Tonight was the Oto-Wa Taiko concert we got tickets for.
Wow. The Museum theater is a much better venue for this type of music – none of the power was lost to empty space. I had such a good time!
I think my favorite piece of the night was Shunpu. It had a lot of drummers on stage at once and really made you feel it. Saru Asobi also had that same intensity of multiple drummers (helped even more that the members of tonight’s special guest Kamo Tsunamura Daiko were on stage as well) but they had all that “monkeying around” going on.
When it comes to Taiko music, I’m not there to sip on fine wines and delight in the rich bouquet of flutes and “interpretive dance”. I’m just low class enough to want to get drunk on the moonshine of a heavy drum beat. With that said, however, I was surprised at the enjoyable use of fans on, I think, Sendai Suzume Odori. It was energetic and snappy.
I think it was Suwa Ikazuchi (“Thunder in Suwa”) that one of the co-ordinators for the concert, Jackie Steele, starts out on stage in black tights and what I’ll call a “shirt”, being only a sheet of material up front held on with elastic straps wrapping around back. This is the reduced outfit when someone is really going to pound on the drums. Taiko drumming gives you a pretty good upper body workout in general and she had already been working through the previous songs. End result of this, not hurt by the dramatic stage lighting, was that she was looking pretty ripped. There’s something attractive about a physically fit woman wailing on stuff. I’m probably recalling my days of G.L.O.W.. A surprise was that she not only spoke perfect English and French, but also addressed the group in, what sounded like, very good Japanese.
I walked away from the concert with a Kamo Tsunamura CD and a Oto-Wa T-shirt. I am such a sucker for this stuff, but I just had so much fun! 
