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TI: Okay, so you're, you go to L.A., but there, there's also this influence from San Francisco also.

RH: Right. So once we got started into it then we had an opportunity to connect with San Francisco Taiko Dojo, Seiichi Tanaka, and he offered to help teach the group members, core members at that time. So we had a core group, about eight, ten people, that went up almost a year to study under him. And this is about 1974, so it was almost right after we started. So our group, so San Francisco Taiko was the first taiko group to start, and Kinnara in Los Angeles under the Senshin Buddhist Church was the second one, so that was in 1968 then '69, and then we were organizing in 1973, basically, so we were the third group to start here in the U.S. And so San Francisco Taiko's led by Seiichi Tanaka who's from Japan and studied, basically, more the traditional styles from Japan, and then Reverend Mas is comin' from a very Buddhist style philosophy of taiko in L.A., and here's us who, the people that started, that I brought into taiko here and from, especially from San Jose State and stuff, really were more involved in, wanting to do music as music, not knowing, at that time, really what taiko was. So we were bringing together, basically, our influences of listening to the R&B, the jazz, the Latin, whatever and using the taiko, this instrument we call the Japanese drum, as an instrument at that time.

TI: And so if, when Seiichi Tanaka would hear you guys play, from his more traditional training, what were his comments about how you played back then?

RH: [Laughs] I remember early on he would tell us, "Your music is too hard, too difficult. It's too complicated." Because we were doing these polyrhythm things and very intricate stuff, so, whereas the Japanese taiko style at that time was, was pretty straightforward, very repetitious in some ways, and so it was kind of basic and not so layered musically than what we were doing. And so that's, he thought our music was just too hard, too difficult and that we were thinking too much because we made it too hard to do it that way. But that was, but that's what we were used to doing. That was kind of part of our culture of playing music, though.

TI: Now, when you think back to those early days, back in '73, '74 when you're first starting and playing the music, what would you say about that music, looking back?

RH: I guess in starting, once we started going into that I realized that this is an opportunity really to kind of start creating an Asian American, or even more specifically a Japanese American sound, and even though it's just a drum, that this is an opportunity really to start creating that identity of what we have, what we can have as a Japanese American musical sound. I mean, the band Hiroshima was already doing stuff and they were doing their crossover, the koto and they had the taiko, so, and they had the jazz fusion stuff, so that was kind of going on already. But in the larger scene, the blacks had the soul music, the Latinos had the salsa, and the Asians, we didn't have anything. We did the R&B and the salsa, basically. We copied what other folks were doing, and so there was no identity. Japanese Americans weren't out there at dances doing Tanko Bushi. They were following what other stuff was going on in mainstream. So we, I thought it was an opportunity for us to start creating an identity for what we can have within our own community.

TI: So this is kind of the "Aha" moment, in some ways. I mean, really you did, you created a Japanese American music.

RH: Right.

Tom Izu: Did your, the other musicians who got involved in taiko, did you have a lot of discussions about what this means?

RH: We started talking about it a lot, 'cause our interest, and we were fortunate, we had some great musicians early on, in their own right, were very talented and able to kind of come up with stuff, and again, within their own perspective. And we were all kind of locked into this sense of what community was all about and that importance, too, and so we were coming from both socially and politically and somewhat musically on the same level, which was kind of great, which was, I think, different than the other groups that were starting up, had started up. And so we talked, we did talk a lot about what it meant to be Japanese American or be an Asian American and that importance and how we could try to create something that represented more of who we are versus copying what, what's from Japan or another group is doing, basically, and so those were kind of the issues at hand for us.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.