echoes of ancient war drums

Jodi Wildhaber could hear it as she walked to her car after her evening college classes. But she couldn't figure out where the rhythmic thump-thump-thumping was coming from.

Then one evening, she spotted them - members of St. Louis Osuwa Taiko, practicing their art.

"It makes you curious," Wildhaber, 31, of St. Louis, said as she stared at drumsticks flailing and heads bobbing through a second-floor window as she walked to a parking lot on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. "It's kind of a pleasant thing. It's certainly not noise."

But inside the classroom, the beats were less thump, more thunder.

Seven adults leaped, lunged and pivoted with choreographed precision while pounding fat barrel drums with fat drumsticks. It sounded jazzy and tribal.



"As far as I know, we're the only taiko drumming group in the St. Louis area," said the group's co-director, Andrew Thalheimer, 31, of Creve Coeur.

Taiko drumming started more than 1,400 years ago, when Japanese troops pounded the drums during warfare to boost morale and intimidate enemies. They also used them to communicate among neighboring villages.

During the 1950s, grandmaster Daihachi Oguchi of Suwa, Japan, took the art form and incorporated some jazz and physical flourishes, and Osuwa Taiko was born.

Oguchi helped start branches worldwide. During a visit in 1986 to St. Louis, a sister city of Suwa, he bestowed a gift of several handmade drums and helped form St. Louis Osuwa Taiko.

The group was made up of children who eventually went off to college, and the group disbanded. Then, in 1996, Joe Kimura, one of those founding members, returned and restarted the group at Washington University. It's now one of more than 30 taiko groups nationwide. According to taiko.com, there are as many as 8,000 such groups in Japan.

The local group performs traditional taiko songs as well as pieces composed by Kimura and other local drummers, Thalheimer says. And there's at least one from ancient scripts that Oguchi transcribed.

Each class begins with Thalheimer counting repeatedly in Japanese as the drummers stretch in several positions for several seconds. Once they've limbered up enough to scrimmage against the New England Patriots, they get down to business.

They step this way and that, pivot and lunge, leap and pose. Sometimes, they chant and twirl their drumsticks. Every once in a while, they look like they're performing ballet; other times, martial arts.

They strike the drums with swooping gestures, causing thunder to roll from the skins and reverberate off the gray and blue classroom walls. A brass lock on a nearby storage trunk rattles.

It isn't long before the drummers are sweating and breathing hard. Frequent water breaks are necessary. So are earplugs.

Member Maki Wall, who moved here from Japan when she was 19, says taiko drumming is a popular exercise class in Japan.

"I actually had to take exercise classes to get fit for this," said Wall, 36, of Ballwin. "I did a boot-camp class. Some of the songs are eight minutes long, and you have to squat the whole time, so you have to have some muscle."

After one particularly energetic routine, Thalheimer tugs at his waistband and says: "This is a good time not to wear jeans. Or sandpaper underwear." Apparently, he was wearing at least one of those garments.

Helena Wotring, 22, who studies computer science at Washington University, learned about taiko from a friend who's an avid follower of St. Louis Osuwa Taiko.

"She's a groupie," Wotring said. "And she insisted that I go to the beginners' class because she was too young to go."

That was four years ago.

"This is something that brought together a bunch of different interests that I have, including my background in music," she said. "I play piano and cello."

Wotring insists that learning the choreographed routines is not as difficult as it seems. First, she says, members learn the rhythm. Then they learn how to play the entire song before adding in the steps and motions.

"Probably the hardest thing for me is that even though we're dong something really loud and strong, we have to remain relaxed, otherwise you get tired and it won't look right," Wotring said.

"It looks like you're trying to kill yourself rather than do something nice and strong."

Wall learned of St. Louis Osuwa Taiko several years ago when she heard they were going to perform at the Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

"I thought, 'American guys doing taiko? Yeah right,'" said Wall, a mother of three.

"But they were really good. I was surprised that they actually play traditional tunes that I remembered from my childhood. I got chills when I heard it and thought, I have to do this."

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