I drove by Amoeba Records yesterday afternoon, and noticed that a guy was sitting on the curb outside playing the banjo in a very percussive way. Doh–! I had obviously missed the event he was riffing on, the in-store performance of the Yoshida Brothers (吉田兄弟), who are playing at the El Rey next week, touring the US and Canada, and may have actually relocated to LA.
The Yoshida Bros are two amazing neo-shamisen players–specifically, the Tsugaru-jamisen. The Tsugaru style of shamisen playing is often likened to the rough, crashing and merciless sound of the sea in that part of the country. Hear for yourself, and note the fauxhawk!:
They’re more known here for their Nintendo Wii tune. But the larger wave whose heels they ride on is worth noting. For about the last twenty years, there has been a revival of this rough, percussive style of shamisen, whose strings are thicker than the delicate ones used for court and kabuki music, and hit as much as pulled or plucked.
Tsugaru-jamisen derives from the very tip-top North of the country, Aomori prefecture, and was initially practiced in the late 1800s by itinerant blind musicians. Aomori is known, when it is known at all, for potatoes, rice, apples, tasty clear saké, migrant agricultural workers, high unemployment, and an extremely bleak sense of humor. It borders the colonial expansion territory of Hokkaido, and would be flyover country if your travels took you between Niigata and Idaho.
I’m not so keen on the neo-national red-and-white made-for-export kimono. To me, this scheme is more often associated with the controlled palette and geometry of Mishima-style cultural fascism (this is a still from the Paul Schrader Mishima movie, playing @ LACMA May 16).
This dumb-down is especially baffling to me, given the local nature of the music, which you can see in an NHK broadcast here. The song is a Tsugaru jongara bushi, one of the staples of the early mod repertoire which the Yoshida Bros have recorded in several different versions.
Their reach is actually kind of stunning. Their latest album apparently covers a Brian Eno number, and they do a pretty nice ambient spaghetti-western soundtrack with slide guitar, in “Morricone.” Their publicists seem to be lamely scrambling to find the right slots and “cool Japan” metaphors to describe the Bros–hmm, let’s see what’s in the virtual pirate crate here…
Clad in formal, ceremonial attire of kimonos and hakama pants, but sporting the dyed light brown hair that is trendy among Japan’s savvy youth, the Brothers play the age-old Tsugaru-shamisen-an instrument akin to a rustic three-stringed banjo-with the fervor of Jimi Hendrix.
I like “rustic,” as a tipoff to folky timelessness, found in the “age-old,” uh, nineteenth-century style of the Tsugaru jamisen. And “clad” as a verb meaning “to wear in a stiff, formal manner” as in iron-clad, def conveys the angle that these dudes don’t put their pants [hakama] on just one leg at a time, like you and me. But what really puzzled me was the Hendrix comparison–it’s like they said “hmm, 2 guys, not white…wait… playing a power instrument, hmm, let’s round up to Hendrix!” Last time I looked, the Yoshida Bros were acoustic musicians, all about rhythm and not improvisation, never sing anything longer than a single shout at a time. But there is that flag thing in common.
