(Click here to go to the PRC Main page.)
Opening question: Do you speak another language besides English? Or can you teach us a word/phrase from another language?
A variety of languages popped up in the class - French, Spanish, Italian, Armenian, Japanese, ASL. Franco and Yurika had taken an ASL course for taiko instructors and thought perhaps this might come in handy for teaching Zoom classes long-term. Since everyone is muted a lot of the time. Stay tuned for some new taiko zoom hand signals.
RumbaKo Sweeps
Building off of exercises on sharp vs. smooth movements, Franco ran us through an exercise based on an SJT song called RumbaKo, which was inspired by rhythms from Cuba. There is a section of the song called Sweeps, and this is what we were working on. Here is a practice video. (*Tip: You can make the video go faster or slower by clicking on the little wheel/flower at the bottom right of the video and choosing the speed you want.)
You can see the entire performance of RumbaKo below. The sweeps section starts around 1 minute 30. (It is slightly different than our practice exercise.)
Horsebeat + Number Song
We also continued on with the number theme. Yurika made a up a song based on numbers that fit nicely into counts of 8, which should feel more natural to us than the random number activity from last week. In contrast to other world music that might be written in complex meters of 5 or 11 or 13, Japanese music and western music both are mostly written in counts of 8.
The pattern is:
5 . 5 . 4 . . 4 . . / 5 . 5 . 1 . 1 . 2 . (“Ho!”)
This does break our previous rule of having 2 clicks after even numbers. But to mix things up, we changed the last click after the 2 into a Kiai and movement.
The entire song pattern is preceded by a Horsebeat. This is a base beat or “ji” that is very common in taiko music. When played quickly, it evokes the image of pounding hooves. There are various ways you can think about it:
Don DoKo (or Don DoRo)
Right Right-Left
1 - 1-2
In this exercise, play the horsebeat 8 times before and after the song (set of numbers).
Happy practicing!
ANNOUNCEMENTS and REMINDERS:
Payment for classes should be made here: https://www.paypal.me/sanjosetaiko OR by check made out to San Jose Taiko, 565 N. 5th Street, San Jose CA 95112 (please mark the check PRC). The fee is $10 drop-in or $36/month. (The fee for September is $45/month since there are 5 Tuesdays.)
Bachi can be purchased to be mailed for $10 a pair.
Our friends in southern California are also running a taiko class for Parkinson’s called “Rhythmic Flow Taiko” on Sundays. Please check their website for more info.
We will be running classes through December. We’re not sure when we’ll be back at the studio, so it will be Zoom for the time being. If we do end up going back to the studio, we are planning to also have either a separate Zoom class or a hybrid Zoom/studio class if you can’t come all the way to SJ.
At any time, feel free to email yurika@taiko.org for questions!