Enjoy musical night of Taiko and Shakuhachi

Rhythm and Flow: A Community Performance of Taiko and Shakuhachi will bring two forms of Japanese music together for a rare Northwestern Wyoming performance.

Sponsored by the Park County Arts Council and the Northwest College Department of Music, the performance features artists with a strong connection to Heart Mountain.

The San Jose Taiko performers come from a part of California whose Japanese American residents were incarcerated at Heart Mountain during World War II. This is their 50th anniversary tour on which they will also appear in Sheridan. 

Gould studied shakuhachi — the Japanese bamboo flute — while living in Japan from 1980-1997. In 1994, he became one of only a handful of non-Japanese players to hold the title of “Dai Shihan” (Grand Master of Shakuhachi). He now holds two honorary titles above Dai Shihan, which places him at the highest level an artist can attain in the Japanese system. 

A Cody resident, he is also the husband of Aura Sunada Newlin, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation’s interim executive director.

This program is made possible through grants from the Wyoming Arts Council and WESTAF through funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming State Legislature.

It is part of the growing relationship between Heart Mountain and San Jose Taiko, which the foundation hopes will endure for the next 50 years and beyond. 

The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell. 

For more information, call the center at (307) 754-8000 or email info@heartmountain.org.