Taiko Dojo

Edge City

Taiko Dojo

by Dennis Green

I first saw Taiko drummers at the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco’s Japantown in the early ‘80s when I was living only ten blocks away. I’ve been going to concerts all my life — from blue grass bands playing on the back of flatbed trucks in a parking lot in Springfield, Oregon, to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison & the Doors, as well as the Grateful Dead, back in the Sixties in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, Monterey and Santa Barbara. But I’d never seen anything musical with the power of Taiko Dojo, especially as its practiced in San Francisco.

Like all martial arts, yoga and various dance forms, Taiko depends on the development of “muscle memory,” the repetition of ritualized movements until they become unconscious, autonomic, as effortless and unplotted as breathing. Tremendous energy is expended in Taiko, but the drummers barely break a sweat.

Like a dance step, back to the bar for one, two and three, until the leg, the foot, the body move without effort through the moves. In San Francisco Taiko Dojo, the drumming is accompanied by shouts of exaltation and facial expressions of great joy, which distinguish the style practiced there from other schools of Taiko.

The motto of San Francisco Taiko Dojo is “Sticking to one task until the end.” It’s Grandmaster, Seiichi Tanaka, opens Taiko to all, believing, “It’s very important that Taiko not be exclusive.” He goes on to say, “Most people just listen. I want people to not only hear the sound, but also watch the sound, see the sound, feel the sound.”

“Big muscles,” he adds, can produce a big sound. But the quality of the sound comes from the inside — a flow from the performer to the drum, or Ki. The ultimate challenge is making the drummer’s spirit one with the drum.”

Grand Master Tanaka and San Francisco Taiko Dojo have collaborated and performed with a diverse line up of luminaries in the music industry, including such legends as Tony Bennett, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Art Blakey, Tito Puente, Babatunde Olatunji, Orlando “Puntilla” Rios, “Patato” Valdez, Benito Concha, Narada Michael Walden, Kitaro, Mickey Hart, Mario Bauza and Max Roach.

Mickey Hart, in his “Planet Drum” project, has also played with such artists as Ali Akbar Khan and various tabla players and stringed instrument masters of the Indian music forms. Hart is best known as a drummer with the Grateful Dead, and Hart is a fanatic, in the most wonderful sense of that word.

In addition, Grand Master Tanaka and San Francisco Taiko Dojo has been featured in four major motion picture movies—Phillip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, and Rising Sun starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, George Lucas’ Return of the Jedi, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Years ago, at the San Francisco Japantown, in a tiny shop on the upper deck, I bought a black T-shirt with the image of a very young Tanaka and the name, “San Francisco Taiko Dojo,” and have been wearing it with great pride ever since.

If you’ve never experienced this musical art form, check it out on their website at www.sftaiko.com. You’ll be hella glad you did.

©2009 Dennis Green