Eastern tradition, western influence

TOKYO -- As a teenage percussionist growing up in Japan in the 1980s, Shuichi Hidano's favorite drummers were the guys who sat behind the kit in British rock bands, musicians like Stewart Copeland of the Police and Bill Bruford, who played in those now-deeply unfashionable progressive rock bands King Crimson and Yes. "I loved John Bonham too," says Hidano of the late Led Zeppelin drummer, an innovator who swelled his heavy backbeat with congas, orchestral timpani and other flourishes.

Hidano produces a big, complicated sound too, but you're not likely to catch him sitting behind a drum kit. He plays standing up, a muscular 38-year-old pulling thunder out of an array of traditional Japanese taiko drums. First used to send messages between ancient villages, then as instruments of war and intimidation, the long-sustaining sounds of taiko are now played mostly by musical ensembles. Taiko players dart from drum to drum, punctuate their rim shots with shouts, and wail on the skins with sticks the size of pipe bombs.

It is a distinctly Japanese percussion style, though Hidano is doing his best to see how far he can push the music from those roots.

"I studied traditional Japanese rhythms and I'm always aware that I'm a Japanese drummer, but I grew up with western music and I'm drawn to that," Hidano says, sitting in a Tokyo hotel lounge before leaving for a concert on Saturday at the Japan America Theatre in L.A.'s Little Tokyo.

New ideas needed

His quest has turned him into a musical pilgrim. He travels extensively to play with foreign musicians from the Middle East to Africa -- especially in Zambia where, he says, the Music Gods reside. He knows the days when a musician could entertain a foreign audience just by showing up with an exotic ethnic instrument are over. If taiko is to have a future, he argues, it will have to unlock new musical ideas.

"Taiko has become very much composed, almost like classical music," Hidano says. "Everybody has to do the same thing or else you get ostracized. You have to worry about raising your sticks to exactly the same height as the other drummers.

"That doesn't always make for good music."

So anyone hoping to hear a standard Japanese drumming session at the Japan America Theatre is advised to stay home.

"For Japanese Americans, taiko is a nostalgic sound," Hidano explains. "When they invite me they expect me to perform in a traditional style. They want a connection to Japan, and there is no way they can stand something completely new."