Japanese Bluegrass

Yesterday I posted a picture of my daughter playing with her mother’s sanshin, a banjo-like Okinawan instrument that is the direct ancestor of the Japanese shamisen. I thought I’d post today about the shamisen player Kunimoto Takeharu and his foray into bluegrass, a style of music I vastly prefer (and I realize I’m in the minority here) to pop, J or otherwise.

Kunimoto was born in Chiba Prefecture. Both parents were practitioners of a form of storytelling called roukyoku. Unlike the older and better-known art of rakugo comic storytelling, in traditional roukyoku narrative is combined with singing, and the storyteller performs standing, accompanied by a concealed shamisen player. There is an improvisational element as well, and the same piece may be dramatically different from one performance to the next. Roukyoku was widely popular at the height of radio, but like many older arts has lost a great deal of its audience in recent decades.

As a child, Kunimoto was completely uninterested in roukyoku. He was, however, drawn to American bluegrass after seeing Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys at the age of 15. He fooled around with the flat mandolin before taking up Tsugaru-jamisen, the percussive, improvisational northern style of shamisen that shares an undeniable energy with bluegrass. At nineteen, after flirting briefly with acting, he formally entered the world of roukyoku. He was the first person to do so in over a decade.

Over time, he has broken with tradition in several key ways. First, he sometimes dispenses with the concealed shamisen player to accompany himself during the sung sections of his performances. This was done, in part, because he wanted to introduce strains of rock and roll and bluegrass into the music, another innovation.

In 2003, he left Japan for a year to focus on bluegrass at East Tennessee State University, where he joined the Bluegrass Pride Band the day after arriving in the U.S. With members of the band, he later formed a new group called The Last Frontier and made an album called Appalachian Shamisen. If you have Quicktime, you can look here for a clip of his shamisen, backed up by banjo, mandolin, fiddle, bass and guitar. It sounds pretty damn good. His albums can be bought through this same website, though if you’re reading this from outside Japan your computer may not be able to display the Japanese script.

There’s an unusually good English-language website devoted to Kunimoto here. There is also a recent article in the Asahi Newspaper here. If you’re in the States, Kunimoto and the band will be performing in March at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival, one of the best music events in North America. If you’re in Japan, he’ll be performing roukyoku February 21-22 at Tokyo’s Parco Theater, and March 14 at Sogetsu Hall (03-3572-4311).