In the GVJCI lobby, I’ll be holding a musician’s garage sale featuring musical instruments and other things we love. The sale will include the koto on which On Ensemble composed and first performed Gengakki (for $175!), a great-condition IBM Selectric typewriter, and a host of other satisfying home and work items.
For those of you attending the meet-the-performers lunch, I’m pleased to let you know our shipment of miracle berry samples has arrived! The extract from these berries is formed into a pill that you dissolve on your tongue and that makes sour things taste sweet. We’ll have a variety of foods for tasting (apparently lemons are incredible)!
Sawada Seijyuuro, the award-winning tsugaru-shamisen player, will be playing a song or two for us at the lunch. He performed at an event we organized in Tehachapi yesterday. It was great! He’s got an amazing dynamic range; from tiny, technical, plucking, to all-out bashing. You’re in for a real treat!
Advance-sale concert tickets are available through midnight tonight! If you’re planning to come, ordering your ticket today makes our job a little easier. Thank you!
Fuji Ondo preparation for Good in Gardena
Our nine guest artists from Japan have arrived and preparations are well underway! I’m really excited about the opportunity to perform with these fantastic players and to feature nagauta in an On Ensemble concert. Please join us! Tickets are available here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/225761
Along with Katsuyukie Sensei and Katsujyuuro, an additional three singers and three shamisen players are coming from Hakodate and Japan, specifically for Good in Gardena! These are some of Sensei’s most accomplished (and friendly!) students and I am tremendously excited to have them join the lunch and concert! Here are brief introductions of the members.
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Good in Gardena debuts a ton of new material! We have a new shamisen arrangement and two brand-new On Ensemble pieces. It will also be our first time doing the slant-drum battle in LA, with more than a dozen participants! These friends have been working on new movements and rhythms for the last six months and I’m excited the world will get to see their creations! Here’s a short preview with clips from a few of the battlers, including Maz and my dorky batchi-switching stuff!
Please order your tickets soon to join us March 11!
Tickets to the lunch and concert are available now! Please join us!
I’m tremendously excited to bring Kineya Katsujyuuro (aka Sawada Seijyuuro) to Good in Gardena, to perform at both the lunch and concert. One of the up-and-coming members of the Kineyakatsu guild, Katsujyuuro is a rare, crossover shamisen player, with stage names in both tsugaru-shamisen and the Kabuki world of nagauta shamsisen. In fact, Katsujyuuro was ranked number one in Japan for tsugaru-shamisen in 2006 and 2008, and even at the young age of 33, is currently performing with top Kabuki stars like Tamasaburo. He will be at the Good in Gardena lunch playing selections of tsugaru repertoire and giving background about the music. At the afternoon concert, he and Katsuyukie-Sensei will demonstrate the differences between tsugaru and nagauta shamisen!
Please come see this amazing player (and get shamisen insider info)!
My shamisen teacher will be joining us for both the lunch and concert portions of Good in Gardena! Here is a bit of background about this wonderful woman!
Tickets aren’t selling as quickly as expected, so I need to work on getting the word out about Good in Gardena! Toward those ends, here is the first in a series with details about the lunch, battle, and concert!
Mabo-tofu with 50% polished brown rice, chard goma-ae, lettuce salad with maple dressing
Hiro and I have been doing test batches of our recipes for the Good in Gardena lunch. I’m really excited about each of the dishes! We’ve managed to design the purchases, cooking, and presentation to produce no trash thus far! Meiji Tofu will be making tofu just for us on the morning of March 11. The chard and lettuce at the farmers’ market this year are particularly good. And oranges are just coming into season and it seems like it’s a really great crop. My mom is helping us bake 15 batches of Hiro’s cinnamon cookies too!
With music by Suwada Seijyuuro (winner of the 2008 All-Japan Tsugaru Shamisen Contest), we’ve pulled out all the stops!
Please, please join us! It will be so fun to have On Ensemble friends there!