Thank you to Stacey Nakasone for her donation to the 2009 FoundatiOn Team! Stacey is our 100th donor this year and brings the grand total to $11,375!
Thank you again to all of this year’s donors! I will have updates from the hands-on workshops as they happen over the next few months. Thanks to the generosity of the FoundatiOn Team, On Ensemble is providing eleven taiko workshops to public school students!
It kind of had to happen sooner or later. On Ensemble has a new Facebook page. Hopefully we’ll actually keep this one up. We don’t have a great record with the social media thing but hey it’s a new year and anything is possible.
I assembled a set of Five Fish preamps for Shoji and they turned out really well! The preamps sound fantastic and thanks to the high quality of the kit and the great support offered by Five Fish, the build process was very enjoyable. Here’s a time-lapse video of the construction! Photos and a review of the kit follows the break…
Happy New Year! The beginning of a new year is a hopeful and reflective time. Last year was filled with some amazing experiences. I was blessed with the opportunity to collaborate with amazing artists from around the world and got to perform in new places like Yogyakarta and Ulaanbator. I started two new musical ventures: Khoomei Taiko Ensemble and Stereo Alchemy. I also took a big step toward full adulthood and bought my first home!
It was also a great year for On Ensemble. We kicked off the year with the release of Ume in the Middle and followed it up with several successful tours and a lot of great performances. Some personal highlights from 2009 include performing out in Brattleboro with Patrick Graham, performing at the California Worldfest, and performing at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts with the Kenny Endo Taiko Ensemble. Another high point was facilitating the Summer Taiko Institute, performing at Taiko Jam and catching up with the taiko community at the North American Taiko Conference. The year also ended nicely with a great works in progress concert and our most successful FoundatiOn Team drive ever!
I’m looking forward to all the new opportunities and experiences 2010 will bring. So far it’s off to great start. Next week we’re starting our FoundatiOn Team funded hands-on workshops for Glassell Park Elementary and at the end of the month I’m headed to my first Grammys!
We’ve been working with puppeteer director Sam Koji Hale on a short film set to Yamasong. I just saw the rough cut and it looks amazing! Sam has posted some short clips of what his done on his facebook page. Check it out!
The following donors made contributions to the FoundatiOn Team, bringing the total number of donors this year to 99! Will we have a 100th donor?..
Thank you for your generosity!
Chikako Hara
David Wells
Tetsuo Uyeda
Every January in Ashland, Oregon there’s a celebration for Martin Luther King and the ideals of civil rights, inclusion and social justice through non-violence, compassion and courage. For this event I’ll be peforming taiko with Sue Lundquist of Hand in Hand Drumming on West African and Afro-Cuban drums, and Brent Florendo and Dancing Spirit Ensemble on Native American percussion. We had our first rehearsal today and we had so much fun! We’ll only have to perform for about 15 minutes, but we’ve begun to develop way more than 15 minutes worth of music. This is going to be really great, these guys are really cool people and musicians, and I hope to collaborate more with them after the MLK celebration.
Thanks to recent donations from the following people, the fund drive isn’t done yet! In fact, we’ve passed $11,000, generating our eleventh, free, hands-on taiko workshop to public school kids!
Cathy Ginn
David and Kate Cowsky
George Abe
Lloyd Nakano
Michelle Fujii
Mikko Henson
Shira Mendes De Leon