Karen Falkenstrom has just gotten back from a gig in Arcosanti,
playing Japanese drums for famed architect Paolo Soleri at his 90th
birthday party.

Now all she has to do is get her giant taiko drum out of the van and
into the warehouse studio she and her band, Odaiko Sonora, bought
almost three years ago. The drum is enormous, and it looks to be even
taller than it is wide. With a visiting reporter flailing alongside
her, more hindrance than help, Falkenstrom eases it out of the van and
onto a dolly.

“It’s not really that heavy,” she says after she parks the
instrument inside the studio in the industrial area east of Armory
Park. She’s being modest. Falkenstrom is strong from drumming the last
eight years, and her biceps are as buff as Michelle Obama’s. A good
thing, too, because Falkenstrom has been banging the drums almost
nonstop the last two months.

“We’ve been more busy this May and June than ever before,” she
says.

After the star-studded Soleri gig over the weekend of June 20, she
and bandmates Rome Hamner and Nicole Levesque were to head to Safford
to do a residency at a high school where “90 percent of the kids are
Apache.” Then it was up to Triangle Y Ranch in Oracle for a
leadership-training camp for UA students.

Falkenstrom has also been busy picking up prizes. The Pan-Asian
Community Alliance named her Woman of the Year for 2009. Last year, she
was a YWCA Woman on the Move, and Odaiko Sonora got a 2008 Lumie for
emerging arts group.

But in June, Falkenstrom got the biggest arts award in town. The
Community Foundation for Southern Arizona gave her the Arizona Arts
Award, with a cool cash prize of $25,000.

“It’s an incredible honor,” Falkenstrom says. After 25 years of
laboring in the art trenches, and writing endless grants, she is
delighted to get an award that recognizes artistic excellence, pure and
simple: “It’s not based on need. It sees me for my art.”

Falkenstrom was one of five nominees for the prestigious grant. The
other finalists—poet and author Richard Shelton, Navajo poet
Laura Tohe, painter Barbara Rogers and mixed-media artist John
Salgado—each got $1,000.

“It was especially poignant for me to be with Richard and Laura,”
Falkenstrom noted; before she picked up taiko, she was a poet with a
number of published works to her credit.

Artists can’t apply for the Arizona Arts Award, and the five
nominators and the judges are top-secret. Once the five are named, the
artists are invited to prepare a presentation that must be left behind
for the judges to view.

Falkenstrom and Hamner, her life partner and co-founder of Odaiko
Sonora, “pulled out all the stops,” Falkenstrom said.

They made a DVD that walked the judges through Falkenstrom’s bio and
introduced them to taiko. “I had to explain the art form first,” she
said, by drumming in taiko’s hypnotic rhythms. The DVD also chronicled
her dizzying array of arts-community enterprises.

In her 20 years in Tucson, Falkenstrom has worked everywhere from
the UA Poetry Center to the Tucson Weekly to the Center for
Creative Photography to the Tucson Pima Arts Council. She co-founded
Kore Press with Lisa Bowden, and she was an organizer of the Among
Other Things … reading series. She worked with the Tucson Poetry
Festival and was one of the founders of Don Gest’s In Concert!
presenting series. She played bodhrán with The Mollys and
performed her poetry with the Bad Girls Storytelling Brigade.

And that was before she plunged into taiko drumming, built her own
drums, composed new music, taught the art form and within a few years
built up a thriving nonprofit and performing group.

Oh, and there’s the little matter of the arts space she bought in
2006, to save Odaiko Sonora and other arts groups from the depredations
of landlords and the threat of eviction. Dubbed the Rhythm Industry
Performance Factory, it’s now home to at least nine arts groups,
including Thom Lewis Dance—which contributed the Marley dance
floor—and Batucaxé.

“I’m not anybody’s usual concept of an artist,” Falkenstrom
acknowledges.

Now 46, she grew up in suburban Washington D.C., in Fairfax County,
Va. “Music was my first language,” she said. Her father played violin
in the U.S. Air Force Symphony Orchestra, and her mother, a Korean
immigrant, was an opera singer and ballet dancer; she eventually
switched to a career in education. Falkenstrom played violin and piano
as a child, but gave up both in high school.

“I was supposed to be a doctor or an electrical engineer,” she said.
“I was a tomboy, and my mother wanted a princess.” She did get a
bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1984 at the University of
Virginia, but even as an undergrad, she wrote poetry.

After college, she worked by day as a draftsperson in an
architectural firm in Richmond, but “my free time was spent on poetry
and music.” She immersed herself in the alternative arts scene,
co-founding a co-op called Urban Artists Amalgamated. She loved
studying the art of architecture, but found its practice dispiriting,
“changing the door frame in anonymous houses. It was very
male-dominated. I resented it, being ‘little-lady-ed.'”

She came out to Tucson and enrolled in the UA’s MFA program in
creative writing in January 1990. Partly inspired by a history of women
in architecture class taught by Abigail Van Slyck, her poetry thesis,
The Mud Larks, was infused with architectural terms.

For a half-dozen years, she had that rare thing: a paying job in
poetry. Alison Deming, the poet who then led the UA Poetry Center,
hired her to organize a traveling exhibit and to coordinate events. “I
sat in the kitchen, and Alison sat in the pantry,” she says.

Falkenstrom was deeply involved in Tucson’s poetry scene, as a
publisher of Kore Press, at the Poetry Festival, and as a poet herself.
She was publishing in the journals—Colorado Review, Prairie
Schooner—that lead to book contracts. But by the mid-’90s,
she burned out on the printed word.

“I got tired of poetry. If you work in a field long enough, you see
what’s not pretty.” Still, she adds, “Poetry’s rhythm and musicality
planted the seeds” for the music she would later play.

Looking for a new focus for her life, she took a peaceful
compositing job at a publishing company and then headed to Korea, her
mother’s homeland, where she lived and taught for a year. When she came
back to Tucson, she worked a series of arts-related jobs. While she did
editorial layout at the Weekly, she went to the Food Conspiracy
Co-op for a story, and happened to meet Hamner. And Hamner happened to
tell her she was studying taiko drumming right here in Tucson with Stan
Morgan, a “stubborn white guy.”

Falkenstrom had been entranced when she saw Kodo, a Japanese taiko
band some years before, but she had never been able to find a teacher.
She signed up for lessons, and before long, she was hooked. When Morgan
fell ill, she and Hamner started Odaiko Sonora to keep the art form
alive in Tucson.

“I became addicted to taiko,” she remembered. “It used every part of
me—intellectual, physical, spiritual and artistic. It worked all
of that. It required me to use my highest and best self. Poetry helped
me walk in the world, but taiko used everything.”

After years of worrying about money, Falkenstrom is pondering what
to do with her $25,000 windfall. Some of it will pay for taiko study in
Japan and for classes in Okinawan dance in California. She may plow
some of it into the Rhythm Industry mortgage. But she’s tempted, she
says, to buy an Asano, the Stradivarius of taiko drums.

Characteristically, she’s also thinking of others who could use a
chunk of her change. She’s considering paying for a small fountain in
the rock garden at the Poetry Center, or maybe funding a cash prize for
the next winner of the Lumie emerging artist award.

“I’m trying to give back,” she says.

This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2009.