Snare and Tear

Local improv drummer hits YouTube daily.

by Shaun Brady

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Each night, at just about 8 p.m., Toshi Makihara descends into the basement of his Wyndmoor home. He sets his Panasonic digital video camera on a small tripod on a table next to an old IBM computer, hits "record" and steps into frame. Over his left shoulder is a set of shelves holding a variety of drums. Over his right shoulder can be glimpsed a water heater, washer and dryer. In front of him is a single green drum.

The setup is the same in (so far) more than 60 clips that Makihara has posted to YouTube since the beginning of the year. Visually, the only thing that changes is Makihara's shirt; musically, despite the spartan instrumentation, there's something different to see and hear every day.

On Jan. 3, a single drumstick chases Makihara's fingers across the drumhead; on Jan. 30, the percussionist scrapes and crumples plastic coffee-cup lids taken home from his day job; on Feb. 17, his arms flail and fly away from the drum, or float suspended in midair before plummeting again to its surface; on Feb. 23, the day I sat just off-camera, he rapped his knuckles and rubbed his hands on the drum, occasionally muting his strikes with a Santa Claus oven mitt taped to its side.

With the Solo365 Project (youtube.com/solo365project), Makihara has dedicated himself to creating a single, short improvisation every day this year, all on the simple one-drum, one-cymbal setup he's been working with for more than eight years (so far in the YouTube clips, he's stuck with the drum alone, but plans to debut the cymbal on his birthday, March 31). "I'm trying to come up with different techniques and different vocabulary," Makihara says. "It's a process of discovery, finding something hidden behind the music. I want to lose my ego and become the sound."

The drum itself is a snare drum with the snare removed, reducing the instrument to its most basic elements. "The reason I use that is because it doesn't have a strong cultural weight," Makihara says. "It's just a converted snare drum; it's not a traditional Indian drum or a traditional African drum or anything like that. That's intentional — I wanted to have the simplest, most common piece of percussion and try to make a totally new sound out of it."

By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Born in suburban Tokyo in 1960, Makihara grew up listening to rock music but was exposed to free jazz and experimental music by his drum teacher, renowned Japanese improviser Sabu Toyozumi. Makihara came to the states at 18 to study orchestral percussion at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). In the early 1980s he began performing in Philly, eventually joining the Here Now Trio led by saxophonist Jack Wright.

He's been an integral part of the local improvised music scene since, and has collaborated closely with several dance companies. Movement is a key factor in his performance practice, developed from studies of modern dance at Temple and Butoh in Japan. Sometimes this visual aspect is related to the sounds he makes; sometimes it's wholly separate; but it's always charged with grace and surprise.

"I've always been drawn to the visibility of 'discovery' when Toshi performs," says Bowerbird director Dustin Hurt, who books Makihara regularly. "Sometimes when he's playing you get a clear sense that he's just made a sound he's never heard before, and then you'll watch as he eagerly dissects it, finding every nuance and every variation. I think it's the tangibility of this excitement that makes his performances so engaging time after time."

Makihara also studied comparative religion as a grad student, concentrating on the world's mystical traditions, the influence of which also weighs on his music, despite his not being particularly religious.

"I was discovering this trance-like experience when I played, an extremely intensified life or presence, and my study of religion and mysticism gave me an intellectual support for what I do in music."