Tag Archives: Taikoza

Kickstarter Campaign: Taikoza’s new exciting CD featuring a 300 lb. and 6 foot taiko drum and 150 lb. drums with bamboo flutes (shakuhachi, fue and nohkan)

TaikozaText by Marco Lienhard/Taikoza

About this project

We are excited at the project of recording a new CD of Taikoza‘s new pieces. We have been performing our new repertoire but we do not have the songs recorded yet. We hope that, with your help, we will be able to finally make this new CD. We have the opportunity to use a 6-foot long Taiko drum but could not find a space to record it. We finally found the Studio in New York that has doors big enough to fit it in.

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Music Listings – 6/24 through 6/30

1. THE PHANTOM FAMILY HALO/CHRIS GRIER (TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN L.A.) & GIBBY HAYNES (BUTTHOLE SURFERS) ACOUSTIC DUO/MARTIN BISI/INVISIBLE THINGS/DIAMOND TERRIFIER

Date: Monday, June 24, 2013
Time: 7:30pm
Venue:  Bowery Electric (327 Bowery, New York, NY 10003)
Price: $8
Genre: indie/folk rock

“The show has a surprising number of ‘names’ to throw around. at least ‘names’ to post-rock and psych devotees. Z’s have be shaking things up in NYC.. the side project should be awesome – Phantom Family Halo toured with Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus last year – Gibby from Butthole Surfers should be totally, yes,, interesting.
and there’s more” – Martin Bisi
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Concert review: Taikoza banged the big barrel-sized taiko here among the steel and concrete skyscrapers of New York…

Date: Saturday, May 5, 2012
Venue: The Manhattan Movement and Arts Center
Videos and photos: by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
Concert review by Jim Hoey

Taiko is an ancient form of Japanese drumming that most New Yorkers have no familiarity with, yet recently the Taikoza group, led by Swiss-born director Marco Lienhardbanged the big barrel-sized  taiko here among the steel and concrete skyscrapers of New York in the time-honored, Japanese, tradition of cleansing the Spring atmosphere of evil spirits through the banging of drums, dancing, and playing of flutes (shakahachi and fue), and a Japanese 13 strings instrument (koto).

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Interview: Marco Lienhard & his TAIKOZA – the man keeping Japanese culture alive?!

Text by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi

Who’s Marco Lienhard? What does he do here in NY? Oh, he’s a musician. No kidding. What makes him different from other musicians in NY? Many of these questions he’s going to answer in the video interview.

I have known Marco for more than thirty years. We met in Osaka, Japan, when we were thirty years younger. At that time I studied Kendo at a sports college and had just started playing sax. Marco, as far as I can remember, was an exchange student. We both were young and starting our adult lives far in the Far East. Both of us had no idea that we would stay in Japan for a very long time and would master a specific Japanese art. Marco is one of the first Europeans to learn and master the shakuhachi and taiko drum in Japan, and I myself become a Kendo master. In 2008 NY brought us together.

It is very interesting for you to know that people like Marco and me know more about Japan, the Japanese people and Japanese culture than the Japanese themselves. You might think, how can he say that? But it’s true because it’s a matter of fact that the majority of Japanese don’t know anything about Japanese classical music and their classical instruments? It’s unbelievable that a country like Japan lost track of many of its roots by the invasion of American and European cultures after the Second World War.

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