Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

you write well; it was a pleasure to read!
welcome to the forum.

Welcome to the forum, Jim.

If you are interested in listening to more from Okuda Atsuya, I can tell you that soon or at least soonish a CD of a live recording from a concert in Finland should be coming out. Also another wonderful CD called Bamboo Zen is on its way... This is a studio recording.

The work I did with Henry and Fred was FUN to do ! They are both great musicians.

Good luck on your shakuhachi journey and I hope to hear more from you here on the forum!

Kiku Day wrote:

Welcome to the forum, Jim.

If you are interested in listening to more from Okuda Atsuya, I can tell you that soon or at least soonish a CD of a live recording from a concert in Finland should be coming out. Also another wonderful CD called Bamboo Zen is on its way... This is a studio recording.

The work I did with Henry and Fred was FUN to do ! They are both great musicians.

Good luck on your shakuhachi journey and I hope to hear more from you here on the forum!

Excellent News! Thank you for sharing! I think I saved all of your posts from the jinashi forum to my hard-drive.

I will most definately keep an eye out for those CDs along with anything you put out!

J.

Thank you everyone else for the kind words and welcome.

Mr. Cairns, it must be exciting to study Shakuhachi in Japan!

Thank You Perry!

I love all three of these flutes, but I have to say this hotchiku is my favorite! I found early from going to a 2.4 that made playing a 1.8 easier, then going from a 2.9 made technical aspects of the 2.4 easier. The hotchiku is an interesting and different story. If I'm not mistaken the angle of the utaguchi is slightly different which forced me to pay more attention to my embouchure when going back and forth between this and the other shakuahchi. Also, I expected the flexibility of tone that you mentioned to be more difficult at first, but I found it actually helped me by being more receptive to half-tones (via partial hole covering), and I also found doing meri etc. easier on this hotchiku, then all of the above transferred with more ease to the other shakuhachi. I don't know how customary it is for beginners to experiment on different size/types of flute, but I found at a very basic technical level that finding my way around on any one of the different flutes contributed to finding my way on all of them. Plus I think it adds stimulus to practice when I can switch around on different instruments. I love these long flutes and am entire sold on hotchiku - I can't tell you how much I enjoy the sound of this instrument.

Funny thing, I don't know what the temperature was in NYC when you sent the hotchiku, but it was quite warm here when it first arrived, then we were hit by a fast cold front, going from 65-70 degrees to about 40 degrees within around 12 hours, I was playing the hotchiku and heard a CRACK! You bound this very well so it had nothing to do with anything you did, but a narrow crack opened across the outer surface (not all the way throught) of the ONE joint not bound on either side! No problem, I'll follow the directions on your blog and bind it! As others have said here, it adds character to the flute, especially a hotchiku! Plus, I think everyone who owns a flute should know how to do minor repairs anyway.

Thanks again for making these excellent instruments obtainable! Right now if my house caught fire the first things I would save would be 1. my cat and 2. my Yung Flutes!

Jim

Last edited by ABRAXAS (2009-01-19 19:54:07)

I forgot to mention, my shakuhachi friend also gave me a copy of SHAKUHACHI: ASPECTS OF HISTORY, PRACTICE, AND TEACHING a 1974 doctoral dissertation by Andreas Gutzwiller that is extremely interesting. I've read through it once and plan to read through at least two more times with a notebook. I'll definitely have questions about a few things.

One aspect I appreciate about the instrument is the degree to which it was developed and used as an individual solo instrument not intended to be performed with or for others. When I was learning music from my grandfather as a kid and taking music and "band" in school, I realized early how much I preferred playing alone to playing with or for other people. I just wanted to play music for its own sake, playing with others has always felt constricting, and playing for others has always been distracting or annoying. There have only been a handful of people I enjoyed playing with, and only then because it was playing extremely unconventional music with extremely unconventional instrumental combinations, and very improvised. My grandfather was a jazz and classical musician so he had a very open and developed mind about music, but it wasn't until later that I had a good friend who was something of a genius, albeit self-destructive, who was not only extremely gifted at music but had limitless horizons about what to do with an instrument - he's the one who fully keyed me into the use of scales in improvisation with solo instruments, and who put me onto Jerry Coker's IMPROVISING JAZZ, even though I wasn't specifically interested in "Jazz" in the same sense the author was, still a useful book.

Another thing interesting about Gutzwiller is the passages about trying to comprehend shakuhachi in western musical terms; almost like reading Heisenberg trying to describe quantum indeterminacy, or H.P. Lovecraft talking about non-euclidian geometry! Yes, shakuhachi is the way to go!

ABRAXAS wrote:

Another thing interesting about Gutzwiller is the passages about trying to comprehend shakuhachi in western musical terms; almost like reading Heisenberg trying to describe quantum indeterminacy, or H.P. Lovecraft talking about non-euclidian geometry! Yes, shakuhachi is the way to go!

So. Well. Put.