Interview with Takuya Tanguchi by Hanabi[...]

INTERVIEW with TAIKO ARTIST TAKUYA TANIGUCHI May, 6th 2012 Interview with taiko artist Takuya Taniguchi. He is a member of „Fuun-­‐No-­‐Kai“ (group of Eitetsu Hayashi), founder and artistic director of „Tenryu Daiko“ and a solo taiko performer. Takuya Taniguchi, you´ve been playing taiko for almost 26 years now. How did your taiko career start? Well, when I was only 3 years old, I would always use my chopsticks to drum on my plate while I was eating. Since the dishes kept breaking, my mother decided quickly to buy me a den-­‐den daiko1. That is about how it began. Then with 5 years I got my first very small miya daiko and finally at the age of 12 I started taking lessons from a very old taiko teacher. This teacher would normally coach local kids aged 10-­‐12 how to play a few taiko rhythms for the Matsuoka Gozo Matsuri2. Interestingly enough the old man at first did not want to instruct me. I was extremely persistent and put everything into convincing him how serious and determined I was to learn taiko. Finally he agreed. So it was your own strong will and the early support of your parents that brought you so far? Yes. Music has always been a key issue for my parents, although they do not play an instrument themselves. Well, my mother used to play a bit of African drums as a hobby when she was about 18. But it´s for sure that both my mother and father truly love music. That is also why I played Piano for 7 years. I stopped when I reached middle school and became more interested in Kendo. I must admit though, that I never did enjoy playing by musical score. A taiko biography like yours is yet not imaginable in Germany, but Japanese drumming is certainly becoming more and more popular here and the possibilities for learning taiko are slowly but surely growing. Were you very surprised to find out about the taiko scene in Germany? Yes, I was really surprised. I could hardly believe it. When I was organising my first concert with Walter Lang3 in Germany, I had this huge logistic challenge of transporting all the drums that I would need by plane. I was thinking of the costs being tremendous. That´s when Walter 1 The den-­‐den daiko is a Japanese pellet drum. It has two heads and is suspended on a rod, with beads or pellets hanging on threads on either sides of the body. (Wikipedia) 2 Matsuoka in the Prefecture Fukui is the home town of Takuya Taniguchi. 3 Popular German Jazz pianist. [hanabeats] had the idea of seeking a local taiko group in Germany for help. And indeed he did. He made contact with Christof Manhart, leader of the group OKUMIKAWA (Laufen /Bavaria). Since Christof Manhart knew about my master Eitetsu Hayashi and was very interested in the Hayashi style, we made a deal right away. Christof lend me the necessary drums and I gave a workshop for his group. What surprised me most though, was the fact that Christof builds taiko drums himself. In Japan that is rather unusual. Taiko players normally don´t make their drums. Building taikos has a very long tradition and the craftmen keep their knowledge and skills secret. Very few drummers make their own daiko. Where as to making own bachis is quite common. So this is how you started giving workshops in Germany. What is important to you, when teaching taiko? What is the key message you want to give taiko players here? Well, I saw that there were taiko drummers playing Hayashi pieces, that they had learned by video. The results were so different from the original. So, that is why it´s important for me to teach the correct Hayashi style and to provide a solid groundwork of basics. Furthermore I want to pass on awareness for „saho“-­‐ the philosophy and practise of taiko etiquette, meaning all the elements around taiko. For example, how to begin and end a taiko training or appearance with courtesy. A side from that I wish to emphasize how important it is for a player to express his very own personality. One must really become engaged with the drum. Transforming feelings and emotions as well as impressions of nature will make the drumming style unique and special. For me it´s so essential to embody sounds of nature, like for instance the sounds of the seas. Or, when I´m away from home, family and friends for a long time I´ll express nostalgia in my drumming. You can’t find this in the scores! I would like taiko players to express these impressions, these emotions and combine them with their individual joy to play. When looking at taiko performances, it´s always a strong personality that strikes me so much more than just simply good technique. A player should be able to tap the full potential of a taiko drum and expose the complete variety of possible sounds. Also, in order to make a good tone and play more melodiously, it´s important to take the emphasis off the strength and power aspect. A taiko player that mainly stresses power is comparable to a very stiff athlete running a 100 meters race. What is it in your opinion that makes taiko so special that it has become an universal performance art? Taiko is so colorful. There is a lot happening around the drums. The vibration of the body and the movements are mesmerizing. Hearing the sound of the taiko is like having a sense of déjà vu. It feels so familiar, like the heartbeat of your mother. I like to describe it as „natsukashi“, meaning a nostalgic feeling but not in a sentimental sense. Taiko just makes you feel how great life is. When this modest instrument is played with heart and soul, it just wins you over. You compose taiko pieces. Have you been doing this from the beginning or is it something that came with skill and experience? When I took my first lessons from the old taiko teacher, it was only us two training on a regular basis and we would mainly improvise. The time my teacher retired and at the same time more and more young players started to join, I had to compose pieces we could perform together. But up to this point it was just ad-­‐libbing. In this sense my initial composing [hanabeats] experiences were born out of the situation. But I’ve always had an interest in composing as well. Composing own taiko pieces is a present-­‐day subject among German players. A growing number of drummers are criticising that all groups have the same repertoire and that there is hardly any variety. In the UK for example, it´s quite usual for taiko groups to play their own pieces. Would you suggest us to work on own compositions? To create own taiko pieces is abolutely legitimate. The relevant question is, what kind of rhythm patterns are going to be developed. If they´re more or less rhythms that you can play on any type of drumset, than it won´t be all wadaiko anymore. When I compose a song, I use elements from Japenese tradition like old rhythms, folk songs and so on. So the tradition stays alive. Eitetsu Hayashi encourages us, and does so himself, to visit festivals all over Japan. The things we learn there we use as insipration for our projects. This is a pretty natural process that captures authentic impressions. The real challenge is to bring „wadaiko-­‐ness“ into your pieces. That is the reason I stress the importance of the sounds of nature in my teaching. And the importance of speaking the rhythms. Don’t play Japanese taiko strictly according to score, like I see a lot of people here do with African rhythms. Play like you speak, and don’t overemphasize to be „in tempo“ too much. Eitetsu Hayashi is famous for his musical crossovers. Do you feel inspired to do the same? I would like to be a pioneer too and try out new crossovers and taiko projects. Eitetsu Hayashi has played with jazz music and he was the first to combine taiko with classical music. Now, I have the possibility to cross with European jazz and to be innovative in this field. Eitetsu Hayashi encourages me to try out new things. I read about that in an interview Eitetsu Hayashi gave in the Performing Arts Network Japan. He said that he can´t imagine that Pablo Picasso wanted all his apprentices to paint just like him. And as to him, he sees all members of Fuun no kai as excellent performers who have a future as soloists ahead of them. So is it correct to say that you don´t have that typical traditional master-­‐apprentice relationship? I would say that it´s just a little bit different. Eitetsu Hayashi wants to train taiko performers with an own artistic personality. Wadaiko doesn´t have this long tradition that has to be passed on from one generation to the other. Taiko as a performance art is only 40 years old. This is not comparable to Kabuki or other traditional Japanese art forms. Surely taiko itself is a lot older, but that´s the folk drumming at festivals. Takuya Taniguchi, this is something I´m personally burning to ask. What is the most memorable thing a spectator has said to you after an appearance? Takuya Taniguchi laughs. This is so funny. Once someone from the audience asked, as a joke of course, if Walter Lang and I were married, because our music would communicate so well together. There is one comment I like especially. I read it in an article. They wrote that it looks as if I were having a dialogue with the taiko drum and that the taiko performance sometimes appears to be like a prayer. After all it is tradition in Japan to drum for rain, against sickness [hanabeats] or to call out to someone who is far away. The sounds of the taiko are supposed to communicate these thoughts and prayers. What a wonderful finishing sentence. Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. It was my pleasure. Interviewers: Patrizia Bradley-­‐Sorgenfrei and Jossi Holzapfel (Hanabi Daiko) [hanabeats]