This Tuesday, legendary taiko drummer Kenny Endo will perform in Finney Chapel as part of his Contemporary Taiko Ensemble’s 50th anniversary tour. In addition to being a performer, composer, and teacher, he is also the first non-Japanese national to receive a natori, or stage name and master’s license in hogaku hayashi — classical drumming. At age 72, he is considered a representative of innovation in the art form, with a broad stylistic range. He’s collaborated with professional Kabuki musician Saburo Mochizuki, Michael Jackson, and the Brazilian Orquestra Experimental, and has appeared on the soundtracks for Avatar and Apocalypse Now. He’s taken his talents around the world, including on a 1989 tour to the Soviet Union. He currently teaches at the Taiko Center of the Pacific in Hawaii, which Oberlin has maintained a relationship with. Students have participated in Winter Term Projects with them, and a few graduates, including Morgan Chan, OC ’22, are continuing their taiko training there through fellowship programs. Chan will also be appearing onstage this week with Endo.
“When I was growing up, what was coming out at that time in terms of Asian American music would be Asians playing soul music or playing jazz,” Endo said in a feature with Honolulu Civil Beat. “I thought ‘Well these are Asian faces, but where’s the Asian component?’ And I felt that in order to really have a contribution as far as taiko is concerned, I really need to go back to Japan, even if it was for a year or two, to experience and study and learn playing taiko. For me, it meant getting closer to the roots of my ancestors, and that was important to me. It was important to be able to speak the language, to be able to live in the land where my ancestors came from.”
This is not Endo’s first time appearing on an Oberlin stage. He visited three and a half years ago for his ensemble’s 45th anniversary. Sarah Wong, OC ’22, was serving as chair of Oberlin College Taiko and instructor of the Taiko ExCo then, and she spearheaded the process of bringing him to campus through the connections Oberlin already had with the Taiko Center of the Pacific.
“We were coming out of the pandemic, and one of the things that my cohort, class of ’22, really wanted was to bring taiko back strong,” Wong said. “We also had a number of other performances, but Kenny Endo’s Contemporary Ensemble was definitely one of the highlights.”
In an interview with Discover Nikkei, Endo recalled his own years following undergrad, at which point he took a residency on an Indigenous reservation in Arizona.
“At that time, I was very idealistic because … I thought the academic environment was really removed from reality and because I had this opportunity to do this internship on a Native American reservation where one of the concentration camps for Japanese Americans at Poston was located,” he said. “One time I went to a feast day in a pueblo in New Mexico — and to me it was like being in a foreign country because this particular village was very traditional. … Then I realized we’re foreigners, and this is the native culture of this land, and it made me realize how far removed I am from my own culture.”
Wong explained that taiko drumming is often seen as a traditional art form. However, kumidaiko or ensemble taiko, the practice that OCT and many groups around the world partake in, is a practice that bloomed out of cultural intersection in the 1950s and ’60s during the Asian American cultural renaissance in California. Its emergence and popularization is credited to Daihachi Oguchi.
“He took a lot of inspiration from jazz ensembles,” she said. “The ‘traditional’ kumidaiko song format follows very much a jazz standard format where there’s a main melody, and then there’s solos and people get to play and do what they want, and then we come back to the main thing. That’s always been a fixture of taiko. I think it’s a really cool intersection between this instrument with amazing history, that’s thousands of years old, but also with newer art forms that have taken hold and really have been globalized.”
Conservatory fourth-year Matthew Brown recalled Endo’s 2022 performance, which he saw when he visited campus for All Roads Lead to Oberlin.
“It was a good look at the kind of place that I was coming to, because here I was, thinking I was going to study classical composition, and the first performance I saw was taiko drumming,” Brown said. “It was such a beautiful moment of, ‘Oh, this is a place where all kinds of music and all kinds of art and creativity happens.’”
The performance featured collaborations with experts in traditional instruments from many parts of the world and emphasized the importance of cultural intersection in the deconstructing and redefining of an East Asian sonic identity. While taiko drums have often been utilized in tandem with orientalist depictions, their sonic variety lends itself to a rich cultural diversification.
“Taiko is an instrument that has so much potential, and there’s so much we can do to showcase what it can do outside of these stereotypical understandings of what it might sound like or what it’s used for,” Wong said. “One of the most amazing things about the Contemporary Ensemble in particular, is that they’re not afraid to push the boundaries of taiko as an art form. … When he came three years ago, he really inspired those of us in OCT at the time to the point that I reached out to [Associate Professor of Contemporary Music and Improvisation and Director of Conservatory Professional Development] Dana Jessen. We brought her in to do a workshop with us thinking about how we can bridge what our instrument looks like with contemporary music and the way that she thinks about it. That’s the spirit of this kind of music: very inclusive and constantly transforming.”
While kumidaiko provides large-scale opportunities to reclaim and diversify East Asian art, on a smaller scale, OCT has a history of connecting the Asian American community on campus.
“I would not have gotten through the pandemic without OCT,” Wong said. “It gave me a space to express who I was through music, through this really amazing instrument, and then also to build community with the other Asian Americans who were at Oberlin. I really loved being part of that and being able to move our organization forward. … I’m really excited for a completely new batch of students to get to see what taiko has to offer and what contemporary music looks like in taiko’s context.”
Wong continues drumming with Kishin Daiko, one of Los Angeles’ many taiko ensembles.
