Shakuhachi | 1937-2014

Hozan Yamamoto started playing shakuhachi at nine, trained under his father and then under Chōzan Nakanishi, studied at the Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Studies and the Seiha Music College, and spent his career doing something the conservative world of Japanese traditional music had not expected: placing a Zen Buddhist flute with five finger holes inside jazz, folk fusion, big band arrangements and film scores without making any of it sound like a novelty. His first major crossover recording was "Music for Zen Meditation" (Verve, 1964), with American clarinettist Tony Scott and koto player Shinichi Yuize, a record that found an international audience partly through the growing Western interest in Japanese aesthetics and partly on its own musical terms. He co-founded the Shakuhachi Sanbon Kai trio with Reibo Aoki and Katsuya Yokoyama in 1966, pushing simultaneously in traditional and experimental directions, and recorded throughout the 1970s with Gary Peacock, Karl Berger, Helen Merrill and Jean-Pierre Rampal while also making jazz big band albums with Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats that blended Japanese folk music with jazz-funk and soul jazz. He composed the soundtrack to Kōsei Saitō's 1979 Toei film "Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku" with arranger Yu Imai. In 2002 the Japanese government designated him a Living National Treasure; in 2004 he received the Medal with Purple Ribbon. He taught at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and led the Hozan-kai Shakuhachi Guild. Yamamoto died on 10 February 2014 in Ōtsu, Shiga Prefecture, aged 76.