Commemorating 25 years of cultural innovation and artistic excellence, TAIKOPROJECT’s 25th Anniversary Concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall last Saturday evening was exhilarating. The seventeen-strong ensemble delivered a performance that was brimming with panache, flair, and pure joy. From the moment the first bachi stick struck drumhead, the vast space pulsed and throbbed with kinetic energy, drawing the rapt audience into a dazzling celebration of rhythm, ritual, and modern reinvention.
The acclaimed group was joined on stage by multi-instrument virtuoso soloist Sumie Kaneko, who sang and performed divinely on the koto and the shamisen, and by GRAMMY® winning Chicanx band, also from Los Angeles, Quetzal. At the concert, TAIKOPROJECT announced the release of their fourth studio album, “25,” as well as an EP they recorded with Quetzal.

Background:
TAIKOPROJECT was founded in 2000 in Los Angeles, California by a group of young, emerging taiko drummers, led by Bryan Yamami and Masato Baba. The group defined a modern American style of Taiko, blending traditional forms with an innovative and fresh aesthetic. While the instruments themselves come from Japan, much of the energy as a performing art, happened in the United States by groups like TAIKOPROJECT that elevated a folk art to a notable place of concert attractions.
Over the past few decades the group has become renowned for their bold fusion of concert and performance art, mainly due to their stylized choreography and staging. The performers didn’t simply play their instruments, they cavorted, moved, and danced around them. Yelps, grunts and sharp vocalizations, which are the hallmarks of the taiko tradition, could occasionally be heard expressed by the musicians, punctuating their rhythms and adding bursts of vitality and intensity.

Throughout the evening’s varied program, each piece came with its own spatial arrangement: instruments were trucked on and off stage with visible purpose, and layouts were reset in-between each song, in full view though dimly lit. This “staging business” became part of the performance itself, and the transitions were bridged by quiet singing or plaintive music.
The exquisite acoustics of Walt Disney Concert Hall were a sublime match for TAIKOPROJECT’s sonic palette. Even the delicate sound of two thick wooden bachi (the signature thick, wooden drumsticks) gently tapped together created a resonant, pure percussive tone. The elegant hall’s warmth and clarity captured the thunderous crashes and whispering strokes with equal elegance.

On display and in use was an array of taiko drums, ranging from the massive odaiko to the high-pitched shime-daiko. In addition to drums we heard bamboo flutes, mokushō (a wooden Japanese xylophone), koto, and shamisen, giving the concert a lush, layered sound. A second koto was brought out and played at one point, which provoked the thought – why not use the koto that’s already on stage? Perhaps it was tuned differently to the one Sumie Kaneko had already performed on.

One standout number before intermission featured four smaller drums arranged downstage with six performers rotating in and out, beating each drum from both sides in a fluid, interlaced rhythm. In another thrilling moment, one performer even vaulted over a drum and executed a cartwheel mid-bash, combining musical prowess with athleticism and theatrical daring. Towards the end of the night, group founders Bryan Yamami and Masato Baba spoke fondly of the past few decades, amusingly recalling how much things have changed since their early days of promoting the group by laboriously burning DVDs or printing and sending signed contracts via fax machines.
TAIKOPROJECT’s 25th Anniversary Concert was a radiant display of artistic evolution, cultural pride, and communal rhythms.