Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Check out "Monsters of Shamisen" or "Kevin Kmetz" on youtube! Fun stuff!

As edosan probably knows, this is neither Punk nor Heavy Metal shamisen, but modern Tsugaru-jamisen. I studied this form of shamisen for seven years in Japan, so here’s my take, for what it’s worth.

Edosan’s clip features Kinoshita Shinichi, probably the best young(ish) traditional Tsugaru-jamisen player today. He has done a lot of experimental playing, as well, and this clip is representative of one of the ways Tsugaru-jamisen is being played today. He is using the techniques of Tsugaru-jamisen, but the structure, the rhythms, and some of the pitches used in the piece are what differentiate it from traditional style.

Takahashi Chikuzan, who has come up on the forum before, played traditional Tsugaru-jamisen. Here is a clip from a TV special from the mid-70s. The music starts at about the 1:30 mark, after a monologue on how badly he was treated when he travelled around the north of Japan, playing on the streets in the pre-war period, and how hard he practiced to get the sound he finally achieved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNbvDgMC … re=related

Abraxas mentions Kevin Kmetz, the best non-Japanese player that I have come across. His left hand work is great, and he is expanding the music in ways that the Japanese players seem incapable of (for the same reasons that it took a Californian to put avocado in sushi). His right hand attack, and consequently his tone, is not as strong as many good Japanese players, but I hear him improving year by year.

The guy playing in Abraxas’ tap dancing clip is Ken Shimura, a TV personality who was a member of the comedic musical group The Drifters – lately his Japanese TV bits about his pet monkey (pankun) and the monkey’s pet bulldog are all over youtube. The guy tap dancing is Beat Takeshi, better known outside Japan as movie director Takeshi Kitano (Hanabi, Zatoichi, Battle Royale, etc). Shimura is probably a good guitar player, but his shamisen playing is this video is pretty bad.

Here’s another tap dancing clip with Agatsuma Hiromitsu, another of the very best young players.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbObLy5MjWU

Edosan, I’m glad to know there are other Tsugaru fans on the shakuhachi forum!

Sato Michihiro is another of the great modern players. He did some experimental stuff with John Zorn’s gang in New York in the late 80s, and has for the most part gone back to traditional playing, but with a very different feel than the old players. He is too young to be considered “old guard,” but he pre-dates the boom of young players that happened in the early 2000s. I saw him at a little clubs in Kyoto in the 90s, and he could hold a crowd simply by hitting the open strings of the shamisen (sort of like ro buki), fine tuning the instrument and bringing out all kinds of timbres with just his right-hand attack. Most Tsugaru instrumental pieces open with maybe ten seconds of this, but he might go on for two or three minutes without getting boring!

Mike Penny is part of the California school that seems to have started with Kevin Kmetz. Again, he has nice left hand technique, but is lacking a bit in the right-hand attack that players like Sato have mastered. In the clip that edosan linked to, the left hand technique is up front, while the right-hand technique is de-emphasised. What makes these American players interesting is that they were accomplished musicians on other instruments before finding the shamisen, and they have brought some of that with them into their serious study of Tsugaru-jamisen. Japanese players, on the other hand, tend to compartmentalize their learning for the most part. This is changing with the new crop of players, but getting to the level of a professional player necessitates a single-minded devotion to the Tsugaru repertoire and its techniques. This type of training seems to produce players who, though they have incredible skills, are only able to express themselves in a very narrow style range.