On his saxophone-free 2024 album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, Shabaka Hutchings plays a lot of different flutes. However, the one he seems most committed to, the one he poses with in photos, and loves to talk about, is the Japanese shakuhachi. It’s held in front like a clarinet, made of thick bamboo, and the root is left on as a feature. You blow against a crescent-shaped notch, and getting a note is a knack, which can be tricky at first. But that crescent allows for a lot of sound colour and timbre variation. This is one of the flute’s attractions; another is a long tradition of Buddhist associations with the solo repertoire.

In the past three decades, the shakuhachi has become surprisingly popular outside Japan. An international network of summer schools, online workshops and so on has reached the point where Japanese musicians look overseas with a certain envy that there can be so much activity. In Japan, meanwhile, the instrument retains a strong identity with Japanese nationality, but few have actually seen it played. This playlist offers some highlights from the traditional and contemporary worlds of shakuhachi.

Katsuya Yokoyama
“Tsuru No Sugomori”
From Japon. L’Art Du Shakuhachi (Ocora, 1997)

Among the great postwar shakuhachi players, Katsuya Yokoyama (1934–2010) always seemed to stand out. Of course there were other greats – Hozan Yamamoto, who recorded A Bell Ringing In The Empty Sky for Nonesuch; Aoki Reibo; and my own teacher Kohachiro Miyata – but Yokoyama, often found relaxing with a cigarette, was the boss. In 1967 he premiered Toru Takemitsu’s November Steps in New York, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the New York Philharmonic and Tsuruta Kinshi playing a biwa lute. This was a breakout moment for the instrument.

Here he offers a muscular rendition of “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Cranes Nesting”), complete with rococo trills and flutters as he represents the birds strutting and displaying. “Tsuru” is a honkyoku piece, that is, the repertoire handed down orally for hundreds of years and compiled in the 18th century by Kurosawa Kinko (1710–71). Such pieces vary considerably from player to player, and each master has the right to create their own version of a traditional number.

Mamino Yorita
TV interview

When I interviewed Shabaka about the shakuhachi in 2022, he told me he had repeatedly watched this clip, a Japanese TV segment about Mamino Yorita. A generation ago the world of shakuhachi, like several other areas of Japanese cultural life, was entirely male. Non-Japanese women hoping for music lessons struggled to find a teacher less hidebound by tradition. Yorita, from Kyoto, has been playing since age nine, and qualified as a master in her mid-teens. We see her perform the “Tsuru” piece played above by Yokoyama (one of her teachers), and talk about what she hopes to achieve, namely to give young Japanese a chance to hear the instrument.

Although the interview questions are well informed, we get a sense of Japanese bewilderment when confronted with their own traditional culture. And the dreaded “kubi-furi sannen” crops up. This means “it takes three years to learn how to shake your neck”, and is quoted by everyone to underline the flute’s extreme difficulty. Yorita handles the curveball with aplomb: while agreeing that it takes a whole year to produce one note, she points out that she played it instantly on first picking it up.

Yorita’s career has certainly been helped by performing on the soundtrack of Genshin Impact, a Chinese video game released in 2020 and said to have grossed the highest first year income of any game. She doesn’t mention the game in this clip, but in fact if younger Japanese encounter the shakuhachi, it’s going to be via such games and anime soundtracks.

Atsuya Okuda
“Oshusashi”
From The Sound Of Zen (S-Two Corporation, 2002)

In 2022 Shabaka wrote an article for Nate Wooley’s Sound American magazine: “Learning the shakuhachi took me back to a point of musical infancy, and in doing so, I had the absolute pleasure of learning from scratch. It's easy for me to forget the joy I felt when practising the clarinet as a nine year old kid. I would get home from school, and the possibilities of what I could ‘try’ to do on the instrument were endless... I’m learning the shakuhachi for myself. I feel no pressure to fulfil obligations demanded of me by ‘the tradition’, in terms of path of study. I believe that the instrument itself and my intuition is enough to guide me towards a place where I can disappear into the sound and be healed.”

The clip above is Atsuya Okuda playing the piece “Oshusashi”, set alongside a selection of Zen-inspired art. Just enjoy the first phrase: Okuda’s velvet sound, his subtle flicks of ornamentation and the eerie throat sound on the final note, as if that note is straining to burst.

Okuda switched to shakuhachi after a 20 year career as a jazz trumpeter. He cuts bamboo in the hills and crafts his own flutes, which remain as natural and unworked as possible – no lacquered bore, no inlaid mouthpiece. This type of shakuhachi is termed ‘jinashi’ or ‘no lacquer’. Okuda’s pupil Katsuya Nonaka is a rice farmer in Kyushu who has gone down the same road, growing his own bamboo and creating instruments essentially unchanged since Japan’s Edo period. Shabaka has visited Nonaka, who has helped him to grow and harvest his own bamboo, preparing flutes for the future. One more tribute to the premodern Edo period (1603–1868) is Seppuku Pistols, with whom Nonaka plays. In the past they have covered Dead Kennedys (and other punk classics) as they might have been played at a 17th century street festival.

Such: Yoshikazu Iwamoto/John Tilbury/Eddie Prévost
“Para' 1”
From The Issue At Hand (Matchless 1999)

From 1982 Yoshikazu Iwamoto taught shakuhachi at Dartington College Of Arts in Devon, UK. Alongside several albums of traditional material, he recorded compositions by his friend and Dartington colleague Frank Denyer, and this 1999 improvised set with AMM’s Tilbury and Prévost. Iwamoto stopped playing (and effectively disappeared) soon after 2000. Another pupil of Yokoyama, he had a wonderfully calm, focused approach which blends perfectly into the AMM soundworld. As Denyer writes in his sleevenotes, “[This music] offers an inspiration to our own aspirations as listeners to find what it is to be simply human.”

Brian Tairaku Ritchie
"Ryoanji"
From Ryoanji (Thylacine, 2006)

Brian Ritchie is the bassist with alt rockers Violent Femmes, and a leading light among non-Japanese shakuhachi players. He was inspired to take up a wind instrument after seeing Steve Lacy play numerous times in New York clubs. In his words, “After much trial and (mostly) error I settled upon the shakuhachi.” Conferred by his teacher James Nyoraku Schlefer, his middle name Tairaku signifies high status and a teaching licence.

On this 2006 CD track he offers a version of John Cage’s Ryoanji, in praise of the Kyoto temple rock garden. Ritchie is in the company of Milwaukee jazzers John Sparrow (percussion) and Dave Gelting (upright bass), and he christens the group Shakuhachi Club Milwaukee.

Ritchie takes an earthy and no limits approach to the instrument. Elsewhere on the album, his liberated jazz trio versions of classic honkyoku mix with the popular melody “Kojo No Tsuki”, evolving into free blowing in the manner of Ayler and Coltrane. There’s also a lament by Steve Lacy, composed for a Japanese friend, that plays well as a thoughtful, downbeat blues. Currently based in Hobart, Tasmania, Ritchie curates a local festival called Mona Foma – in 2024 they presented Moor Mother and Queens Of The Stone Age.

Lauren Nagaryu Rubin & Stephen Flinn
Transparent (pfMentum, 2017)



Lauren Nagaryu Rubin’s teacher was Alcvin Ramos, himself a pupil of both Yokoyama and Okuda. She has made two albums of free improvised music with the percussionist Stephen Flinn. Rubin blasts through husky attacks and high moaning. If the shakuhachi player traditionally aims at the sound of wind in a dying bamboo grove, this version conjures a storm-driven filthy night. Flinn’s subtly played metal sheets and gongs surround and punctuate Rubin’s patient shakuhachi explorations. The Los Angeles based Rubin is originally from Melbourne, Australia, and has written at length on the parallel traditions of didjeridu and shakuhachi, delving into their relation to birdsong and avian breathing.

Hozan Yamamoto
Ginkai (Philips, 1971)



Decades ago I met Hozan Yamamoto, one of the great postwar shakuhachi masters, at a semi-formal event in London. I congratulated him on his performance. His reply surprised me: “Frankly, I'd rather be in a jazz club.” Yamamoto (1937–2014) was the player who really herded his instrument into fresh pastures, collaborating with Ravi Shankar, bebop vocalist Helen Merrill and Karl Berger. In 1964 he joined clarinettist Tony Scott and koto player Shinichi Yuize on the pioneering experiment Music For Zen Meditation. Then in 1970 he led his own quartet – bassist Gary Peacock, pianist Masabumi Kikuchi and drummer Hiroshi Murakami – on the remarkable album Ginkai (the title means Silver World). Sounding supremely confident and like he has all the time in the world, Yamamoto gathers up the classical phrases and stylings he’s been steeped in since age nine, and improvises in and around them. Four tracks in, Murakami is whipping up a rapid swing and we’re dancing in “A Heavy Shower”.

Kokoo
“Purple Haze” (TV, 2011)
From Super-Nova (King, 2000)

Akikazu Nakamura studied with Yokoyama and graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College Of Music in Boston, but that’s only the start. For composer Somei Satoh he performed several pieces on the ultra-slow Sun Moon album (1994), featuring his remarkable circular breathing technique. This is something of a super power, and makes Nakamura pretty much unique among shakuhachi players. For his solo The World Of Zen Music (2001) he researched traditional repertoire at a Kyushu temple, discussing the music with the abbot. His version of the ancient “Daibosatsu” on that album is technically astonishing and very fierce. In fact, if Iwamoto and Okuda are introverts, Nakamura is definitely an extrovert, with a taste for the spectacular. So it’s fitting that he also runs a trio called Kokoo, with two no-nonsense women koto players (Michiyo Yagi and Miki Maruta), specialising in covers of prog rock classics. Their Super-Nova album includes Bowie’s “Warszawa” alongside Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia”. The above clip gives a taste: Kokoo blasting through Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” on Japanese TV.

Watazumi
Sokuin Rancho (Philips, 1970)

In 2022 I asked Shabaka how he positions himself with regard to the Japanese tradition: “I consider it to be the same issue as jazz, in terms of dealing with the music of another culture. And as far as I can see the tradition is a tradition of mental awareness and relationships to breath, using the tool of the shakuhachi. The music, for me, is what’s being used to express those elements as opposed to the music being the tradition itself. Watazumi himself says it’s not about playing music.”

Watazumi (1911–1992), aka Watazumi Doso Roshi (Roshi being a Zen master), was a true legend of shakuhachi and one of Yokoyama’s teachers. Saxophonist Steve Lacy made a point of meeting him and hailed him as “my favourite improvisor”.

Watazumi certainly stressed that music was not the be-all and end-all. His performances devoted plenty of time to demonstrations of martial art practices and talking. In 1981 he gave a talk to music students in Woodstock: “It’s fine that you are all deep into music. But there’s something deeper and if you would go deeper, if you go to the source of where the music is being made, you’ll find something even more interesting. At the source, everyone’s individual music is made. If you ask what the deep place is, it’s your own life and it’s knowing your own life, that own way that you live.”

Mike McInerney & Duncan Chapman
QuietKnot (Mushinnoise, 2022)

Finally, one more non-Japanese player, this time with cosmic ambitions. The shakuhachi has travelled beyond Earth before – in 1977 a track from Yamaguchi Goro’s A Bell Ringing In The Empty Sky was selected for the Golden Record and shot into space aboard the Voyager space craft.

Plymouth, UK based Mike McInerney studied shakuhachi with Iwamoto, and has teamed up for many years with electronics specialist Duncan Chapman. Their latest collaboration is QuietKnot (2022), a drone-based trip across the cosmos. It starts in a Devon kitchen, listening to hail hitting a roof, and moves out to the planet Saturn. Tiny particles struck the dish antenna of the Cassini probe as it penetrated the rings of the planet. According to Cambridge University’s Carolin Crawford, scientists in Iowa converted these impacts into audible sounds “that resemble hail hitting a tin roof”. McInerney’s shakuhachi sits patiently singing amid these vast soundscapes, until eventually he unleashes complex spirals of flute trills, looping into contrails across the sky. Whether sat in the kitchen or traversing space at 20 kilometres a second, the duo have produced a mind-expanding set.

Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace by Shabaka is reviewed by Phil Freeman in The Wire 482. Wire subscribers can access the article online via the digital magazine library.