Taiko ensembles are ancient drums played in a style barely seventy years old
Japanese drums have sounded at shrines, battles and theatres since at least the 6th century. Yet the thunderous ensemble shows most people picture as taiko, many drummers playing different drums together, were invented in 1951 by a jazz-trained musician named Daihachi Oguchi.
In Japanese, taiko simply means drum; abroad it usually refers to Japanese drums, or wadaiko, and to ensemble drumming, called kumi-daiko. Drums probably reached Japan through Chinese and Korean influence as early as the 6th century CE. Records from 588 CE tell of young Japanese men travelling to Korea to study the kakko, a drum from South China, and haniwa clay figures found in Gunma Prefecture show a musician carrying a barrel drum from his shoulder. Myth offers a livelier origin: in the Nihon Shoki, the goddess Ame-no-Uzume lures the sulking sun goddess Amaterasu out of a cave by dancing wildly on an upturned sake barrel.
Drums had practical jobs. Feudal armies used them to rally troops, relay orders and set the march, typically six paces to a beat, and during the 16th-century Warring States period particular calls meant advance or retreat. Theatre adopted them too: Noh drumming follows exacting patterns, with the Konparu school alone teaching 65 basic ones, and kabuki uses drums to build tension. They still guide dancers in gagaku court music and accompany Shinto kagura and Buddhist Bon festival dances.
Oguchi's group, Osuwa Daiko, reworked festival drumming into new pieces for the concert stage. Oedo Sukeroku Daiko, formed in Tokyo in 1959, is often called the first to tour professionally, and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics gave the style a world audience. Den Tagayasu later took young men to Sado Island, where his family had settled in 1968, for a total immersion in drumming inspired by local demon drumming, and that project produced Ondekoza, whose format groups such as Kodo copied. Estimates of active groups in Japan range from about 800 to 5,000.
Construction divides the family into three types. Byō-uchi-daiko have heads nailed on and cannot be tuned; traditionally carved from a single trunk, ideally Japanese zelkova, they are now also built from staves, and even wine barrels have served. Shime-daiko have skins stretched over rings and tightened with ropes or, today, bolts. Tsuzumi are hourglass-shaped, rope-tensioned drums.
Source: Taiko
