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The natural sound of wind and water, of the earth that nourished the bamboo, of the spark that enlivens them — this is the spirit in the note of the shakuhachi, the Japanese flute. That spirit flows through Peter Ross, shakuhachi maker, player and teacher. It is what the Zen priests who practised it call blowing zen.
From Jazz to the Zen Flute
How did Peter Ross, a teenager from New York in the 1960s, become one of only a handful of shakuhachi teachers in the United States? His musical background was anything but traditional. He started out as a jazz saxophonist, always interested in music but particularly in its improvisational side.
"I grew up listening to jazz: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker. I was living in Berkeley in 1965, '66, '67. I had been playing saxophone, and used to play conga drums with the players in the park. I wasn't highly trained — more like an improviser. I played what I felt: a lot of feeling, but not much training."
Berkeley in 1967 was a highly charged place, and like many people then and now, Peter was looking for something — an outlet for his creativity, a way to make contact with his deeper self.
A Sound He Could Not Name
"One afternoon I was walking down Telegraph Avenue when I heard a sound I couldn't identify. I was on a crowded street across from the University — hundreds of people, lots of noise. It was a shakuhachi playing from a record in a music store, but I didn't know that at the time. I didn't have any word for it."
"It totally reached through to me. The sound just reached out, and I was completely stopped by it and drawn into the store. I walked in and bought that record — A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky — and another by the same artist, Yamaguchi Goro."
Peter did not know it then, but Yamaguchi Goro is one of the great shakuhachi players and teachers; in Japan he is considered a national treasure. Listening to the music, Peter knew he had found his instrument. A single sound can still affect him profoundly. "One note can go right through me," he says, tapping his chest with a finger. "One sound can bring me to tears."
The Practice and the Student
Could a person with no musical background connect with the shakuhachi in a meaningful way? "Most of my students aren't musicians," Peter says. "They are engineers, nurses, construction workers, computer programmers, artists. What they have in common with each other and with me is that we are all seeking something — and that something may come to them through the sound or the practice of the shakuhachi."
The shakuhachi is a five-hole Japanese flute that has been played for at least three hundred years by Zen priests, who practise the thirty-six traditional honkyoku pieces as a form of meditation. Its ancient ancestry can be traced to a similar instrument in Egypt. In Japan it began as a solo instrument; only about a century and a half ago did it begin to be heard outside the temples, joining other instruments in the classical sankyoku ensemble and, soon after, in folk music.
The Symbol of Bamboo
"In Asia, bamboo is the symbol of strength," Peter notes. Bamboo grows tall — thirty feet or more — yet bends in the storm without breaking, and it is from this humble, resilient grass that the shakuhachi's voice is drawn. To learn more about the instrument's place in the wider world of music, the Smithsonian Folkways archive offers recordings and notes from across the Japanese tradition.
Continue to the history of the shakuhachi and Peter's full biography, or hear the instrument on his recordings.
This article was written for Cloud Hands Music.