[reviews originally written for The Wire magazine or European Shakuhachi Society Newsletters ]

Sabu Orimo: Susabu: SUBJECTIVE SPIRIT SOUND CDR

Ichion: SUBJECTIVE SPIRIT SOUND CDR

Two discs on the tiny Japanese label Subjective Spirit Sound contain some of the most remarkable solo shakuhachi playing heard in years. Sabu Orimo is a player still in his twenties, with a fine lineage: both his parents were musicians in Punk groups. He studied with Atsuya Okuda and plays exclusively “hocchiku” flutes: natural bamboo with no lacquer or special treatment to affect the sound. His concert posters proclaim “Noise Shakuhachi Solo Live”, while his label describes him as playing “Japanese old stone age style”.

Susabu 's opener is a passionate treatment of “San-an” from the ancient honkyoku repertoire, a display of hectic flurries, gasping and violent stamping. It recalls the master Watazumido, but more uninhibited and earthy. Orimo's control is firm – he often swivels into silence, and the piece closes with great calm after the storm. A version of “Koku” is meditative and beautifully paced.

Orimo also plays the classic “Sanya” and “Honte No Shirabe”, but almost half of this album appears to be improvised. Susabu 's title track is in two parts, between which Orimo probably needed to lie down in a darkened room. “Susabu Part 1” is a full-blooded outburst, culminating in an almighty thump. In “Part 2” Orimo snorts down the flute like a trumpet, and roars as if possessed. The recording equipment reels under the onslaught - it's a shock, but somehow integrated into the story that Orimo is telling. His sound has such integrity that he can carry the listener with him; as with Albert Ayler's saxophone, you feel that if he needs to extend his emotional range this wide, then so be it.

Susabu concludes with an extremely low-pitched and restrained track titled “Tsukiyo”. In spite of all this, it's Ichion , Orimo's second album, recorded two weeks later, that is one of my favourite records of 2006. What's remarkable here is how little Orimo does and how good his timing is. Three minutes can be devoted to exploration of one quiet note. The outside world creeps in around the edges: on “Yure” we can hear it's pouring with rain. Five minutes in, Orimo makes his move. Gusts of wind whip through the bamboo, then he returns to stillness. These are extraordinary performances that dig deep into Japanese tradition.

BY CLIVE BELL

GORO YAMAGUCHI: SHAKUHACHI MUSIC: A BELL RINGING IN THE EMPTY SKY NONESUCH EXPLORER CD

Goro Yamaguchi (1933-99) studied the shakuhachi with his father, Shiro Yamaguchi, during the second world war, and quickly rose to recognition as a leading player. In 1967 he taught for a year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and while in the US recorded two honkyoku pieces in New York: “Sokaku-Reibo” and “Koku-Reibo”. In 1969 these appeared on an LP in the Nonesuch Explorer Series, titled A Bell Ringing In The Empty Sky (the title taken from a colourful pseudo-translation of “Koku-Reibo”). Now Nonesuch have reissued the album on CD as part of their gradual re-release of the whole Explorer Series. The two tracks remain the same; the sleeve notes are unedited, though a bio of Yamaguchi has been added; but the wonderful monochrome psychedelia of the LP sleeve, in which a crane appears to fly through a geisha's hair-do, has been replaced by a 1961 photo of a tiny fishing boat on the Inland Sea.

It's probably hard to overstate the impact of Yamaguchi's original LP in the West. One has to think back to a benighted generation when not only had no one ever heard a shakuhachi, but the idea that Japanese music might have depth to it, that it might have a rigour that could stand alongside European classical performance, was thrillingly new and taboo-busting. Inviting Yamaguchi to teach at Wesleyan was a pioneering move, and A Bell Ringing was the first widely available recording of a completely new music. It took its place alongside Ravi Shankar, Stockhausen and Hawkwind on the shelves of discerning record buyers, and aspiring music-makers and composers marvelled at its qualities. By 1977 a portion of the recording was included on a compilation of “Earth Music” aboard the Voyager II spacecraft. Having conquered hip record stores, Yamaguchi was off to new galaxies.

How does Yamaguchi's record stand up now, forty years on? The first thing you notice is the overall length: at under thirty minutes, this is what we would now term an EP. Nonesuch clearly had no extra material in the vaults to flesh out the CD version. Having said that, Yamaguchi's versions of these classic pieces are unusually long: “Sokaku” at thirteen minutes and “Koku” at fifteen represent extended explorations. The sleevenotes, despite being written by respected ethnomusicologist and broadcaster Fumio Koizumi, are misleading and, when it comes to scales, hilariously inaccurate. However there is an honourable tradition of album notes getting these things wrong, and if a sleevenote writer starts talking about scales it's almost guaranteed that what follows will be nonsense.

Yamaguchi performs both pieces on a 1.8 shakuhachi. His playing always has poise; it is elegant and cool to the point of chilliness. “Sokaku” (Depicting The Cranes In Their Nest) is largely static, in that Yamaguchi stays in one small pitch area for a long time, but highly ornamented – a picture of young cranes bickering at home and not taking flight. After ten minutes the piece calms down and moves to the lower octave. “Koku” spends more time in this lower octave and is generally slower and more meditative. It's also a warmer, more human performance, and Yamaguchi's playing features some lovely, subtle dynamics.

Even at the date of its first release, a Western listener might have judged that Yamaguchi's shakuhachi style was not the only game in town. In 1967 the New York label Lyrichord issued Japanese Masterpieces For The Shakuhachi , an LP of five pieces from anonymous monks at Kyoto temples (this is also available on CD). At the time this may have seemed an inferior record: the performances are rough and unsophisticated, the sleevenotes dodgy as ever (Fuke monks are termed “tootling preachers”), and the vinyl pressing of poor quality. Now things look a little different. Yamaguchi represents a shiny new breed of player, both refining and formalising the old techniques so that the instrument is ready to don bow tie and tails, as it were, and enter the Western concert hall. Lyrichord's unnamed tootlers, on the other hand, are playing on their home ground. The two monks playing “Koku” are inside the Meianji temple, and their temple bell is incorporated into the track. This music has some function in their daily life, and plenty of meaning as an activity: not a show for an audience but a spiritual exercise. Whereas Yamaguchi's music floats free in an empty sky, divorced from context. What is it for? It's for consumption, live or on record, by the new audience, according to Western models of art music.

The effect of Yamaguchi's record on his Western listeners is one thing, but what about its effect on Japan? By 1969 Japan had invested pretty much a century in a massive adoption of Western culture and technology. Beginning with the import of brass bands, new musical ideas had taken root: the importance of playing in tune; formalised and fixed versions of pieces; large groupings of instruments, or orchestras; and concert halls where the audience politely listens in silence. Any of these notions would have astonished our old friend, the tootling Komuso player beneath his basket hat. But by the 1960s Japanese performers of European classical music were receiving international acclaim, Toru Takemitsu was on the point of acceptance as a world class composer, and the figure of the globetrotting concert hall soloist was completely familiar to Japanese audiences. Yamaguchi's performance, highly polished and beautifully recorded, slots into place as an early step in Japan's resumption of confidence in its own traditional culture. The Tokyo Olympics were in 1964; around 1976 my own teacher, Kohachiro Miyata, went onstage solo at the Carnegie Hall.

There's no question that Yamaguchi was one among a generation of marvellous shakuhachi performers, and it's fascinating to see how they differ from one another. Another version of “Koku”, played by Katsuya Yokoyama, is on the excellent The Art Of The Shakuhachi on Ocora. One year younger than Yamaguchi, Yokoyama was 63 when he made this record. He continued studying with the Zen master Watazumi until the latter's death; this must have kept Yokoyama in touch with the down to earth Fuke monk tradition, and its concerns with matters other than music. Yokoyama retains an unpredictable exuberance in his playing. His crane piece (“Tsuru No Sugomori”) attacks the famous passages of flutter tonguing and tremolos with an animated, improvisational attitude. Thirty years earlier, Yamaguchi sounds correct and formal, a musician on his best behaviour, as if slightly in awe of the future status of his recording.

BY CLIVE BELL

OKI: TONKORI: CHIKAR STUDIO CD

www.tonkori.com

“For one trained in traditional Japanese folk music, the sound of an Ainu song comes as a real shock. It is like meeting a grizzly bear in a pet shop.” Thus William Malm in his classic introduction to Japanese music. Writing in 1959, he grimly concludes, “There is no future for Ainu culture.” Fast forward a quarter of a century, and 22 year old Oki, living in Hokkaido, learns that his father was Ainu, the indigenous people of north Japan. Oki’s cousin gives him a tonkori, the gut-strung Ainu harp, plucked with both hands when accompanying bear sacrifices and shamanistic dances. But the tonkori tradition has all but died out, and Oki finds himself peering into the audio murk of fifty year old recordings, trying to reconstruct an extinct music.

Fortunately Oki draws encouragement from his love of reggae, and releases a steadily improving series of albums from his Chikar Studio. Ainu singer Umeko Ando teaches him plenty, until her death in 2004. Then comes the inspired Dub Ainu collection, and now an entirely solo tonkori album: three original tunes and twelve kiss-of-life renditions where Oki restores to rude health a dozen pieces by vanished masters.

The instrument sounds ancient to its core, but Oki somehow gives it a contemporary feel – maybe it’s Jamaica imparting earthy weight to his rhythms. The production is cunningly various: from the virile stomp of opener “Hechiri Rock” to the duet of “Retah Chiri Haw”, to the dabs of delay on “Tonkori In The Moonlight”. Oki sings a lullaby in utterly mellow mood, and for one track he strings up a bass tonkori with the Achilles tendon of a deer. Ainu is a hunting culture, full of birds, animals and ghosts. And if there’s one thing ghosts hate, it’s tonkori music. Hence the story behind “Sannupista Hechiri”, in which the instrument’s strings are quickly improvised from a dead man’s blood vessels. Curdling stuff, but beautifully performed, mournful music.

BY CLIVE BELL

BRIAN TAIRAKU RITCHIE: RYOANJI: THYLACINE CD

This is a shakuhachi record, but one with sweat on its brow and mud stains on its kimono. Bass player with Milwaukee alt-rockers Violent Femmes, Brian Ritchie was inspired to tackle a wind instrument after seeing Steve Lacy in New York. Eventually he hit on the Japanese Zen monk's flute of choice and developed his own muscular, improvisational approach. His first release, Shakuhachi Club NYC from 2004 on Weed Records, pits Ritchie's flute against banjo, tuba and drums (Billy Ficca from Television). Ritchie blasts away as if on trombone, but the context is so raucous it almost overwhelms what is essentially a delicate instrument.

Ryoanji , while still unpolished in the best sense, is a step forward. Ritchie's own playing is stronger and more focused, and his current band make a dark and appropriate sound: Dave Gelting on string bass and John Sparrow on gongs and cajon (the Afro-Peruvian wooden box also used in flamenco). Ritchie takes Japanese folk songs and treats them as stomping jazz vehicles for group exploration. Classic shakuhachi “honkyoku” pieces are enlisted as drifting melodies, played unison with bowed bass and coloured by tympani. Popular melody “Kojo No Tsuki” leads to free blowing in the manner of Ayler and Coltrane, and there's a Steve Lacy lament for a Japanese friend that plays well as a thoughtful, downbeat blues.

At the album's centre is “Ryoanji”, a fourteen minute version of a late John Cage piece inspired by the Zen rock garden. Shakuhachi and bass glide around eerie glissandi while the percussionist thumps an irregular pulse. It's a stirring performance: definitely Cage with jacket and tie off, and immediately followed by “Soran Bushi”, a riotous drinking song.

BY CLIVE BELL

Watazumidoso: Sokuin Rancho/Ryohbo: UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAPAN, DCT-1882 CD

Records by Zen priest Watazumi Doso Roshi (who died in 1992) have always been rare, so the re-release of two albums on a single CD by Universal Japan is to be welcomed. Especially as these are excellent recordings, displaying Watazumi's whole range.

Watazumi was the maverick misfit of the shakuhachi: he founded his own Zen sect, and incorporated flute playing as just one element in his ‘way', no more important than his martial arts practice, whirling a long stick. Stories abound of his unacceptable behaviour, megalomaniac remarks and unsavoury political connections, but few would deny his extraordinary skill on instruments which he made himself. These unlacquered bamboo flutes are called Hocchiku. Watazumi single-handedly took the shakuhachi tradition and shot it into orbit, to glow alongside visionary musicians like John Coltrane and Steve Lacy (who was an occasional pupil). “Man, that cat plays some bad shit,” might seem an inappropriate comment on many classical shakuhachi performances, but for Watazumi it'll do fine.

This album comprises two LPs: Sokuin Rancho from 1970 and Ryohbo To Zen'ei from 1975 (when Watazumi was aged 65). From the latter there are just two tracks from the original seven - but one of those is 19 minutes long and perhaps the most remarkable Watazumi recording I've heard. The album's overall length is a generous 67 minutes.

We open with “Furin”, an unhurried eight minute performance. These are Watazumi's versions of traditional Japanese pieces – the method is to study the piece, “and then follow the rules of nature”, according to sleevenotes by the late radio presenter and ethnomusicologist Fumio Koizumi. “Murasaki Shoden” by contrast is a brief, breezy take on a folk melody. “Hokkoku Renbo” and “Soh Shingetsu” are similar: higher pitched, outdoorsy music, blustering and flapping like a flag on a mountainside. “Shin Kyorei” on the other hand is 16 minutes of stillness and velvety rumination.

If timbral range is one key to Japanese music, then Watazumi offers a masterclass in it. The colour of his sound is magnificent and varied, one minute fierce and low, the next a gusting squall of wind, then slipping into delicacy till the note almost vanishes. Koizumi's sleeve essay makes the point that our idea of music needs to expand to accommodate what Watazumi was up to – he was a free spirit who happened to use shakuhachi to embody his ideas. One of his most extreme statements is the 19 minute “Ryohbo”. Here the microphone is closer, the sound intimate and the dynamic range astonishing. There are mid-note blasts here that are frightening, that can jolt you from your chair like a horror movie. Finally Watazumi reads one of his short poems, about getting up before dawn, culminating in a blood-curdling yell. The record should carry a health sticker warning off anyone who thinks Zen music might somehow be comforting.

BY CLIVE BELL

http://www.japanimprov.com/indies/universal/sokuinrancho.html

http://www.discogs.com/release/1244859

http://www.komuso.com/people/Watazumi_Doso_Roshi.html

THE SINGLE TONE: A Personal Journey Into Shakuhachi Music

by Christopher Yohmei Blasdel

paperback, 167 pp. published by Printed Matter Press

Japan's fascination with the West is well documented, but in the course of a single generation, starting around 1970, there was a rush of traffic the other way – a rag-tag army of Westerners arriving in Japan, determined to learn about the traditional culture. The potential for misunderstanding was high, if only because by 1970 the average Japanese must have decided that he or she could safely ignore that culture. A hundred years after the Meiji Restoration, traditional performing arts were marginalised and underground, and a young Japanese would have no more interest in, say, shakuhachi music, than his British counterpart would be clued up on Morris dancing or the Northumbrian bagpipe.

In 1972 Christopher Blasdel arrived in Tokyo fresh out of Texas, where he characterises the local culture as “fifty foot-high cowboys dressed in real Levi jeans” (to advertise restaurants) and a monument to helium. He signed up for shakuhachi lessons with leading player Goro Yamaguchi, studied at Geidai (Tokyo University Of Fine Arts) with World Music pioneer Fumio Koizumi, and became a kind of shakuhachi ambassador, performing in Japanese schools as well as around the world. Having spent his whole adult life in Japan, he wrote his autobiography ( Shakuhachi Odyssey ) in Japanese, and won the non-fiction Ren'nyo award in 2000. The Single Tone is his translation of this book into English.

As an artist with a foot in both cultures, Blasdel has to discover how to keep his balance. Early on the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi warns him he will never really belong either to America or Japan. He will be isolated, but this can be his strength. By the end of the book, in the company of three hundred shakuhachi enthusiasts at the Boulder International Shakuhachi Festival (1998), Blasdel contemplates his solitude, not yet Japanese but no longer fitting into American society. The shakuhachi seems an appropriate instrument to offer consolation. His teacher Yamaguchi claims to envy him: “I have the sounds of the old shakuhachi masters in my head and can never really escape from them. You don't, and you can be free to do whatever you want with the instrument.” Though Blasdel is smart enough not to take this kind remark entirely at face value.

There are chapters here on studying with Yamaguchi, the traditional iemoto teaching system, the shakuhachi's history, campaigning for the restoration of a concert hall at Geidai, and a good account of why Japanese music education (until very recently) chose to totally ignore traditional music. Blasdel's campaigning spirit finds an ideal target in the Japanese people's colossal ignorance of their own music, and he works hard to introduce schoolchildren to the shakuhachi. Possibly he becomes oversensitive: when a Japanese diplomat in Shanghai remarks that the koto makes a trivial, plunking sound, Blasdel is quick to interpret this as arrogance bordering on racism. But there will always be folk who just don't care for the sound of your favourite instruments.

Blasdel is good on the sensuous impact of his first visit to Tokyo – “the exotic fragrances and unusual sounds” make him want to tear off his clothes, and “after three decades, I still feel this way.” He describes well the excitement generated by his teacher's tone quality during lessons. Like a sensual priest, he can also be a bit pious. He takes a firm view that you should not learn solo Honkyoku till chamber Gaikyoku pieces have been mastered: “One shouldn't attempt to penetrate the inner sanctuaries of a tradition before one is prepared to do so.” Does that really mean anything, apart from “this is how I did it”?

Sometimes there's a stiffness in Blasdel's writing, maybe the result of originally using Japanese. He opens the book with an oddly rapturous evocation of a shakuhachi playing in an ancient farmhouse. An evening listening to Yamaguchi? No, it's Blasdel's own performance. He has nothing to say about his teacher's album on the Nonesuch label, A Bell Ringing In The Empty Sky , which has been universally available for decades and must have influenced countless artists in different fields. Blasdel improvises on the shakuhachi, a practice with an oblique relation to the traditional repertoire, but he is tight-lipped about this too. There's not enough personal revelation here to make the autobiography really spring to life. He goes coy at key moments, for example when talking of Fusachiro Inoue, a mysterious wealthy patron that Blasdel shared with the Kabuki actor Tamasaburo. Still, Blasdel clearly has an interesting tale to tell, and tells it without too much purple writing or New Age obfuscation. His book's tone is perhaps more worthy than it need have been, but still worthwhile.

BY CLIVE BELL

Francisco Xavier 1506-1553: The Route To The Orient: Jordi Savall & Hesperion XXI. ALIA VOX 2xCDs.

Francisco Xavier was one of the young firebrands who founded the Jesuits' Society Of Jesus in sixteenth century Paris. In 1540 he travelled to Mozambique, from where he was to spend the rest of his life roaming around Asia, including a two year spell evangelising in Japan. Xavier and his companions would stride along the roads of Kyushu singing psalms at the tops of their voices. This attracted large crowds of local people, and represents an early case of Western music being performed in Japan.

In 2007 the Catalan viola da gamba player and tireless leader of the Early Music group Hesperion XXI, Jordi Savall, produced a double CD to commemorate Xavier's extraordinary travels. The albums come encased with a book in a deluxe package, and feature several excellent Japanese musicians: Yukio Tanaka on biwa, Hiroyuki Koinuma on shinobue and nohkan, and Ichiro Seki on shakuhachi. In fact the second CD is structured to dramatise Xavier's final years, with Spanish choral hymns, Japanese pieces and a Chinese version of Ave Maria called upon to represent his progress through Japan and eventual death on an island off the Chinese coast.

As well as playing solo, the Japanese instruments improvise on the Marian hymn “O Gloriosa Domina”, alternating with verses sung by the choir. In 1605 a Nagasaki publisher brought out an edition of several Jesuit songs – Savall's collage of musical juxtapositions is an homage to this early contact between Western and Japanese musicians, about which, sadly, hardly anything is known.

The Japanese musicians are understandably cautious in their improvising, sticking pretty closely to the hymn's scale. Only Yukio Tanaka's biwa pushes the boat out, slapping strings like gunshots, and scraping his plectrum menacingly down the string in that way that always makes me think of Hendrix. In fact Tanaka comes close to stealing the show altogether, with a stunning vocal-plus-biwa rendition of “Honnoji” (the story of the death of Nobunaga). This is great, dramatic playing, switching from delicacy to violence as only the biwa can.

On the shakuhachi, Ichiro Seki performs an eleven minute version of the meditative honkyoku piece “Reibo”. Seki, now in his fifties, is a pupil of Katsuya Yokoyama. He uses a deep-pitched flute with a soft, velvety tone. Throughout the album his sound is warm – more soft-edged than many players, but highly attractive.

Is this what Francisco Xavier would have encountered in sixteenth century Japan? We can only speculate. It's fascinating to imagine the sheer bewilderment on both sides as the psalm-chanting Jesuits beheld court Gagaku players or village dances. In Xavier's letters he is clearly impressed by the Japanese, whom he found “generally well-mannered…They eat with moderation, though they are less moderate when it comes to drink.” Jordi Savall's album is at least a model of harmonious cooperation, with much beautiful playing and singing.

By Clive Bell

ALIA VOX label