Takashi Hirayasu

The music of Okinawa, the biggest island in the Ryuku Island chain south of mainland Japan, continues to be driven from the innovative playing of multi-instrumentalist Takashi Hirayasu. A founding person in Shokichi Kina and Champloose, Hirayasu helped to create Western rock and roll and electric tools to Okinawa’s traditional music, min’yo. His small, rhythmic playing was a significant in the achievement of the band’s 1977 strike solitary, “Haisai Oji-San” (Hello Uncle) and Bloodline, the recording that Shokichi Kina and Champloose documented with American guitarist Ry Cooder. A commitment to globe music is a guiding push throughout Hirayasu’s profession. As well as the acoustic guitar, he takes on sanshin, a normal Okinawan three-stringed snake pores and skin banjo. This wish to explore a number of musical affects led him to keep Champloose in the middle-’90s. As he described within an interview with Folk Origins, “I love all sorts of rhythms, such as for example African, Caribbean, and Southern Rock and roll, but, Kina just enjoyed Okinawan rhythms.” An identical global view established the building blocks for Hirayasu’s debut record, Kariyushi Simply no Tsuki. As he informed Folk Root base, “This record is similar to the culmination of most my encounters and affects — in the Ventures while i was 16 to Adam Dark brown, the Allman Brothers, Indian, and African music.” In 1999, Hirayasu became a member of pushes with American glide electric guitar wiz Bob Brozeman to record an record, Jin Jin/Firefly, that fused their diverse customs. The record was recorded, based on the liner records, within a “little, traditional, wooden home on Taketomi, one of the most unspoilt from the Ryukyu islands of Okinawa.” The record was a significant hit in European countries where it reached the quantity two position over the globe music graphs. In July 2000, Hirayasu and Brozeman became a member of with Greek comedian/metropolitan blues musician George Pilali and Hindustani brothers Debashish and Subhasis Bhattachayarya on glide electric guitar and tabla for Okinawan, American, Indian, and Greek jam periods on the Winnipeg and Quebec Folk Celebrations. Initially motivated by traditional western music, Hirayasu performed blues, R&B and rock and roll in the pubs and clubs encircling American armed forces bases on Okinawa. His launch to traditional Okinawan tracks emerged through Tsuneo Fukuhara, a musician, manufacturer, and owner of Marafuko Information, Okinawa’s oldest record label. His experimentation with such compositions continuing on 2001’s Nankuru Naisa.