Ready to Groove?

Konnichi wa,
Welcome to my blog!
In case you didn't already know, the Bass in "Bass'n'Taiko" refers to bass guitar - not a fish; the Taiko refers to the Japanese word for drum, as well as the style of drumming made popular by Kodo and many other groups.

I've been playing bass guitar for nearly 30 years, and have been studying taiko drumming with Odaiko New England for about 7 years (I had a 2-year taiko'ing hiatus to finish off my degree). More to come about both of these activities - in fact, much more.

I maintained a blog in a Yahoo!"360" account from August, 2008 through early Spring, 2009. Unfortunately, the 360 account suffered some strange occurrences (and my blog even disappeared for a couple weeks at one point) and I encountered difficulty in maintaining it and adding new entries. When I finally managed to access everything again, I salvaged all of my blog entries before the 360 pages and blogs were sent to the online equivalent of the Great Gig in the Sky (which happened in early July), so I have installed them here - with their original post dates.

I'll do my best to get caught up on events between March '09 and now.....as they say, "stay tuned".

Practice makes...less than perfect

We all know the expression "Practice makes perfect".

Were that but true.

Tonight in taiko rehearsal we worked on "Yatai Bayashi". In performances by Kodo or Za Ondekoza, for example, the song can run anywhere up to ten minutes. Our group plays a slightly abridged version of this piece. Playing this the traditional way - sitting on the floor, feet cradling a huge drum, and having to lean back in sort of a 1/3 sit-up position to get enough sound out of every hit - I discovered very quickly what kind of condition I'm NOT in.

There's humbling, and then there's HUMBLING. Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little, but, tonight was my first attempt to play through the piece in the traditional way, and the attempt sent a profound message, one might say, to my abs and back muscles. It generated a wince and a few wry, ironic, rueful smiles. Well, I guess I had to start somewhere. Now if I can just get to the point where I can believe that there will be a light at the end of this tunnel I haven't entered yet...