Filed under: JAPAN
I’m a big fan of the shamisen and it’s ancestor the Chinese sanxian. Maybe it’s because the banjo was one of my first instruments? The shamisen and it’s family are typically three string fretless banjos with snake, cat, dog or calf skin stretched across the body.
The Tsugaru style shamisen is currently in vogue, thanks to the Yoshida Brothers. Tsugaru style is usually fast, virtuosic playing and it is a bigger, heavier instrument. Incidentally, Tsugaru has an interesting history, as told in comic strip form by California’s own shamisen monster ,Kevin Kmetz.
But these sparser, slower styles are sometimes more interesting to me, this one in particular reminds me how bluesy a lot of Asian and Southeast Asian music can sound…Chinese guqin, Vietnamese “Vong Co” and Khmer mahori music are some other examples
The song is the well known Yasuki Bushi which is associated with the “fish scooping dance” (see Excavated Shellac for another example). Here it is sung by Murano Koichi with shamisen played by Tachibanaya Kin-nosuke.
The label also indicates that this is a “ko-uta”; short songs typically sung by geisha.
(special thanks to Mary Mariko Ohno, director of the Kabuki Academy in Tacoma, Washington and Linda Kako Caplan. Also, thanks Excavated Shellac’s JW for some work on the audio restoration…cheers!)
Filed under: JAPAN
In January we heard an example of the Chinese zither called guzheng, and now I’d like to present one of it’s descendants; the Japanese koto.
The koto came from China to Japan sometime between the 7th and 8th century and was used primarily in the Gagaku ensemble, Japanese court music (see World Arbiter). Like the guzheng, the koto is a long zither with bridges and it went through many configurations over the centuries in terms of size, construction and number of strings. In the 17th century the gifted blind musician Yatsuhashi Kengyo (1614-1685) created a new style of solo playing and this record is one of his most famous pieces, Rokudan No Shirabe.
The Koto player featured on this recording is another famous blind musician, Michio Miyagi. He was something of a genius; teaching by age 13, creating new instruments such as the 80 string Hachi-Jyugern, making records, writing essays and exploring the music of the west. He published more than 500 compositions before he died in a train accident at the age of 62.
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Here is the full piece, Rokudan No Shirabe, from sides A and B.
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Thanks to Mary Ohno and Reiko Obata for help with this post.
