Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

There are at least two books covering this territory:

Chris Blasdel's "the Single Tone".

Ray Brooks' "Blowing Zen"

In the meantime one of the people on myspace asked me how I got into shakuhachi and here's what I wrote:

I have always been interested in various musical instruments. I spent my entire high school years experimenting with every instrument they had in the band and orchestra room. You can hear that on the Femmes recordings where besides bass I also play guitar, xylophone, drums, sax, bouzouki, and so on.

I was living in NYC and I read an article in the NY Times describing a flute convention that was going on at the Marriot Times Square. It said there would be flutes from around the world, which I was interested in, and particularly mentioned the elusive Zen flute of Japan, the shakuhachi.

I had already experimented with the shakuhachi at a store in Japantown San Francisco and was defeated. This galled me. After that I had read an article by Monty Levenson talking about its relationship to Buddhism and some of the esoteric background of the instrument, so I was intrigued.

I went to the convention and goofed around with a bunch of different flutes, Western and Eastern. I found the shakuhachi and this time I was able to play it, unlike my experience in SF. At this point I was approached by a fellow who handed me his business card and said, "If you would like to learn how to play this instrument, give me a call". This was James Nyoraku Schlefer, who ended up being my teacher for seven years. In fact once someone is your teacher they are always your teacher.

I bought the shakuhachi, but I thought, "Me, take lessons...indeed!" because I am a self taught musician and arrogant about this fact. Nevertheless I called James and started lessons. Soon I realized how deep the instrument and the music was. I learned the Japanese notation and went through the entire process until I got my Jun Shihan, which is a certificate which qualifies me to teach others. After that I went out on my own and at this point I teach myself and others.

I like you approached the shakuhachi through the western flute. I was performing and teaching the flute and recorder in Ireland. I played a lot of contemporary music and came across the shakuhachi. I then got the opportunity to buy a shakuhachi through Dan Mayers. He introduced me to another flautist and superb shakuhachi player, Sunny Yeung. I received some lessons from him in London and Hong Kong. I was then fortunate to spend two years working in Japan and took lesons there.  Since returning back to Ireland, I got more into making my own shakuhachi. 

Check out a former colleague and shakuhachi student of mine based in NY, Yuko Yamamoto. She wrote a thesis based on her encounter with the shakuhachi as a flautist and being Japanese. Her email is yuko.yp@gmail.com.

Hi Alex,

I came to Kochi, Japan in the summer of 1986, and upon my first trip to Kyoto that December, I stayed in a minshuku (cheap Japanese style inn) for a couple of days where one of the other inn guests was carrying around a couple of shakuhachi; it was the first time I'd ever seen the instrument.  The other guest, who was an American living in the Amami islands south of Kyushu, asked me to join him in looking for bamboo flutes in several antique shops in the Gion area of the city.  I was initially drawn to the instrument because of the simplicity of its appearance, and I found the look and feel of the bamboo more attractive than that of the brass instruments (trumpet and horn) I had played in marching and concert bands in junior high and high school.  Upon returning to Kochi I vowed to look for a teacher, and just by chance about half a year later happened to run into a Japanese guy carrying a shakuhachi at Kochi's Nichioichi, a Sunday outdoor market, where farmers from the countryside bring their produce to sell every weekend.  The player, named Kei, happened to be fairly fluent in English, and ran a small English language school (where I later ended up teaching;  some years later Kei joined a Zen monastery in Japan and eventually ended up as a monk in Burma) and had just been learning the flute for a few months with a teacher who had recently gotten his license from a shakuhachi master living in Tokyo (Fuji Jido) and he drove me out to the teacher's house, out amidst the rice fields in the countryside outside of Kochi; there were only some narrow paths amidst the fields leading to the house at that point and we'd park our car and then navigate in the dark through the rice paddies to get to the sensei, Ikezoe san's house, our weekly trek.  There I started lessons, and Kei luckily translated for me as my Japanese language skills were still pretty nonexistent at that point.  I began learning on a pvc pipe flute given to me by the sensei until about a year later, when I happened to find a used shakuhachi in a koto/shamisen shop in town; then I really got serious about the flute and started studying gaikyoku and honkyoku, eventually getting my junshihan license about six years later, and my shihan menkyo another six or seven years after that.  I was fascinated by the history of the instrument, the stories of the komuso, and the whole idea of suizen, or 'blowing zen.'  I learned to play reading the traditional Kinko tablature -- my teacher didn't read Western notation -- and I didn't have much of a clue as to what was going on in the rest of the shakuhachi world, though I did pick up Christopher Blaesdel's book on the shakuhachi soon after it came out, and also heard my first Neptune recordings when backpacking through the Okinawan islands -- hitchhiking on Iriomote, and got picked up by a rice farmer kind enough to put me up for a couple of days; he still used a water buffalo for plowing and put on some of John Kaizan's music when he saw that I was toting a shakuhachi.  Then I happened to attend the first International Shakuhachi Festival in Bisei-cho, Okayama, in 1994, thanks to the invitation of a shakuhachi player in Kochi named Yamamoto, and met shakuhachi players from other parts of Japan and from various  countries for the first time.  As for where it has taken me, I've been lucky to meet, learn from, and play with a variety of musicians, some of them shakuhachi players, some of them players of other instruments, musicians from various cultures (some incredible virtuosos too!), and involved in a number of different genres.  It's been a continual and enjoyable challenge learning and working with Japanese traditional music and also improvizing and experimenting around with musicians involved in other areas of music, and now I'm trying to do some teaching of the shakuhachi myself, and getting to learn from my own students.  Although I don't actually make a living from the instrument it has been much more than simply a hobby and has enabled me to meet people and get to places in the world that I probably never would have gotten to otherwise.  Concerning the Western flute tradition, I don't play any  side blown instrument myself but I was excited to find out about an ancestral connection with flutes from that area of the world.  About  a decade ago my grandmother showed me a family tree she'd been hiding away in her bank vault and I found out that one of my ancestors was a flute player at the court of Elizabeth I (a fellow named Nicholas Lanier) as were several of his descendents; it was nice to hear out about that historical connection with flute playing.  Best of luck with your journey on the shakuhachi path.

Last edited by Daniel Ryudo (2006-11-29 21:02:11)