Click here for a photo slideshow.
They may have looked like a band of big, bad Japanese samurai warriors, but the only weapons the men and women of Wadaiko Yamato are packing are big, fat drumsticks.
Wadaiko Yamato, also known as the drummers of Japan, gave an enthusiastic, two-hour performance Sunday night to a capacity crowd at Laxson Auditorium.
The band calls itself Wadaiko Yamato after the main musical instrument the members use, the wadaiko drums, and the Japanese city where the band was formed, named Nara, which means "the land of Yamato."
Formed in 1993, Wadaiko Yamato began touring in 1998. Its 10 members have since performed in many countries, including Austria and Spain.
Wadaiko Yamato performed at Chico State as part of the band's Drummers of Japan World Tour. The drummers attracted a wide spectrum of people, from toddlers to the retired. And they had talent that makes Tommy Lee look like an amateur.
Dressed in black, the group began the show with one of its male performers beating a large drum with two huge drumsticks that could have passed for oversized bread sticks. Next to him, two women beat smaller drums while the rest of the group danced around playing drums attached to their shoulders.
At one point, the man with the big drum started hitting it with a wooden bat.
After some intense drumming that echoed through Laxson and shook the audience to the bone, the seven performers with mobile drums stepped forward and gave mean faces. Then one of them smiled and said hello.
A lot of Wadaiko Yamato's performance was lighthearted and had the whole audience cracking up.
The audience laughed when three of the band's male members started playing small hand cymbals, known as chappa.
One of them started to beat out a rhythm and pretended to throw it into the air for one of the other two to catch. The two started throwing the beat back and forth, keeping it away from the other man.
Besides Wadaiko Yamato's vast collection of drums, which at times were bigger than the person drumming, they had instruments such as the three-stringed shamisen and the bamboo flute known as the shinobue. These instruments added a relaxing touch to the intense beat of the drums.
The evening ended with a drum medley. The back of the stage had five enormous drums turned on their sides. With their backs toward the audience, five drummers beat out a rhythm as hard as they could, as the other five members played smaller drums near the front of the stage.
After the performance, the audience gave Wadaiko Yamato a standing ovation.
"They are great," said Tracy Ikert, a 20-year-old junior. "You can actually feel the music."
Ikert came to the performance because she used to be a drummer and wanted to see something different.
"It felt like a drumline show, but it was so much better," Ikert said. "It is all amazing."
Allison McDermott can be reached at
Be the first to comment on this article!