Zahra Gor­don

An­cient and mod­ern mu­si­cal styles merged to cre­ate unique sounds at Queen's Hall on Tues­day night when in­ter­na­tion­al mu­si­cians Kaoru Watan­abe and Isaku Kageya­ma were fea­tured in con­cert.

Join­ing the mas­ters of bam­boo and West­ern flutes and taiko drum­mer re­spec­tive­ly, were pan­nist Keisha Co­dring­ton and drum­mers Bri­ane Kush­maul and Sheena Richard­son.

Dur­ing the two-hour in­ter­ac­tive per­for­mance, Watan­abe and Kageya­ma played tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese mu­sic, orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions and even ca­lyp­so. Watan­abe ex­plained that tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese mu­sic takes many cues from na­ture, im­i­tat­ing the sounds of wind, rain, thun­der, snow and oth­er nat­ur­al sounds.

Oth­er sounds were meant to push the imag­i­na­tion of both the au­di­ence and the mu­si­cians. As Watan­abe ex­plained, Kageya­ma demon­strat­ed the sound of shut­ters in a win­dow and crash­ing waves.

The drums Watan­abe and Kageya­ma played were rel­a­tive­ly small, as taiko drums can weigh as much as 900 pounds be­ing craft­ed from some of the old­est trees in Japan. Some of Watan­abe's flutes, like the shi­nob­we for ex­am­ple, were made from bam­boo as old as 100 years.

While both mu­si­cians demon­strat­ed skill and knowl­edge of the Japan­ese mu­si­cal tra­di­tions, Watan­abe and Kageya­ma al­so demon­strat­ed their abil­i­ties to fuse tra­di­tion­al mu­sic with more mod­ern sounds.Watan­abe is well-known for his jazz fu­sion pieces and this was ev­i­dent in his per­for­mances of his orig­i­nal pieces To­geth­er Alone, First Light and The Eye.

Al­though Watan­abe ex­plained that tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese mu­sic is very rhyth­mic and usu­al­ly out of time, when an arrange­ment of Lord Kitch­en­er's Old La­dy Walk A Mile was played as the fi­nal num­ber the pan, African drums, drum-set, taiko and flute eas­i­ly blend­ed in­to a smooth and groovy sound. The taiko drums were of course the most pow­er­ful, how­ev­er, Kitch­en­er's melody could be clear­ly heard.

Both Kageya­ma and Watan­abe are based in the US. Watan­abe is a grad­u­ate of the Man­hat­tan School of Mu­sic and is a for­mer di­rec­tor of the taiko group Ko­do. Watan­abe cur­rent­ly teach­es mas­ter class­es at Prince­ton and Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ties. Kageya­ma is world renowned taiko in­struc­tor and com­pos­er hav­ing worked at in­sti­tu­tions such as Berklee Col­lege of Mu­sic, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, the Brazil Taiko As­so­ci­a­tion and the Yoko­hama In­ter­na­tion­al School.

The con­cert was or­gan­ised in con­junc­tion with the Japan Foun­da­tion and the Japan­ese Em­bassy lo­cal­ly.