Kyle meets Takeo

Kyle meets Takeo & Yamaguchi Goro’s Shakuhachi! I met Takeo at Yamaguchi san’s house. Yamaguchi’s practice was to schedule students in such a way as to have a few lined up and observing him and the current student receiving the lesson. That way, a student could actually have two or more lessons in one, so to speak.

Takeo was in Japan researching the construction of the shakuhachi for his thesis and I was making them, so we had something extra in common right away. At one point we teamed up for a week to harvest bamboo on Sado island in the dead of winter… the best time to harvest bamboo for making shakuhachi. I still have about 30 premo pieces. They should be ready to fashion into flute, having cured now for some 40 years. 🙂

Here is Kyle just getting a taste of the shakuhachi… literally.