I saw the moon and some very bright planets around it the other night.

October's edition came out a bit late so November has been pushed back a bit - I'll be talking about a few things that happened last month as well as at the begginginn of this month.

In brief, October was an intense month. I got sick twice (non covid related thankfully i guess) and my daily practice went off the rails a bit. I also had a very nice gig playing western woodwinds with a pair of friend's bands which took some time to prepare.

On the shakuhachi side I got to have a few in person lessons again with my mentor in the field, Ralph Samuelson. Rounding out the month is the return of Ryuteki practice into my life with a reformation of the Columbia Gagaku ensemble - now meeting in exile since Columbia will still not allow non enrolled students onto campus. This is sort of funny to me as a New School grad - the original "University in Exile" from Columbia.

Bureaucracy and sickness aside, it's been another month with lessons to learn about music. I keep waiting for these kind of lessons to dry up and for things to just plateau but like any study it's a real rabbit hole once you start going. I want to write a bit about clout chasing and getting money from shakuhachi which is a topic that might be a little spicy but anyone invested enough to actually read this email should remain unmolested by the coming tirade. I'm going to use some pretty specific language when talking about this so buckle up.

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The foreign (non-Japanese) people who are carrying in the shakuhachi world are the people who have advanced knowledge and have attained it through pure enjoyment of the practice. There's been a flood of posers putting themselves in positions of authority in this world in the last few years. The real players who have met the music on it's own terms and gained knowledge don't push their reputation and you would probably not know anything about them if your interest in the Japanese flute (or basically any hobby actually) is limited by the contradictory and tryhard world of The Internet. The people who the search engine metrics will tell you are experts on shakuhachi are involved in an attempt to monetize and make themselves relevant (Perry Yung is the only exception but even he isn't posting like these people). There's also a subgroup of what I'll call shonen players who are basically courting children's views on Youtube - very surface level stuff and gets you none of/nowhere near the goated shit you learn in the trenches of actual prolonged study of this music. Ok rant over. I'm saying all this because I'm about to hit 10 years studying this music and I'm realizing that the things I want to be able to do and hear in it are like 20-30 years away at my current level. It's fun to have found something that has so much depth and difficulty and can be such an expansive study - I'll never really be able to share it with a mass audience because it's subtle and the world is running out of time/collapsing. I really just don't care anymore about this because again if you're reading this it means you have been plugged into something that will let you share the lessons that you get when you really study something. I hope I can communicate them to you articulately some day.

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For the elders who want to know the things I've been working on specifically here's a bit of a list.

• back pressure in the mouth during lines - drawing the breath through the flute through a full line of music. It's easy once you get the muscle memory for it and it can give these lines more life

• elimination of excessive sounds when playing in general. This is something the tryhards never do - they make the flute sound like a barking dog. The best lines on this flute are the ones that sound as if they appear by themselves so yeah some breath sound is always going to be there but reining it in and focusing especially on chi > tsu meri, re > tsu meri, and hi meri > re - also on Hi trills.

• The pieces Sho Chiku Bai, Aki no Kyoku, and Aoyagi

• Listening to an album of music on Youtube by legendary shamisen player Yagi Keiji. An elder practitioner of shakuhachi hipped me to this recording and it has me very hype and excited. Link here

I also wrote a little composition for solo flute called Sprig it's on soundcloud if you want to listen to it here.

TEA THINGS FOR THE MONTH FROM CHADO BY SASAKI SANMI

November is overloaded for tea things. I work for a tea company and November is where things kick into high gear tea wise even to this day.

In the Japanese tea ceremony November is when the hearth is uncovered for winter. Called kairo, opening the hearth is done by tea people on an indeterminate day in November - the tea master Rikyyu said a nice day to open the hearth is when the yuzu plants leaves change colors. The day is typically decided based on the climate of the year. If I had a tea house this year i would have opened it last week or still have it closed since everything is so out of wack these days temperature wise.

A poem I found in the book spoke to me since it mentions the koto. It's by painter/poet Buson, my favorite haiku artist. It's also about the hioke - a kind of pail used for heating wood and keeps area of the tea house warm.

桐火桶・無絃の琴の・撫ぜごころ

Kiri-bi-oke / mugen no kin no / naze-gokoro

The feel of paulownia hioke is like a musical instrument without strings

Here's a drawing by Buson too - I love this dude so much

So there you have it - that's this months update. I'd be curious to hear feedback especially about the hot takes I mentioned earlier. Even if you email in to tell my my opinion is bad and I shouldn't swear in these I want to hear about it since I learn from all that stuff. If there is anything I should focus on next month of if you have any questions you can respond to this email directly or hit me up in all the usual places. You're great, thank you, have fun!

Adam