peaking from experience, to the unitiated, the vast world of shakuhachi music can be
difficult to even begin to understand.
The profusion of schools, the vague aura of
sectarian conflict, and the unfamiliar musical forms
make it hard to get a handle on the scene.
It can be like trying to judge a beauty of a landscape
while being held upside down.
Many players come to the instrument
having been bewitched purely by its sound: the richness of its timbre, the subtle
variations, the shock of its special effects. But, when it comes to questions
like "who is your favorite player?", new players might not yet have an answer.
To help, the author has prepared a brief guide to the shakuhachi celebrities of the 1960s - 1980s:
Yamaguchi Goro, Yamamoto Hozan, Aoki Reibo II, Yokoyama Katsuya, and Watazumi Doso
Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the 1980s, there was
a golden age of recorded shakuhachi music.
In this time, three players who would eventually be named living national
treasures were in their prime: Yamaguchi Goro, Yamamoto Hozan, and Aoki Reibo
II. In addition to
these players, I have also included the legendary Yokoyama Katsuya, and his
notoriously eccentric teacher Watazumi Doso.
They are among some of the
most famous shakuhachi players around the world, and in their heydays, they
traveled the world playing the shakuhachi, made appearances on TV and with major
orchestras, and released an astonishing number of albums.
Of course, they are not by any means the only great players during this time:
they are simply among the most famous, especially in the United States. For this
reason I think it is good to know about them. Many of the most active players today
are linked to them in one way or another.
Once, it was said to me that listening to Yamaguchi Goro was
"like being carried to heaven on a cloud", while listening to Yokoyama Katsuya was
"like getting hit in the heart by an arrow and dying instantly". In the spirit of
these delightful Thanatic phrases, I've provided one for each player in our list.
Yamaguchi Goro (山口五郎)
Yamaguchi Goro's playing was... "Like being carried to heaven on a cloud!"
Yamaguchi Goro created would some say are definitive recordings of many the
classics of the Kinko ryu repertoire. He epitomizes a style of playing that
emphasizes subtle gradations, elegance, and a rich, dark sound. His playing has
a serenity and power that, at its best, transports you to another world.
If you are a player learning the shakuhachi in the English speaking world, you are very
likely to encounter Yamaguchi Goro's influence. By many accounts,
Yamaguchi Goro was a kind and gentle personality, and many Western students had
the great fortune of being able to study with him.
For Yamaguchi Goro, I've picked out one of three pieces traditionally considered
the oldest in the reportoire: Mukaiji Reibo. The title evokes the sound of a
flute drifting over a foggy sea. This music is best listened to on a cold, cloudy
day, when you are relaxed in a hot bath.
Yamamoto Hozan (山本 邦山)
Yamamoto Hozan's playing was... "Like being energized by a laser!"
Yamamoto Hozan had a very broad output: a master of the Tozan ryu school (you
can tell, because he has Zan in his name!), he performed (and composed!) music
in a wide eclectic variety of styles, from traditional Japanese chamber music
with koto, to modernist Classical pieces, to various styles of jazz. His playing
is smooth, balanced, tight and focused: like a laser beam tracing out shapes in the sand.
His playing is always suave, if sometimes hokey.
For Yamamoto Hozan, I've picked out one of my favorite Shakuhachi Albums of all time:
"Shakuhachi & Bossa Nova". There is an entire world of Shakuhachi Jazz Fusion,
and Hozan provides some of the earliest and most delightful examples of the
genre. Shakuhachi Jazz often walks the fine line between cheesiness and the sublime:
and, at its best, it combines them both in a heady, intoxicating brew.
This music is best listened to on a hot, long
summer evening, in the city, or on the road, cold cola at the ready.
Aoki Reibo II (二世 青木 鈴慕)
Aoki Reibo's playing was... "Like being struck by lightning!"
Of all the players on this list, Aoki Reibo was perhaps the most
dazzling. Aoki Reibo's technique was astonishing, and his playing is
athletic, dramatic, and muscular. It has a sharp-edged brilliance and
has tremendous energy behind it: it radiates confidence.
For Aoki Reibo, I've linked to a performance of Ōshū Sashi, a komuso piece not
included in the Kinko repertoire. It is a powerful, dynamic and representative
performance. Comparing and contrasting this performance with Goro Yamaguchi's
performance of Mukaiji Reibo linked above shows the tremendous range that can
exist in performance of shakuhachi honkyoku. This music is best listened to
while sharply dressed and drinking coffee.
Yokoyama Katsuya (横山 勝也)
Yokoyama Katsuya's playing was... "Like struck in the heart with an arrow and
dying instantly!"
Yokoyama Katsuya's playing is full of complexity and contradiction. It is warm and
soulful, yet precise. Yokoyama's playing, of all the players on the list, is the
one that strikes my ears as being the most filled with emotion. He famously
combines the influences of two teachers: Fukuda Rando, who composed sweet and
sentimental music, and Watazumi Doso, who played in a rough, powerful and sometimes raw
way. We can hear both elements in his music: raw expressiveness, strong
technique, emotional sensitivity, sentimentality, power, strength, and spiritual
depth.
Yokoyama Katsuya is, like Yamaguchi Goro, another player that has left a deep
mark on the English-speaking shakuhachi world. Garrulous, kind, and generous, he
taught many students, Westerners and Japanese, and formed a tightly-knit group of followers who
were deeply affected by him, and who have since spread out around the
world to teach his music. The Kokusai Shakuhachi Kenshūkan is the most notable
organization formed and run by his students, though many independent teachers
strongly influenced by Yokoyama sensei are present throughout the world.
For Yokoyama Katsuya, I've linked to a performance of San'an, one of his most
beloved pieces, which he famously took many years to learn from his teacher,
Watazumi.
For whatever reason, I find that live recordings of Yokoyama Katsuya
are more moving than his album recordings, which sometimes seem to fail to
capture the most moving elements of his playing. This music is best listened to
in the autumn, wearing a sweater in a cozy, cluttered living room,
with some toast with red bean paste and butter.
Watazumi Doso (海童 道祖)
Watazumi Doso's playing was... "Like falling into the waves!"
What is there that can be said about Watazumi Doso!
Watazumi was a exemplar of the Zen shakuhachi master:
eccentric, powerful, theatrical, recalcitrant, and abtruse.
What sets him apart, however, is the depth of his
technique: his music is suprising, incredibly dramatic, controlled and electrifying.
His phrasing and use of air is truly a delight.
His playing, however, is more of an acquired taste, in my opinion:
he is not as concerned with sounding beautiful as the other
players here, and sometimes aims, it seems, to surprise more than anything else.
He seems to have been, at once, very funny, and incredibly scary. There are a
rich store of anecdotes about this player, and he was notorious for pulling
stunts like leaving his flutes at home when invited to perform at a shakuhachi concert,
and instead bringing a staff and performing martial arts on stage
before proceeding to give an inpenetrable and esoteric lecture.
For Watazumi, I've linked this rather extraordinary video in which Watazumi
relates an incident in which he berates and then physically threatens famous
beat poet Allen Ginsberg, before performing a brief excerpt of a piece. This
music is best listened to while on shrooms on your best friend's couch.
ere are some of my thoughts on the shakuhachi: meaningless
words tossed into the wind! But hopefully amusing, or thought provoking: and if
not, I beg your forgiveness.
So, here is a little bit of my understanding of
the legendary history of the shakuhachi, as I've picked up in bits and
pieces over the years, and cobbled together into the furnishings of the ramshackle
fantasy hut in which I keep my shakuhachi dream.
As I am a myth-lover, and I can't read or speak Japanese, it is all
certainly nonsense!
The traditional story, as I've heard it, is that the modern shakuhachi
was created by a group of monks (though their religiosity, like most things in
this instrument, is disputed) called the Komuso (虚無僧), who, together, constituted the
Fuke buddhist sect. Their name, translated, means something like "Nothingness" (虚無) "Monks" (僧).
By some accounts, they were a
pretty rough bunch: largely of the samurai class, and quarrelsome and prone to violence
(some claim that the shakuhachi was partially developed with being used as a
club in mind!).
The Komuso traced their origin back to a
Chinese buddhist monk who (possibly apocryphally) somersaulted and insulted
and did all varieties of eccentric things, but who was most known for playing
a bell at all hours, a practice that, for unclear reasons,
a presumably equally eccentric disciple attempted to copy using a flute
(the shakuhachi). One can imagine the student's state of mind: my teacher
goes around making such a racket! I should too! But in my own special way...
One thing, other than their noisesome flutes, that distinguished
the Komuso was their characteristic accessory:
they wore an enormous woven basket over their head.
The basket, roughly marshmallow
shaped, completely covers the face, and allows the shakuhachi flute to
come out of the open bottom and be played while concealing your identity. Very cool!
These monks would travel from place to place, begging with
their flutes. A monk, with a hidden face and a instrument suspiciously shaped
like a club might show up outside your home or place of business, alms box
expectantly hung from their neck.
Perhaps (I speculate!) many of
the most appealing elements of shakuhachi music come from this.
Shakuhachi music is full of forceful, rough, ugly, high pitched,
and surprising noises:
could it be that the instrument was, in some occasions, used as a form of
musical extortion?
At some point, at an unclear time, a musical professionalization of
sorts began to take place. Perhaps some enterprising monk realized there
was more money in teaching rich amateurs than in begging.
In any case, it soon came to be that shakuhachi teachers existed.
Gone were the days of just wandering around, tooting your flute,
learning tunes from your
fellow monks in a free exchange (if any such days ever truly existed):
Now, you needed a teacher! And, naturally, you needed to pay your fees!
Across all cultures, the central preoccupation of all musicians has
always been the same: how do you get enough money to buy food?
Moving from the simple technique of begging, the shakuhachi players
evolved in economic sophistication, and began to sell
not only instruction, which is a natural first step, but
beyond that, authority and authenticity,
in the form of shakuhachi certifications and endorsements.
In many schools (ryu, or kai, as they're variously called),
loyalty to your teacher became, perhaps partially as a natural
outcropping of the broader Japanese culture, perhaps partially
by conscious design of the teachers, important to the extreme:
how your teacher plays was the correct way to play, and emulation
of them as exactly as possible was the supreme goal of your
studies.
In this way, good music could be thought of as a precious fluid,
being poured reverently from vessel to vessel: and you had to
be careful to not spill a single drop. And, in those days, before
the existence of recording devices, secret pieces and secret
techniques could still exist! And access to them was part of
the privilege of belonging to such a school.
Now, in this situation of a monopoly of authority, and considering
the precarity of the musician's life, the shakuhachi teachers
of the past invented various systems for extracting money
from their followers: studio membership fees, lesson fees,
concert fees, and licensing fees.
In some cases, formal systems of progression were put in place,
where you traveled from level to level, paying fees along the way.
In some ways, they created the same excitement
you see in a manga adventure, as the hero continuously powers up
on their adventure. In your shakuhachi journey, you too level
up, going from beginner level, to the intermediate level,
to finally being certified as a teacher and learning the secret
techniques and ultimate pieces of your school.
I think that there's something immensely satisfying about such a
set up, even as it is clearly very easy to be cynical about it.
One might think, given this focus on authority, that the system
might be stifling and unindividualistic: and, I think in some ways
that might be true. But, in others ways, I think that this system is,
counterintuitively, much more individualistic than the western classical
way of going about things.
In this music, the individual matters: how they play affects and
changes the musical tradition going forward.
In western music, the sheet music is in charge.
The notes on the page are taken as a more or less complete expression of the
composer's will, and the musician's job is to interpret it.
In many ways, your teacher, aside from improving your technique, doesn't
matter: what matters is you and Beethoven.
In this way, I think that western classical music is very static:
you are not really doing anything different than what your teacher did.
You are both having a conversation with Beethoven's sheet music,
starting roughly from the same place.
On the other hand, in shakuhachi music, as I've learned it,
the sheet music is much less important. The notation
is fairly incomplete: it's very much expected that much of what
you do is not written in the score, and it's not uncommon for
the notation used by performers to actually be totally wrong,
in that the notes that are played have no relation to the notes
that are written down.
So, if the sheet music is wrong, then what matters instead?
It is the way your teacher plays it.
This, to me, seems way more human and more sentimental:
what you're trying to learn
isn't a some dead thing on a page, but instead
the living, breathing, changing sound made by a real
human being as an expression of themselves.
In this way, the music music you learn is the result of a chain
of changes that goes back into the
past in a way that doesn't exist as much in western classical
music: the piece you learn is the way your teacher played it,
which is in turn a transformation of how their teacher played
it, and so on all the way back until whichever person made
the tune up.
Incredibly beautiful, don't you think?
This setup perhaps creates the foundations for some of the
more controversial practices in terms of fees and certifications
and so on (not that western music is free of such things either):
and I think it also creates the grounds for some of the drama
of the shakuhachi world.
If the definitive "copy" of the music is defined by how it is
played by a teacher, then the act of differing from your teacher
can take on a different meaning. And so the tradition of talented
players breaking off from their teacher, and making an entirely
new school with their own innovations (and own fee structures).
peaking from experience, to the unitiated, the vast world of shakuhachi music can be
difficult to even begin to understand.
The profusion of schools, the vague aura of
sectarian conflict, and the unfamiliar musical forms
make it hard to get a handle on the scene.
It can be like trying to judge a beauty of a landscape
while being held upside down.
Many players come to the instrument
having been bewitched purely by its sound: the richness of its timbre, the subtle
variations, the shock of its special effects. But, when it comes to questions
like "who is your favorite player?", new players might not yet have an answer.
To help, the author has prepared a brief guide to the shakuhachi celebrities of the 1960s - 1980s:
Yamaguchi Goro, Yamamoto Hozan, Aoki Reibo II, Yokoyama Katsuya, and Watazumi Doso
ere are some of my thoughts on the shakuhachi: meaningless
words tossed into the wind! But hopefully amusing, or thought provoking: and if
not, I beg your forgiveness.
So, here is a little bit of my understanding of
the legendary history of the shakuhachi, as I've picked up in bits and
pieces over the years, and cobbled together into the furnishings of the ramshackle
fantasy hut in which I keep my shakuhachi dream.
As I am a myth-lover, and I can't read or speak Japanese, it is all
certainly nonsense!
