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There is a chamber of danger in a certain Midtown Omaha basement.

Ken Yoshida, principal percussionist for the Omaha Symphony, demonstrates. Here is a string of tinkling brass keys hanging from the rafter. There is a group of drinking vessels clustered together to become shimmering glass chimes. Bamboo cylinders tick-tock together.

"I just kind of make my own stuff," says Yoshida, surrounded by the threatening found objects. "That's the danger of being a percussionist. Every little piece of junk has the possibility of being an instrument."

You can go to some import stores and get these things, or something like them. But they just don't make enough noise, at least not enough for the symphony, nor for a pro turned on to sound as a teenager in San Francisco, where the compelling percussion of bands like Carlos Santana's turned Yoshida's head around outside the old Winterland ballroom.

It got even more dangerous as he did graduate study in Cleveland and got to sit in with that city's famed symphony orchestra. That's where Ken Yoshida heard the "major-league" sounds that continue to drive and inspire him. "I carry that experience with me today," he says.

He started collecting as a rock 'n' rolling drummer, when he had the cash, and has added threats to his community of noisemakers ever since.

Intrigued by vaudeville and jazz drummers, whose kits contained the usual drums and cymbals, but also exotic little items used for sound effects, Yoshida pressed on. He has a great set of temple blocks from China, sanded and painted fire-engine red, that could sound like a galloping horse.

You could go to any New Age shop and find a rain stick, but it wouldn't sound as wet as Yoshida's sealed PVC pipe filled with BB's.

Up the stairs from the basement practice room is a vast and majestic-looking set of marimbas, And on upstairs is more exotic and humdrum stuff worth listening to.

His triangles are castoff machine parts, bent to clang at his bidding. There is a cluster of nasty-looking little items he identifies as camel's toenails, supposedly harvested for decoration in some remote interior design school, but they make quite an interesting clatter rattled together.

This collection has the passion of a past in it. Ken Yoshida is the son of a father who fixed cars, who worked too hard, and a mom who made him take piano lessons, then directed the band teacher to prescribe percussion for her son. From the time he was a teenager, he wanted to play music for a living, but didn't see much future in rock 'n' roll.

He graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory, then studied in Cleveland. He has a picture of his percussion master, Richard Weiner of Cleveland, in a close place among his instruments.

Clearly possessed by and attached to the sounds and colleagues from each part of his life, Yoshida winds his background from Cleveland to Mexico, where he met his wife of 17 years, Patty. They have two children, Juliet, 13, and Noah,4.

He has been in Omaha for 12 years. Still aspiring to the collegiality necessary to making big sounds, he describes the connections he has to those with whom he performs. "These people become a part of your sound. When a musician is in trouble, it hurts."

He puts his devotion where he makes his noise, too. He is a member of the negotiating committee for Local 70-558, American Federation of Musicians, representing the symphony players.

"The union part of my job is terribly important to me," he says. "The wages and working conditions for musicians say more than anything about how (the symphony) is going to sound."

One suspects he cares something like that for his little band of rhythm-makers, as he recites their history. The few beautiful old wood-frame snare drums are hard to come by, because they were made, unlike fancy violins, to be more disposable. So most were thrown away and few survive.

The brass cymbals, of course, have their own prominent place in Yoshida's world, and he muses on the sound of older Turkish pieces, how they'd sound in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He has some, probably from the 1930s, with a more clangy sound, less "bright and splashy" than newer ones.

The gong bongs deeply.

The foot-long dried Mexican bean pods, for which there are parts written in opera, rattle the assent.

The castanets chatter on their handles. A rare square tambourine agrees.

Ken recommends...

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Reprinted from the Omaha Symphony Program book with permission from:
Omaha Symphony
1605 Howard St.
Omaha, NE 68102-2705
phone: 402-342-8565
email: bravo@omahasymphony.org
website: www.omahasymphony.org

© 2006-2007 Omaha Symphony Musicians' Organization