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Not too often you get to put Chico and Mongolia in the same same sentence but that’s where On Ensemble members will be next!

Kris, Maz and Kelvin will be performing at the 16th Annual Chico World Music Festival held at Chico State University on Saturday September 19th at 1:00pm and 3:30pm.  The best part is that this is a FREE performance so be sure to catch them if you are in the area!

Meanwhile Shoji will be leaving for Mongolia to participate in the Khoomei-Taiko Ensemble a collaboration between musicians from Mongolia, Japan and United States.  More details soon!

This is Sam, he’s a puppet maker, illustrator, animator and director of our first music video!  Music video is really too small of a title for what Sam is putting together.  His vision for the short film is quite epic and the entire endeavor is being produced by Heather Henson for her Handmade Puppet Dreams Film Festival.

On Tuesday I visited Sam while at Chiodo Bros studio to get a glimpse of what he’s been working on.  Ayumi and Brent took these great pictures and will be documenting the process.

There is something about puppets that is magical.  They are some of our first friends with names like Oscar, Cookie and my personal favorite Grover (let’s face it Elmo is just a wanna be Grover).  Recently my interest in puppets has been rekindled through being exposed to the great puppet theater traditions of Java and Bali.  What struck me was how easily I am transported to another fantastic world by the puppets.

I had a similar experience the first time I met Sam.  He was working with Tri-Pi Theater on a table top bunraku production called The Fox Lantern.  It was a really amazing production using very simple yet imaginative set pieces to create a completely engrossing experience.  The puppets were really beautifully made and I was amazed at how much the puppets were able to emote.  Their faces had such an expressive quality to them that you were able to read almost any emotion in them.

After our first meeting we kept in touch and talked about how fun it would be to do something together.  I knew he’d be great to work with after I sent him a copy of Ume In the Middle and and he sent back two or three video ideas per song in a matter of days.  The ideas were very imaginative and it was hard to narrow it down to just one but eventually we settled on “Yamasong”.

More to come later!

During Taiko Jam, Shoji thanked all of the taiko groups we stayed with during our crazy tours.  From Seattle to St. Louis to Toronto to Boston (and all in-between), we have stayed in awesome homestays.  We are forever grateful to those who have put us up.  This time when we went to Phoenix, AZ for the WAA conference, Shoji and Kelvin stayed with Eileen and Patrick, and Kris and I stayed with Esther and Ken of Fushicho Daiko.  We had a great time getting to know them.  I’ve known Esther for a long time.  She came up to Mt. Shasta to visit Shasta Taiko and Mark Miyoshi when Shoji and I were wee kids.  Ken is a wonderful artist who has traveled the world playing his music and is a proud father of a wonderful kid who dubs himself Miro, “M-I-R-O”.

While Shoji and Kelvin spent time at WAA, I had a very rare experience which was shoe shopping with Kris Bergstrom!  Everyone knows that Kris is a wonderful person, but has extreme traits like his veganism, chooses to only wear shorts, and he usually only shops for food, so shopping for shoes was a brand new experience for me!

Later on, Kris taught an introduction to his 30 Days to Better Shime program to members of Fushicho Daiko and members of their community groups.  It’s a great program and you can download it for free on the above link.

Thank you Esther, Ken, and Fushicho Daiko for a wonderful time!

The Old Blind Dogs are performing in Los Angeles tomorrow night for FREE!  This band is a must see.  Seriously.  If you are into music at all you must go, heck if you have a pulse you must go.

The Old Blind Dogs have become one of On Ensemble’s favorite bands ever since we had the privilege (horror) of performing right after them at the California World Fest this summer.  We ran into them again at the WAA Conference this week and it turns out they are going to play the Macarthur Park Levitt Pavilion this Saturday! We just performed at the Pasadena Levitt Pavilion last Friday.

This is the kind of band we aspire to be like. They play with honesty, soul, technique and conviction and are one of the tightest best sounding bands in any genre I’ve ever heard live.  They are just a great band that plays great music.  Period.  Please go see them.

We just got back into Los Angeles after a week of successful showcases at the Western Arts Alliance Annual conference and I wanted to give a big shout out to Eileen and Patrick for letting Kelvin and I stay at their beautiful backyard dojo during our stay in Phoenix.  Eileen is a taiko performer and instructor who does lots of educational outreach work in the Phoenix area, her husband Patrick is a karate instructor and they have what every practitioner of any artform dreams about, an amazing hardwood floor rehearsal space/dojo right in their back yard!

Not only that Eileen came to all of our showcases and even helped us pack up our copius amounts of gear!  So a huge thank you goes out to Eileen and Patrick for their generous hospitality and banana bread!

This week we’ll be in Phoenix for the Western Arts Alliance Annual Conference.  We are represented by Cadence Arts Network at Exhibit #400.

Showcase schedule:
Affiliated Showcase:  Tuesday Sept 1st, 9:20pm – South Mountain Room, Downtown Sheraton
Juried Showcase:  Thursday Sept 3rd, 4:55pm – Stage West, Herberger Theatre Center
Affiliated Showcase:  Thursday Sept 3rd, 9:20pm – South Mountain Room, Downtown Sheraton

One of the best things about living in Los Angeles is meeting creative people everywhere.  At our Levitt Pavilion gig I noticed a man sketching away in his pad as we were playing and he was nice enough to show us some of his work.  The artist’s name is Ronald J. Llanos and he’s an instrutor of painting at Art Center College of Design.  He’s got a great gallery on his website, I’m particularly fond of the watercolor titled “Cherry blossom ninja girls enter the temple of the bad robot dudes“.  Awesome.

I also met an analog synth collector/sound experimentalist/sound designer who goes by the moniker LofiFreq.  Here’s a link to a youtube video of him improvising on a circuit bent Omnichord.  Also awesome.