Look! Evan has a new wooden harmonica and cardboard guitar!
Evan makes noise. Um, I mean, Evan makes music.
Don’t you want to be noisy… um, I mean, musical just like Evan?
Good news! You can! Come on down to the Museum this Saturday for our March Target Free Family Saturday. (March 9th). We’re ready to celebrate music with fun performances and lots of opportunities to make some noise! On the crafty side of things we’ll be making harmonicas and stringed instruments just like Evan’s.
There will be a drum circle for you to join and performances by the Turath Ensemble, who will perform traditional Middle Eastern music and drumming. A family day favorite, TAIKOPROJECT will perform as well. We’re all set for a JANM jam so come join us.
On top of all this musical excitement, we are also so excited to welcome our friend Sonya from the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan. One of our current exhibitions, Patriots and Peacemakers: Arab Americans in Service to ourCountrycomes to us from AANM. Sonya will be leading tours of the exhibition throughout the day with a special talk at 1:30.
Hope to see you!
Special thanks to Evan for such a dynamic demonstration of what fun we will have on Saturday. He deserves an award for being a good sport.
In 2005, we opened the Big Drum: Taiko in the United States exhibition. It was the first exhibition since my joining the Web unit at JANM where we really developed a lot of cool resources online in conjunction with an exhibit. I had the opportunity to work with curator Sojin Kim, our web technologist Geoff Jost, and volunteer writers to develop & upload a lot of great historic and contemporary photos, activities, and articles on the exhibition site.
I also worked with Discover Nikkei coordinator Yoko Nishimura and staff at our Watase Media Arts Center to add many wonderful video interview clips on our Discover Nikkei website.
The other major component we developed was a database of taiko groups in the U.S., but also included some other groups outside of Japan. We set up the database using some basic info collected for the exhibition. Then, we contacted all of the groups and invited them to log in and update/add to their group info, and upload some photos & audio clips.
It was always so interesting to look at what groups had added information because it showed the growth and popularity of taiko. There were groups all over the U.S. (even in places where there aren’t many Japanese Americans), and many in Canada, and even in Europe (there are 4 groups listed in Belgium)!
After the initial activity during the exhibition run, not many of the groups updated their info. When the redesigned Discover Nikkei site went live in July 2009, we launched it without the Taiko Database, always intending to add it back in once we had some time to work on it.
It’s been 2 years, but I’m really excited that we recently launched our new & improved Taiko Groups section! It has the old database info, photos, and audio clips, but presented in a new layout with easier accessibility, and incorporates events posted by the groups onto their taiko group pages.
San Jose Taiko has already started updating their info and we hope that other groups will join them soon.
P.S. If you are with or know of any taiko groups, please encourage them to update their pages! It’s a great & free way to share your group’s contact info, general info, history, photos, audio clips, videos, and upcoming events!
If you need help with your group’s login info, or if your group is not already listed and you’d like to be added, contact editor@discovernikkei.org.
