The Rafu Shimpo - L.A. Japanese Daily News

Strings of Success
By MIKEY HIRANO CULROSS
Rafu Sports Editor
Monday, Jan.15, 2007

Valencia’s Mike Penny, an unexpected virtuoso of the tsugaru shamisen, will perform this Sunday in Claremont with some of the finest players of Japanese folk music.

Photos by MIKEY HIRANO CULROSS/Rafu Shimpo
Mike Penny bought his shamisen last spring in Tokyo; it has dog skin on the body, is half electric and cost $4,000.

Penny

VALENCIA.—A first look would tell anyone that Mike Penny has had a typical teenage life. The tall, slim kid with blazing red hair lives in his parents’ Valencia home, where his hangout room is equipped with an exercise machine, a case of books and a CD player. The window looks out to the rolling Santa Clarita hills, where Penny, now 20, said he has discovered the joys of hiking.

“It’s interesting how you can develop such a disdain for the place that is so familiar to you, but once you leave you begin to notice all that it had to offer,” he said.

And Penny has certainly been away. Within his California boy persona lies a budding master of an art born far beyond these shores. Though he took it up barely two years ago, Penny has become one of America’s best performers on the shamisen, the traditional four-stringed Japanese lute-like instrument.

“I’ve played guitar since the age of 10, so I was really into classical styles, then various ethnic styles,” Penny explained. “When I was 18, I went to a music camp in Mendocino, and that’s where I met my shamisen teacher. He’s a half American, half Japanese guy named Kevin Kmetz. I saw him perform and it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

Penny and Kmetz perform this Sunday, along with renowned Japanese player Masahiro Nitta, at the Folk Music Center in Claremont. Among those joining them for the 7 p.m. show will be Tom Kurai of Taiko Center L.A.

Penny said he was instantly taken with the shamisen when he first heard it, and that he knew this was a direction he’s been seeking.

“I had already been looking for another instrument anyway; I was fooling around on trumpet and tabla, and just trying to find a new voice. I felt my style on guitar had become very ‘ethnicized,’ I was into a lot of Eastern European gypsy music from the Balkans and that region,” he said.

Gypsy music probably wouldn’t rate in the top ten genres for most teenagers, if they’d even heard of it. Penny, born in Texas and raised in California, is a musician’s musician, to whom all styles and forms hold merit.

“I like all music, it just has to be good,” he claimed.

So involved in his art is Penny, that he has foregone traditional schooling in favor of a classical-style curriculum. At the age of 18, he moved to Santa Cruz where he studied only shamisen with Kmetz daily, immersing himself in the traditional art and trying to absorb as much of its soul as he could.

Penny hasn’t eschewed a standard education altogether, however. He has been taking online college courses for a year and a half, which he said gives him a precious latitude in pursuing music.

“It’s really conducive to this lifestyle. I’ve been able to go to Japan twice this year and I just finished a West Coast tour with a gypsy group. On line college allows me to do this.”

And it’s paying off. Last May, just over a year after first picking up the instrument, Penny placed third at the prestigious Kanagi Tsugaru Shamisen Tournament in the town of Tsugaru in Japan.

Some may wonder–as I did–what is it about shamisen that would attract a young, gifted musician and hold his attention, more so than say, the glamor of the electric guitar?

“Well, I don’t want to sound culturally arrogant. I think what keeps me going is trying, through performing and my compositions, is to develop a more musical identity for shamisen,” Penny explained, choosing his words thoughtfully. “Traditionally, shamisen music was typically limited to two scales, pentatonic major and minor scales, and that’s pretty much the paradigm right now in Japan. The right-hand technique is great, but I could feel at the tournament, even among Japanese people there, that the point of these tournaments was to develop this instrument for music, not just songs that sound like exercises. I guess that’s my big incentive.”

Other young performers have heard the calling, on both sides of the Pacific. In Japan, the Yoshida Brothers are bona fide superstars, playing sold-out shows and being mobbed by girls wherever they go. Penny said he had the chance to meet the brothers backstage at another tournament, but chose a bold way to make his introduction.

“My teacher and I just went up to them and started playing one of their songs on our shamisen. They started laughing and that kind of broke the ice.”

In additional to performing regularly with Kmetz and other shamisen artists, he is a member of the Fishtank Ensemble, an inspired, eclectic group featuring musicians on violin, accordion, bass, guitar and even bowed saw. He said that other musicians are normally curious about the shamisen at first, but then they wonder if it can be played in concert with other instruments and styles.

“When they see the shamisen, they’re pretty interested, but I think until I actually start playing, they wonder how much I’ll be limited. That’s the reason I want to develop it more. You can play so much on this instrument. You can play Bach on this,” he said.

The Fishtank Ensemble, whose selections range from gypsy to flamenco to traditional Japanese styles, is planning an extensive tour of the U.S. Southwest, beginning in February.

Perhaps unsatisfied with his third-place finish at the tournament last year, Penny has begun to seriously consider moving to Japan.

“Third in last year’s competition was nice,” he said. “I want to be tops next time.”

Mike Penny will perform with the Monsters of Shamisen, Sunday at The Folk Music Center, 220 Yale Avenue in Claremont. $10. Call (909) 624-2928.

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