The Making of a Drummer

“The drums were in his bedroom, off-limits, kind of
a shrine, but I just couldn’t stay away from them,” Okimoto recalls. “One day,
I heard about a school talent contest and decided to enter it as a drummer. Now,
my father had just checked into the hospital for back surgery, so I asked Mom
to get his permission to use the set that day. He must have been surprised, but
he did say yes, finally.

“I entered the show playing behind two records.
One was by the Young Rascals, the other was a side my dad cut with Herb Ohta.
It was a bossa nova, something relatively new in American music back then. I did
fine.”

Photos: Rae Huo

Whatever his father’s house rules might
have been, he also realized that a kid who could pick up on the bossa nova on
his own was a prodigy. He became Okimoto’s first and most demanding teacher. “My
father pushed real hard,” says Okimoto. “I cried every day, but I played every
day, as well. He wanted me to know above all that the drums were not a toy.”

Okimoto
was just 10 when he joined the musicians’ union and began playing with the Ebb
Tides in Waikïkï. As he entered high school, he formed bands of his own, began
studying the vibraharp-an instrument on which he would become fluent and which
would give him new worlds of melody, harmony and musical color. His bands played
fusion, a mixture of jazz and rock popular at the time.

About a year into
college at the University of Hawai’i, he became Gabe Baltazar’s regular drummer.
“I was at the university, learning all kinds of new things-that was a haven,”
Okimoto says. “And I was playing every night with Gabe at the Cavalier. But in
1982, I’d graduated from college and gone freelance, and wondered what my next
move would be. Fortunately, the phone rang and-knock on wood-it hasn’t stopped
yet.

“I’ve made trips to Japan, Australia, and spent two months on the
road with Woody Herman’s band. But for the most part I’ve stayed here, very happy
for it all. Especially since ’88, when I was accepted into the Royal Hawaiian
Band. That makes for a steady livelihood, something very rare in a musician’s
life, and something for which I’m very grateful.”

Okimoto’s first recording
under his own name, ‘Ohana, was released last November. It is an impressive, wide-ranging
musical autobiography, co-produced by Okimoto and Roy and Kathy Sakuma, longtime
friends and, in Okimoto’s words, “dream producers.”

Okimoto
had control over the project, which is a musical joyride but always under control.
There is a fiery Latin opener (“Siete Noches”), funk (“You Buggah”), abstract
tunes (“Cinder Cone”) reminiscent of the Miles Davis groups of the late 1960s,
an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek send-up of fusion (“Displaced”), a bebop line
that might have been written in the ’50s (“Pop’s Bop”) and a very pretty ballad
(“San Francisco Rain”).

“When I was first planning this album,” he recalls,
“I was trying to decide whether it should be a concept album with a theme, or
whether it should be schizophrenic.” He pauses, and one catches a glimpse of a
determined 10-year-old kid again. “I picked schizophrenia.”