

Finally, it was time to call it a night/morning, so we concluded back at Higashi, enthused from a great performance, legs tired from dancing to Rob Zombie, and eyes dried out from eyeliner.

What a fun night!

Lone Pine and Bishop (4/1 to 4/4)

So, like Jen said in the last post, we drove up to Lone Pine and Bishop for some performances.

We got to Lone Pine on Wednesday night and had 3 shows to do on Thursday. The first 2 were school shows... one for elementary school kids and one for high school. The one at night was more like a concert, but with some more talking.

It was a really nice day... so Jen and I decided to sit in the sun for a bit between the shows.

Such a pretty day!

















Lone Pine is on the way to Mammoth (from LA) and the town has just a little over 2000 people. This is the view that they get to have every day!























After our evening show in Lone Pine, we drove to Bishop, which is about an hour drive to the north. We quickly went to bed... since we had 3 more shows to do the very next day.

I must admit. Doing 6 shows with 5 people in 48 hours is quite tiring. Still, knowing that the Inyo Arts Council brought us out to perform and show what we do to the people in Lone Pine and Bishop kept us going.

Before we left Bishop, we had to stop by Schatz Bakery for some yummy bread and lunch!






















The people in Bishop kept telling us that we must go to Great Basin Bakery, too. So, we went!
It's much smaller, but we could tell it must be a great place... because almost everything was sold out by the time we got there! I got a loaf of DELICIOUS pumpkin walnut bread. Mmm!


















On our way back, we stopped at Manzanar and visited the Interpretive Center. The center is actually in the restored Manzanar High School Auditorium and has various exhibits and tells the story about the internment camp there.

At the school shows, Jason asked the students if they knew what Manzanar was and what the significance it has in our history. Basically everyone raised their hands. At the evening show, during one of the talks, he shared that the fact that all the students knew about Manzanar represents all the work that the people in Lone Pine and Bishop were doing to educate their people about what took place in American history. Manzanar is very close to both towns and knowing that the residents are teaching their kids about what happened lets me know that that part of history won't be forgotten.



































And then, we went home. :)

Thanks for reading!

On the road...

...again. Jason, Yuri, Courtney, Maz & I headed back out on the road again today and have safely arrived at our 1st destination in Lone Pine, CA. The drive went pretty smoothly, but one thing we learned (or, I learned...) was that if you're ever headed out towards this way and you stop in Lancaster for a quick bite... use the restroom right before you leave because if you just chance it and go, you WILL NOT see another rest stop that doesn't resemble bushes or trees for the next 80ish miles. I have never been so glad to see a little town that exists out in the middle of nowhere. Thank you so much Pearsonville for existing =)

The next few days out here will be pretty action packed for us. Tomorrow, we have 2 school shows and an evening show scheduled. Then, we'll pack up and head farther down the road to Bishop to do 3 more shows the following day. We'll post updates on those later...

Well, it's pretty dark out now, so I don't have any good pictures to post from our trip so far, but here are a few of me & Yuri settling into our hotel room. Enjoy...