Local album nominated for a Grammy

The album, titled “Island of Drums” was recorded by the Tainan-based Ten Drum Art Percussion Group and produced by the Taipei based Wind Music International Corp. It was nominated in Los Angeles Thursday with four other contenders from India, Scotland, Africa and Latin America for a Grammy, the world's biggest music award ceremony, which will take place in January.

Ten Drum Art's nomination marks the first time in 16 years that an album produced by a Taiwanese company has been nominated. The last one — Taiwan's first Grammy nomination — was an album produced by another Taipei-based music company featuring Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical The Phantom of the Opera in 1993.

The nominees for the 52nd Grammy Awards were selected in a vote by 3,600 members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States for outstanding achievements in the music industry.

Wind Music International Corp. is one of the three Taiwanese members of the academy, according to Yu Su-ying, head of Wind Music's business planning department.

Ten Drum Art founder Hsieh Shih, who began drumming at the age of 3 and who composed all five pieces on the album, expressed elation over the nomination.

Of the five, “The Gate of Taiwan, “ a 20-minute piece featuring traditional Chinese drums of all sizes along with suona — a traditional Chinese reed instrument — and dulcimers, tells the epic story of how Koxinga made landfall on the coast of Tainan's Luermen in the 17th Century, according to Hsieh.

Hsieh said that growing up at a Taoist temple run by his father meant that he was familiar with the sound of drumbeats since birth.

“I was ordered to beat the drum for a ritual one day when I was 3 as the drum player was absent that day,” he recalled.

As a 16-year-old high school student, he went on, he saw a performance by renowned Chinese percussionist Yan Xuemin and was enthralled.

“I was suddenly enlightened that playing drums was not merely folklore but could be a form of performance art that could earn high respect, “ he said.

Hsieh founded his own ensemble, the Ten Drum Art Percussion Group, in 2000, naming the company Ten Drum Art because his given name translates as Ten, while the character for the numeral 10 can also mean “energy from all directions.”

The group's performances involve not only complex drumming but also the postures of the players, he continued, adding that to perfect their performances, the players jog for 5 km every day, besides drumming at least 4,000 beats and laboring on farmland.

Hsieh described the Grammy nomination as a turning point in his career. “My goal is to build Tainan into the homeland of drumming and Taiwan into the island of drums,” he said.

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