Beyond Japan Update

Shakuhachi Summer Adventure Part 1

June, 2003

"Without love, beauty, and danger, it would almost be easy to live."

PART I: Traveling into Desert Country

At the Greyhound bus station waiting for my bus to Arizona. Dumbfounded and marvelled that I am living life as a shakuhachi player. This November, we in Vancouver, Canada will host the first Shakuhachi festival in Canadian history. Kakizakai and Matama will come to do workshops and concerts. I'm so excited about it. Our job here in Canada will be to find a nice performance and workshop space, book nice accomodations, and organize sightseeing tours for the Japanese guests. I hope Kakizakai and Matama get many people to come.

Looking for freedom. What thoughts blow through my head have no basis for this reality. They mean nothing. My health problems are now non-existent. How did this come to be? I am so thankful that I can finally experience life with perfect health. Travelling on the bus is a bit uncomfortable. It's cheap and it gets me there. But once the body relaxes into it it's easy. Happy to be healthy on this trip.

After a LONG bus ride through Washington, Oregon, and California, we finally reached the desertlands of Arizona. The weather is blazing hot and dry as death. A perpetual oven. Many of the buildings have outdoor sprinklers lining the roofs, emitting watery mists as a relief from the intense heat. I successfully checked into my hostel in Phoenix, Arizona. The Metcalf Hostel. It's a well-used old house with lots of character. Many aging posters, sketchings, postcards on the walls and ceilings from the many lodgers through out the years from many lands. Tonight I play in Tempe, at the Borders Bookstore in town. Andre, whom I met on the internet just before I left, will be coming to the show tonight and will have a lesson with me tomorrow.

6/14

Last night's gig went really well. More people than usual came to hear me play honkyoku. Met Andre who will have a lesson in an hour. I wonder what the show in Chandler will be like tonight.

Just finished a 4 hour lesson with Andre which went really well. He's very kind and lives an interesting life as a tatoo artist and metal craftsman. He loves shakuhachi so deeply. It's a shame that there is no one to teach him where he lives. We worked on the basics of tone production and bonding with the flute and meri/kari techniques. Also mangaged to get through the first 4 lines of Honshirabe. I can tell immediately that he will be a fine honkyoku player later.

6/15

The show at the Chandler bookstore was such a wonderful success! Sold several CDs and one of my hand-crafted hocchiku shakuhachi. Also made several new friends. It was so unexpected. At first it seemed like no one would show up. Then suddenly more and more people started to sit at the tables. After the show, I was invited by one of the audience members to play shakuhachi at the Desert Lotus Zen Sangha on Monday night. I'm looking forward to that.

Tonight's offering here in Tucson, however doesn't seem too promising since the manager said he never received my poster, nor did the general manager ever mention me to him. I was not on any of their newsletters for programming for the month either. There was no advertising at all done, as the other stores had done. Nobody knows I'll be playing here! But he said it would still be alright to play in the cafe. This will be basically be a busking situation. Anyways, I have a few hours till the show, so I will visit Steve Roach, one of my sonic heroes of my younger years who lives near here in Tucson.

As I suspected, the crowd was pretty scant. Just relaxed and enjoyed playing to the spirits. Afterwards a couple approached me expressing a great interest in the honkyoku sound.

6/18

Yesterday I drove up to Sedona and spent all day searching for and harvesting agave stalks to make didgeridoos from. The agave plant is sometimes called "Death Stalk" because soon after flowering it dies; similar phenomenon as a madake bamboo grove when it flowers, the whole forest dies, since each bamboo plant is connected to eachother, like one single organism. Earlier I looked all over the Tucson area for the agave but couldn't see any, only a thinner cousin, the yucca. I finally spotted the characteristic flowers about 6000 feet above sea level in the hills of Sedona past the commercial new age town. I stopped by the side of the road. Armed with heavy gloves, a shovel, and saw, I trekked into the ravine where I stumbled into a family of the plants growing all around. It looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie: giant alien spores sprouting from the red earth, basking in the intense heat of the blazing sun. The first stalk I was drawn to was a huge, 10 foot, black, dried up flower that was perfect for tranforming into a didgeridoo. It was clearly dead, but hadn't aged as yet to the point of deterioration (as evinced by the crumbling stalks lying all around), so was still solid enough to make a didge with. After saying a prayer and offering water of thanks to the spirits of the plant, I spent a couple of hours ripping out by hand the dangerous spiky leaves that surrounded the root portion of the plant. When the root bell was sufficiently exposed I sawed the stalk out of the ground making sure enough root remained to create a bell for the instrument. This process reminded me very much of harvesting bamboo in Japan to make shakuhachi. I love root ended instruments that reach deep into the earth! When it was finally cut from the earth, I sawed off the flower tip and carried the raw 2 meter stalk back to the car. I saw another smaller, thinner, much lighter stalk which was white in color laying on the ground. I also took this back with me to Phoenix to transform into a musical instrument.

In the evnening after dropping off the agave stalks at the hostel, I headed once again to Chandler, but this time to play at the Desert Lotus Zen Sangha. I was invited by one of the members, Barbara, who attended my show at the bookstore on Saturday. The meeting was actually held at a Unitarian Church. The head Roshi was out of town so the proceedings were lead by Barbara, the senior member. About 25 people came and first we sat for about 30 minutes, chanted part of the Diamond Sutra, then I gave a talk and presentation/demonstration of classical zen shakuhachi. I played Honshirabe, Shingetsu, Sagari-ha, and Tsuru no Sugomori. Afterwards we all had a chance to talk and ask questions. Most everyone was very appreciative of the sound of honkyoku and expressed it by purchasing my CDs. I left the Sangha full of good energy, enjoying the warm, desolate feeling of the desert summer night weather.

Then next couple of days were spent in the construction of the didges. First I had to cut the stalks in half and hollow out the fiberous center to create a bore. I used special chisels that were conviently supplied to me by the hostel handyman, Keith, who happened to be a an ex-wood sculptor. If it wasn't for his knowledge, experience, and good advice I could never have completed these instruments. After hollowing, I applied several coats of polyurethane lacquer to the bore. When the coats were sufficiently hardened I glued the two halves together using clamps, saran wrap, and a substance called "Gorilla Glue" which incredibly cemented the two halves perfectly together. I was kind of concerned whether or not it would work, but by the next morning when I unwrapped the stalk, it had glued rock hard and perfectly sealed where I had cut. The moment of truth arrived when I applied the beeswax mouthpiece and evoked its first resonant frequency: the deepness and smooth rumbling power of this new didge was awesome! The lightness of the material and wideness of the bore and bell combined to produce a profound sound unlike any other didge I've ever played. My job was now complete here. It was time to leave Arizona to go to Colorado via Texas and New Mexico.