CSUN’s Japanese traditional drumming group Jishin Taiko will hold its fifth annual Spring Concert this Sunday.
“Taiko is not something you hear or see, it is something you feel,” said Gisselle Jaen, one of the performing members who is also in charge of the group’s fundraising.
The concert will serve as a celebration of the all the member’s hard work throughout the year as well as a farewell to retiring members. The concert will also showcase new members who will carry on the drummers’ beat next year.
Walking into the Northridge Room students will immediately hear Jishin Taiko’s sound before you see them. Next they will feel the vibrations of the drums throughout the room transferring energy into the audience, creating an experience not just a mere show, Jaen said.
“We put everything we have into it,” she said.
Jaen added that she is not nervous about performing. Members have been running through the show three times a week for a couple months and are fully prepared to give it their all.
Jishin Taiko has performed experience in other events on CSUN as well in the community. However, performing for friends, family and the CSUN community to showcase their work is much more exciting, Jaen said.
The Spring Concert is getting a lot of attention this year and retiring members are a bit nervous and are really pushing to have a good show, said Blaine O’Brien the group’s president.
This year’s group has more members than prior years and has created a large intercollegiate Taiko community on Facebook, which helps the group share information with the entire community.
It is a place for them to come together, O’Brien said.
Another goal is to create an efficient process that is easy to understand and can be used document the groups endeavors, which will allow new members to run the club smoothly once the retiring members leave the group.
The driving passion behind the drummers is self-improvement, O’Brien said.
Taiko members want to better themselves and learn the art form that speaks to them, he added.
The concert will culminate with a song called “Yamabiko,” which means mountain echo. The song was written by early members of the group and mostly made up of simple exercises, O’Brien said.
Throughout the years members have added more complicated techniques, which creates an interesting scope of performance piece, he added.
The song starts out slow and two groups of drummers echo each other. Gradually the tempo gets faster and ends the concert with the echoes interweaving and dancing that simulates the sounds, Jean said.
O’Brien describes it as a fun yet challenging performance.
“Different drums call for different abilities,” O’Brien said.
He has been in the group long enough to have played all the different drums at one point and explained you never understand what it takes until you do it.
The group was first established in 1995 after the Northridge earthquake. Jishin means earthquake in Japanese.
