COMPOSER KITARO, TAIKO DRUM GRAND MASTER TANAKA & NATIVE AMERICAN SPIRITUAL LEADER DENNIS BANKS COMMEMORATE THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARRIVAL OF THE JAPANESE KANRIN MARU ON SAN FRANCISCO BAY
Celebrating 32 years with a mission to support progressive social values, sacred community activism, trans-partisan politics, and conscious uplifting music, the producers are very pleased to announce the special guests presenting the opening blessing ceremony of the 2010 Harmony Festival (www.harmonyfestival.com) on Friday, June 11 at 5pm on the Main Stage at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, California:
For over a quarter century, KITARO has been an internationally recognized icon and globally acclaimed composer and musician. His pioneering fusion of electronic artistry, traditional Japanese forms, and pop-inflected Western idioms created a lush, harmonic, and poetic sound that won the now legendary artist a huge international following. Kitaro’s hundreds of sound collaborations and resonant, multi-textured compositions, with their crescendos of passion and oases of serenity, truly defy the constraints of any genre. At its heart, Kitaro’s music is always about sending a profound message of peace and spiritual development, both personally and globally. It offers a beautifully expressed and richly resonant experience through which to contemplate our changing world. In 2010 his latest album, Impressions Of The West Lake, was nominated for Best New Age Album at the 52nd Grammy® Awards.
Ojibwa Native DENNIS J. BANKS is one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and has spent much of his life protecting the traditional ways of Indian people and engaging in legal cases protecting treaty rights of Native Americans. At the age of nineteen, Banks joined the U.S. Air Force and served in Japan. Discharged in the late 1950s, he returned to Minnesota, where he faced the same problems as young Native American men today: alienation from his culture, unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and crime. The next forty years took him from Stillwater State Pen to seizing Alcatraz Island along with 200 other activists, to caravanning to Washington DC in a protest rally dubbed the Trail of Broken Treaties to the riots protecting Sarah Bad Heart Bull in Custer then Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to finding sanctuary on the Onondaga Reservation in New York to surrendering in 1984 after nine years living as a fugitive. In 1988, Banks organized and led a spiritual run called the Sacred Run from New York to San Francisco, and then across Japan from Hiroshima to Hokkaido. Also in 1988, his autobiography Sacred Soul was published in Japan, and won the 1988 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award. He had key roles in the films War Party, The Last of the Mohicans, and Thunderheart. He now travels the globe lecturing about and teaching Native American customs and sharing his experiences, and is writing a book on Native American philosophy which will be published in Japan.
Grand Taiko Master SEIICHI TANAKA spent his youth in Nagano prefecture and, like his father, grew into a skilled athlete, attending university on a baseball scholarship. He visited the United States in 1967 and it was during a visit to the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco’s Japantown that he discovered his calling. In 1968 Grand Master Tanaka established San Francisco Taiko Dojo, the first such school in the United States. Over the past forty years he has taught Taiko to more than 10,000 men, women, and children from all walks of life, many of whom have gone on to begin the over 200 Taiko groups throughout the United States and Canada. Grand Master Tanaka has been honored by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with its prestigious Foreign Ministers Commendation which recognizes his significant efforts in promoting the Japanese art of Taiko drumming. In 2001, he was named a National Heritage Fellow by the United States National Endowment for the Arts, widely recognized as one of America’s highest honors in folk and traditional arts.. Master Tanaka explains, “The essence of Taiko is not only skillful playing of percussive instruments, but also discipline of mind and body in the spirit of complete respect and unity among drummers.”
To put the theme of the opening ceremony into historical context, in 1860 Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate government dispatched the first Japanese embassy to the United States to exchange documents with the hopes of establishing a long-standing friendship. The Kanrin Maru was the escort ship to the USS Powhatan sent by the U.S. government, and it arrived in San Francisco on Pier 9 twelve days before the Powhatan.
Harmony Festival CEO Howard “Bo” Sapper says, “These nautical pioneers shared a spirit of adventure, openness and respect for all mankind, a philosophy which is also embedded in the roots and mission of Harmony Festival.”
As Kitaro explains, “Our ceremony will unite the voice of the heart with the voice of the earth, and open our mind to the peaceful energy within us all, in a spirit of Harmony.” This ceremony is sacred yet joyful, commemorative yet inspiring, historical yet timeless.
To Grand Master Tanaka, Taiko drumming can be expressed in one word–heartbeat. “We listen to it before we are born-it is instinctive.” Harmony Festival programming director Sean Ahearn agrees, saying, “The message of this opening ceremony will be harmony, manifested through the musical vibration of sacred drums, signifying the unification of all beings through one collective, vibrating, pulsating heartbeat.”
More detailed information about the 150th anniversary commemoration can be found in the Los Angeles Times, here:
Harmony Festival is honored to have these esteemed musical, political and spiritual leaders grace its Main Stage for this very special opening ceremony on Friday, June 11 at 5pm. Info/tickets
The gathering is open to all, and admission is included with all Friday Day tickets, as well as All-Weekend and VIP tickets.
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