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We just finished up the New York leg of our tour and a lot has happened since my last post.  We had quite a few performances in New York that culminated in a great performance at Symphony Space.  We also had a number of workshops for local taiko groups.  Both Tetsuro and I taught a class at Kaoru’s Taiko center and at the Long Island University workshop there was even a group of students that had come all the way from Bowling Green Ohio!

Kaoru, Tetsuro and I had a performance at Drom with our translator Nominjin who is also a great singer in her own right.  Shinetsog sat in with Adam Rudolph’s Go Organic Orchestra and with another gig at a African Restaurant that Kaoru was playing in blowing people away with throat singing and Morin Huur playing.   It was a great couple of day filled with music and some NY site seeing.  We had to say goodbye to Tetsuro yesterday and tomorrow the rest of us head off to Seattle for our last leg of the tour.  More soon!

Maz, Kelvin, and I have just returned from performing two sets at the Chico World Music Festival. We had a great time! Just like the Grass Valley festival, also organized by the great Dan DeWayne, the staff is amazingly helpful and courteous and the festival attendees are enthusiastic and friendly. See what I mean?!

(Sorry about the ridiculously shaky video!)

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!

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!

We’ve had an amazing couple of days at the California WorldFest!  It’s one of the best music festivals I’ve ever been to or performed in.  First of all the Grass Valley/Nevada City area is really cool.  It reminds me a lot of the Mt. Shasta area with it’s beautiful scenery and super friendly people.  In fact Maz and I ended up staying with one of my good high school friends whom I hadn’t seen for a years while we were in Grass Valley.  We had a mini Mt. Shasta High reunion.

I’ve been completely blown away by the other bands at the WorldFest.  You know a band is really good when they make you realize you like something that you never knew you did.  I totally had a moment like that watching the Old Blind Dogs work the audience into a hypnotic dancing frenzy.  The band’s rhythms and vocal harmonies were so tight it was ridiculous and I thought  “Wow, I didn’t know I liked Scottish roots music.”

After our two performances on Friday Maz, Kelvin and I stayed to watch the evening acts play on the main stage.  We didn’t have very good seats and then out of the blue someone offered us these amazing seats not ten feet from the stage (Thanks Dale!).  The headline act was the Indigo Girls who were fantastic.  Amazing energy, great song writing, great vocal harmonies and just great music.

On Saturday we got the play the main stage ourselves.  We were the opening act to the opening act of the opening act to the opening act of the opening act of Los Lobos, the East L.A. legends themselves!

We’d like to thank Dan Dewayne and the entire staff and volunteers at the WorldFest.  Everyone was so friendly and helpful, great to work with and to top it off there were even free massages for the artists backstage!  Also a big thank you goes out to Yoko-san who made us sound great and to Thad for putting half of On Ensemble up for the weekend.  Hopefully we can make it back to Grass Valley next year!

We had a great performance at the Green Show today! Thanks to Claudia, Jess and all the Green Show volunteers.  It was great being back in Ashland and it’s starting to feel like a second home now that Kelvin is living there and we find ourselves performing there for the second time in two months.  We even made the Green Show poster complete with a nice shot of the LA skyline.

We’ll be spending the next couple of days in Mt. Shasta getting some creative rehearsal time in with Kelvin before we head back down to Los Angeles.  More later!

We had a great sold-out performance tonight at the Oregon Bach Festival.  Our stay in Eugene has been fantastic and we’d like to thank John Evans, Michael Anderson and the OBF staff for bringing us to their amazing festival.  We’d also like to thank the great theater and sound crew at the Hult Center for making our concert go so smoothly.  Also a huge thank you goes our to our lighting designer Eileen Cooley for all of her artistry and work.  And last but definitely not least thank you to the members of Portland Taiko who helped us pack up and load out!

Tomorrow we head down to Ashland for a performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Green Show.  More later!

We are currently in the beautiful city of Eugene OR for the Oregon Bach Festival.  Yesterday we performed at the opening of On the Road: Two Visions of the Tokaido at the University of Oregon’s Jordon Schnitzer Museum.  We spent today in the theater preparing for tomorrow’s concert and got a nice write up in the Eugene Register-Guard.

Tonight we’re going to watch Helmuth Rilling conduct a performance of Joseph Haydn’s The Creation at the Oregon Bach Festival.  Should be great concert!