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The crowded dance floor is dark and fetid as the headliners take the stage. The warm air tastes like whiskey and sweaty anticipation; everyone who’s anyone in this little corner of Georgia knows the Wormhole’s main act never gets hot before eleven, and the churning bodies blow the scent out past poor souls waiting at the gates as the Gods of Shamisen strap on their sacred instruments. Lee Smith’s iconic dreads start to shiver as his twin sticks tap out a tricky tattoo, a thrash drum solo challenging Mark Thornton to lay a bass line smooth enough to bring the metal fans back to the hardwood in time to lose their mind as the band launches into the first set.
It works. The beat explodes and the dance floor becomes a mosh pit as Savannah natives rejoice in the traditional metalhead manner, sturdy black boots tramping out a bone-jarring beat as the lead vocalist unstraps his secret weapon: a flimsy bamboo banjo. Startled silence settles over the audience, to be replaced by wild cheers as the sweet sounds of the shamisen launch the seedy club headlong into a radical re-imagining of a Motorhead classic.
God of Shamisen rides the bleeding edge of a new trend in music fusion: the world’s first rock band to combine elements of contemporary metal, funk, and progressive rock with the soothing sound of traditional Japanese folk instruments. For this quartet of young Bay Area musicians their instrument of choice is (appropriately) the shamisen, an ancient Japanese lute. Ringleader Kevin Kmetz is the first foreign musician in history to master the shamisen, compete against Japanese masters and win the honorary Daijo Kazuo Award for excellence; now he’s returned to the U.S. bearing a new genre of music he calls Asian bluegrass metal, an alternative sound that no one on either shore has ever heard before. But Kmetz’s unique brand of tsugaru-shamisen (a regional variant of the traditional lute built smaller and lighter to accommodate flashy showmanship and a freewheeling, improvisational style) is far from the first brush Bay Area audiophiles have had with foreign folk rock; for more than a decade ancient Japanese music has been popping up in jazz clubs and metal bars across the nation, a fresh take on tradition that entertainers like Wesley Ueunten believe people need to know about.
“When Japanese and Okinawan music gets appropriated, a lot of the context gets lost in the process,” he explained in a recent interview with the Nichi Bei Times. Ueunten is an Asian American Studies professor and one of the best Okinawan folk musicians in San Francisco, and together with Tokyo native DJ Shing02 he hopes to educate people about the history behind the hot new trend. “A lot of the promotion of Okinawan song and dance today is about selling something exotic,” he claims. “But you can’t really feel and experience the true meaning of Okinawan music without some sort of political consciousness.”
For Ueunten the rising popularity of shamisen music in America is a grim reminder of the poor treatment the people of his native Okinawa received at the hands of the Japanese government. First imported from China by Okinawan traders in the 16th century, the modern Japanese shamisen is essentially a carbon copy of the Okinawan sanshin lute which was a prominent part of the smaller island’s (previously known as the Ryukyu Kingdom) culture and religious festivals before it was annexed by the Japanese government in 1872. It may seem trivial, but for native Okinawans living in the Bay Area this new sound drums up unwelcome memories of being treated as second-class citizens.
“Even today hearing the word shamisen tossed around in clubs just reminds me of being back in Japan,” admits Ueunten. “It used to be a very derogative and discriminatory term.”
But even hurtful memories of home are sometimes welcome for Japanese-Americans who emigrated to the U.S. in the wake of World War II, and so Ueunten found himself playing shamisen with DJ Shing02 (a popular Japanese-American musician and human rights advocate) for Japanese cultural associations scattered throughout the East Bay. In a strange way, the recent popularity of Japanese folk music among Western audiences has helped heal the divide some native Okinawans still feel, as cultural curators like Ueunten have noticed the number of students enrolling in shamisen lessons has more than tripled in the past decade. “I used to offer free lessons in Okiniwa-guchi [the regional dialect of the Okinawa islands] to a lot of Okinawan women, wives and daughters of U.S. servicemen who came back to America after the Second World War,” says Ueunten. “But that was back in the 80’s; nowadays all my lessons are in Japanese, because all my students are Japanese-American kids wanting to learn more about their heritage. For them, the rising popularity of folk music is validation that their culture can be cool again.”
The sudden surge of shamisen fever can be laid almost entirely at the feet of one Kevin Kmetz, an Army brat who grew up in northern Japan and crossed the border daily to attend high school on Misawa Base, an American Air Force base established in Aomori prefecture. The son of an American mechanic and a Japanese schoolteacher, Kmetz was often accompanied by the call of “gaijin kid” on his daily walks back and forth between two countries, but never accepted the catcalls of his classmates as an insult. “Most of the neighborhood kids were my friends; it just so happened that I was a gaijin (foreigner) to them.”
Kmetz cites his teenage years on the military base as his first stumbling introduction to classic rock and roll artists like The Who, and after falling in with a group of rebellious metalheads from other military families he came to embrace foreign aspects of American culture like electric guitars, heavy metal music and ridiculous haircuts.
To understand what makes the rising popularity of the tsugaru-shamisen so interesting, it’s important to realize that, just like the lanky Kevin stands (or more accurately, slouches) out on a crowded Japanese train in his torn jeans and dirty flannels, so too the awkward-looking instrument represents a quiet rebellion against the conventions of traditional Japanese folk music. A tsugaru-shamisen is a longer and more delicate regional variant of the Japanese shamisen, a three-stringed lute (the name sha-mi-sen literally translates to “three tasteful lines”) which itself is an evolution of the Chinese sanxian brought to Okinawa in the 16th century. Similar in length and heft to the banjos built by African slaves on the sprawling plantations of post-colonial America, the shamisen was associated with traditional Japanese folk music, kabuki theatre and bunraku puppetry throughout much of the island nation’s history.
The rise of tsugaru-shamisen (the name can be used interchangeably to refer either to the instrument itself or the style of music it spawned) can be traced back to the legend of an outcast musician who wandered the roads of 19th century rural Japan in search of sustenance. Born into a family of low social status, Akimoto Nitaro was a bosama, a blind musician and vagabond who traveled between cities performing music in return for charity. Barred due to his low birth from joining the guild of professional shamisen performers who controlled the theatres, Nitaro was forced into the life of the hoido (a group of outcast beggar musicians,) taking up the name Nitabo and developing a new style of shamisen music which relied heavily on free improvisation and flashy fingerwork to keep listeners entertained and food on the table (or mat, floor or barren earth, depending on the generosity of the host.)
Tsugaru-shamisen is often jokingly referred to among Japanese music critics as a recently invented ancient tradition, because despite the style’s relatively late birth (the term tsugaru-shamisen does not appear in any historical texts before 1940, whereas the war drums which would eventually birth a myriad of percussive instruments that Americans know simply as taiko have been a part of Japanese history since the feudal era,) the lexicon of tsugaru-shamisen music is comprised almost entirely of traditional Japanese court performance pieces. The wandering bosama would mix and match snatches of well-known tunes from historic Noh dramas and popular folk tales with snippets of their own music to keep the audience interested (and the charity bowl full.) These itinerant musicians developed the music remix over a decade before European and American DJs like Tom Moulton began experimenting with mixing and matching popular disco tunes in the 1960s. But where artists like Moulton experimented with music from a wide variety of genres and cultures (including Jamaican reggae and Brooklyn funk,) early tsugaru-shamisen players were limited by Japan’s tendency towards cultural isolation to playing only the most traditional chords and melodies.
But Japanese musicians were hit with a bombshell of fresh ideas in the latter half of the 20th century. The U.S. military rushed to build permanent outposts throughout Japan in the wake of the second world war, and the occupying forces brought with them artifacts of 1950’s American culture that were alien to Japanese civilians. In the remote rural reaches of northern Honshu an old Japanese airstrip was appropriated to serve as a permanent home for U.S. troops stationed in Aomori prefecture, and to ease their homesickness a local radio station sprang up that rebroadcast popular American music. A member of the wartime F.E.N. ( Far East Network,) the station began playing popular hits from home that included American country, blues and classic jazz.
But American troops were not the only audience tuning in on a regular basis. The F.E.N. (today known as the American Forces Network Japan, or AFN-J) was originally established to broadcast propaganda to the Japanese during the war; many civilians and former soldiers continued to listen after the surrender, and in Aomori many tsugaru-shamisen players heard for the first time a musical tradition which glorified the same improvisational skills and flashy musical showmanship that had made them such an anomaly in traditional Japanese culture.
Players like Shirakawa Gunpachiro and Takahashi Chikuzan (the very man who, decades later, would drag his broken body up on stage to blow the mind of 14-year-old Kevin Kmetz) started to experiment with strange foreign melodies and immediately felt a strange kind of connection with luminaries like Lu Watters and Wade Mainer, a kinship that was even more startling when Japanese audiences learned the American musicians were often young men of poor working-class background, a stark contrast to the traditional Japanese folk musician (usually an elderly blind man or woman, though occasionally geisha were trained to accompany court performances.)
Here again we see a striking similarity between the development of the freewheeling tsugaru-shamisen style and the evolution of American jazz from the improvisational bluegrass breakdowns that were popular among African-Americans at the dawn of the 20th century. The same casual disregard for convention and tradition that makes tsugaru-shamisen stand out from hidebound Japanese culture makes the instrument a perfect accompaniment to the improvisational allure of contemporary American jazz music.
The night before his fourteenth birthday Kmetz’s mother dragged him kicking and screaming (literally) to a traditional Japanese music concert, a taste of local culture that stuck with the young gaijin throughout his life. Determined to be bored by the entire performance, Kmetz was nevertheless drawn in to the performance of an old blind man who hobbled onto center stage carrying a cherished shamisen.
“This was Takahashi Chikuzan, who’s possibly the most legendary tsugaru-shamisen master of all time,” says Kevin with fond enthusiasm. “As he played I remember thinking I was going into a state of shock from the sheer awesomeness of the tone and feelings that were flowing out of his hands through the strings.” Kmetz returned to his electric guitar and his heavy metal friends the next morning certain that an outsider like himself could never be accepted into a shamisen school or find a traditional master willing to instruct him. To cope, the young metalhead began secretly collecting all the Japanese records he could find that featured a shamisen player, even those featuring barebones accompaniment to Noh plays, taiko drums or Minyo song performances.
Kmetz eventually came to the U.S. to study music theory in college, and after graduating from the Cal Arts School of Music with a degree in music composition he moved to Santa Cruz and joined the band Estradasphere. He joined as a lead guitarist but was fascinated with the group’s love of incorporating world music (African drums, Italian flutes etc.) into their performances and began to wonder whether or not his heritage had something to contribute to what he calls the “California world music scene.” Recalling his love of the frail Japanese shamisen, he took a few months off at the end of 2002 to return to Japan and seek out a teacher willing to train a foreigner in the basic techniques and melodies of traditional Japanese folk music.
“Kevin is incredibly passionate; he devotes his entire life to one thing until he masters it,” says Nao Nakazawa, a documentary filmmaker who shadowed Kevin on his pilgrimage “Without passionate crazies like Kevin traveling around the world to find new ways of making music, America would be a wasteland.”
Nakazawa followed Kmetz for more than two years after he returned to America in 2003 with an authentic handcrafted shamisen. The wandering minstrel rejoined his bandmates with a shamisen in hand, and immediately began to incorporate the traditional melodies of his Japanese master (an eccentric shamisen player named Akihito Narumi, leader of the folk ensemble group Shirakami) into what Estradasphere was creating in the recording studio. For years Kevin devoted himself to mastering this little-known folk instrument that resembles nothing so much as a gawky preteen banjo, venturing almost daily into the streets of downtown Santa Cruz, California to take part in solo street performances.
To this day he continues to strum his shamisen on the same sunny street corners; he never asks for money in return, and indeed speaks fondly of joining other street players and performers for impromptu jam sessions. “In Santa Cruz I wanted to get together with a variety of musicians like sitar players, percussionists, guitarists and the like to really see how shamisen would work in all kinds of jam session situations.”
Eventually (Kevin does not recall the exact month) he joined together with friends and fellow musicians from the Bay Area and formed God of Shamisen (and another side project, the Fishtank Ensemble) to explore how well a traditional shamisen player might be received among contemporary music fans. Both experiments prove successful, and to this day Fishtank Ensemble focuses primarily on producing what Kmetz calls “Eastern European gypsy jazz,” while the members of God of Shamisen promote themselves in local Bay Area clubs as a form of Japanese-American heavy metal fusion.
What Kevin is trying so hard to achieve in America is fame and controversy, and he admits to being disappointed when his antics fail to get the crowd riled up. “When we first began to do God of Shamisen live shows they were totally over the top heavy metal in nature. We used to use fake blood on stage and we had a routine in which a staff member would be escorted on stage to be ‘sacrificed’ to the gods,” recalls Kmetz. “Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten nearly the level of resistance I was hoping for.”
Indeed the few U.S. shows God of Shamisen has played have been enthusiastic successes, though Kmetz is still far more popular among the people of his adopted homeland. Kevin became the first foreigner to win the Daijo Kazuo award in May of 2005 at the Tsugaru-Shamisen Championship in Kanagi, a feat which instantly won him widespread adulation among Japanese music fans eager to embrace an exotic foreigner (At 6’2” and 245 pounds, Kmetz is a hulking presence on the crowded streets of Aomori with a shaggy goatee and a shock of dark brown curls exploding out from beneath his battered baseball cap.) He’s gone on to place in other national shamisen competitions in 2006 and 2007, but it was that initial groundbreaking recognition that earned him fans, press coverage and even a full-page article in the latest Japanese musical history book by Daijo Kazuo himself, an award-winning writer and music historian whose novel dramatizations of Japanese myth are responsible for popularizing the “Nitabo” theory that the tsugaru-shamisen school of music was borne from one gifted musician.
Winning the honorary Kazuo award means Kmetz is still one step below being named the actual National Shamisen Champion in Japan, an honor he hopes to earn in the near future. “It’s not enough to just whip out this weird-looking guitar and start wailing on it for laughs,” claims Kmetz.”A lot of fans think I just play shamisen for the shock value, but they never hear me practice the traditional nagauta songs that were once played in the palace of the Emperor.”
Yet so far traditional instruments like the shamisen have been well-received among fans of both traditional and contemporary music in the Bay Area, a happy coincidence which puzzles Kmetz. A staunch adherent to the hard rocker’s creed of shock and awe, God of Shamisen performances are always rife with over-the-top antics and face-melting shamisen solos. Audiences at a GoS show last September were treated to buckets of fake gore and the spectacle of live human sacrifice as a member of the staff (“a polite term for roadie,” chuckles Kmetz,) was led on-stage and ceremonially slain to appease the Japanese rock gods. Kmetz admits to deliberately pumping up his stage presence to attract and offend a wider audience, often wearing a blood-red traditional Japanese hakama and gi (what most Americans might recognize from movies as stereotypical samurai comfort wear) and trying to be as controversial as possible wielding nothing but a scrawny lute and a tiny turtle-shaped plucker (known as a bachi) in a club full of pumped-up metal fans.
“It’s not easy, but we try to put on the most exaggeratedly heavy metal show we can to blow the kids’ minds with this new sound,” says Kevin with a straight face. “Make sure you put three ‘x’s in that last ‘exaggeratedly’ when you write it down, because we are that hardcore.”
Still, album sales have dropped precipitously since the global financial crisis began in 2007 and even in better years the band’s albums were never profitable. In Japan the group enjoys a great deal of popular support from fans of traditional shamisen music who are pleased to hear Americans embracing their music. “Many Japanese fetishize Westerners, so Kevin and others like him enjoy a great deal of success with our audience,” claims Mori Mariko, the marketing agent who represents Kmetz’s band through their Japanese record label EMI Japan. “The problem is, the audience for traditional folk songs is too small for Kevin to make a big impression.”
Here in America, the band suffers from a lack of tour presence (each member of GoS is working on multiple musical projects simultaneously, and so the group is rarely together long enough to commit to a serious touring schedule) more than anything else; according to Mark Thornton, audience turnout is steadily rising and band merchandise always sells out during a tour. God of Shamisen isn't likely to strike it rich, but Thornton and the others are thankful for their cult following. “Any success we have is absolutely the fault of the fans, because without word of mouth and t-shirt sales God of Shamisen wouldn’t exist," says Thornton. "Shit, I’m still not sure we exist!”
