Josh Smith's dynamic and avant-garde playing style of the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, will take you on a mysterious journey through tradition and the imagination.

10 MP3 Songs in this album (43:15) !
Related styles: WORLD: Japanese traditional, WORLD: Japanese contemporary

People who are interested in Riley Lee John Kaizan Neptune should consider this download.


Details:
Josh Smith is from Buffalo, NY but has lived in Japan for the past 10 years. He studies the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, under Okada Michiaki, who is a student of the famous Yokoyama Katsuya. He focuses mainly on the traditional Zen solo pieces called honkyoku, but also plays modern and traditional classical music with the koto and shamisen and has recently been experimenting more with other instruments and genres of musuc. The repertoire consists of the creative style of honkyoku passed down from the Zen priest Watazumi Doso as well as the Kinko style of shakuhachi. Joshâs teacher's powerful yet deep and haunting sounds drew him to this instrument, and he has found it to be the most emotionally expressive instrument around. He received his Master's from Osaka University with his graduation thesis entitled "Shaped by the Wind: Artistic and Cultural Identity Formation of Shakuhachi Players", and is continuing his research in their Doctoral program in the Cultural Sociology department. He is a member of the Komuso Kenkyukai or the komuso (priests of nothingness) research group, as well as a friend of Ishikawa Toshimitsu's "Ishi no Kai". In August and September of 2006 completed the Shikoku 88 Temples Pilgrimage, playing at all of the temple's Daishi-do and the Hondo (main temple). It was a tough 1 1/2 months of hiking (1,400 kilometers) and sleeping in his tent, except when the typhoons came and he kept refuge at some of the temples. It was a great experience and the people he met along the way were very interesting. That following winter he returned for a week and walked Tokushima prefecture again, a very difficult season to play in the freezing cold! The pilgrimage is a highly recommended life changing experience. Recently he has been concentrating on performing, mostly around Nara and the Kansai area, as well as teaching at two locations in Nara Prefecture. This year the 2008 World Shakuhachi Festival was held in Sydney, Australia. On July 5th Josh took 2nd place in the S-1 Grand Prix Young Players Competition Finalâs Concert.
His CD and compositions were highly influenced by the environment where he lives. Katsuragi is a serene area of Nara surrounded by the mountains of Nijozan, Katsuragi-san and Kongo-san. This CD Hakuho-ne, or the Sound of the White Phoenix, has a traditional feeling as well as an abstract feeling of the White Phoenix gliding through the surrounding foggy mountains.