Blowing Bamboo: a Shakuhachi Improvisation Journey

My teacher, Ronnie Nyogetsu Reishin Seldin, asked me to present a workshop at our East Coast Shakuhachi Camp in 2012.  Since I was a professional jazz musician in the 1970s and 80s, I thought would be a challenge to make shakuhachi improvisation my topic.  I would like to use this journal as a way to develop my ideas for the workshop, to create a little pre-workshop interest, and more importantly, to explore an approach to improvising that is musically and psychologically integrative.   My goal is to work toward my more mature improvisatory voice, with strong roots in  shakuhachi aesthetics, phrasing, and the structural rhetoric of honkyoku.  That is to say, I want to reshape my ”jazz bones.”  I also want to apply my music-theoretical knowledge (see the Bio) to issues that arise in my playing and to issues that I want my playing to more consciously address. I also want to find a way to synthesize what may be conflicting aesthetics: Buddhist equanimity and jazz catharsis, sexuality and passion.  In that sense, the blog is really an audio journal, but  I’m hoping that other shakuhachi players will find some of what I play or say to be useful.  Each post will be directed toward a particular musical or conceptual issue that I’m trying to work on and each will contain at least one embedded MP3. You have three possible ways to procede from here: You can jump to my very 1st post “Phrases and Licks Pt.1“, you can continue reading in more detail about my journaling goals in “About: Pt. 2,” or you can check out my non-improv  MP3s and videos.