Collection: Hozan Yamamoto

The shakuhachi is a vertical bamboo flute with five finger holes, associated for centuries with Zen Buddhist meditation, and not at all an obvious candidate for jazz crossover. Hozan Yamamoto spent his career making it one anyway. Born in Ōtsu, Shiga Prefecture in 1937, he started playing at nine, taught first by his father and then by Chōzan Nakanishi, and trained formally at the Seiha Music College and the Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Studies. The conservative shakuhachi world was not entirely welcoming of what he did with it. By 1964 he was recording "Music for Zen Meditation" with American clarinettist Tony Scott and koto player Shinichi Yuize, and in 1966 he co-founded the Shakuhachi Sanbon Kai trio with Reibo Aoki and Katsuya Yokoyama, a grouping that pushed the instrument's possibilities in both traditional and crossover directions simultaneously. Through the 1970s he recorded prolifically in jazz contexts, working with Gary Peacock, Karl Berger, Helen Merrill, Ravi Shankar and Jean-Pierre Rampal, and composing original music for jazz big band settings alongside Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats. The "Beautiful Bamboo Flute" albums with Sharps and Flats, blending Japanese folk music with jazz-funk, big band and soul jazz, became the records that international collectors came looking for first. He composed the soundtrack for Kōsei Saitō's 1979 Toei film "Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku", with Sadistic Mika Band keyboardist Yu Imai as arranger, one of the most collectible shakuhachi jazz records from that era. He was designated a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government in 2002 and received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2004. He died on 10 February 2014 in Ōtsu, aged 76.