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August 11, 2004
Fourth Annual World Shakuhachi Festival
photo by Kayo
There was so much great activity at the Fourth Annual World Shakuhachi Festival in NYC this year. Much kudos to Ronnie Nyogetsu Seldin for producing it this monster event. Aside from the concerts, workshops and cool people, the best thing was meeting Monty Levenson and Ken Lacosse. I've heard great things about them from mutual friends and aquaintances. Ken even gave me a stock piece of 1.8 a few years ago. It was great playing their flutes.
As a maker, an event like this is invaluable. I got a chance to hang out with seven makers for four days. Murai Eigoro, whom I met in Japan last year, invited me to his place in Japan to pick bamboo this winter.
Chistopher Blasdel is trying out an Eigoro shakuhachi. David Sawyer is in the back and furthest back is Jim Schlefer.
John Neptune's table was across from mine. I met John in Japan last year too. I wanted to build a dome house after visiting his place. Dan Meyers looks on.
My brother Peter picks up his auction winnings from Ronnie at the final concert.
Kurita Masami, a shakuhachi maker, checks out an Imovie on my laptop. He knows my shakuhachi Sensei in Japan, Kinya Sogawa. I made an Imovie that I used in performance with Kinya and Laurie Sogawa. A lot of people really dug the bamboo harvesting section ( ouch!).
Sunday of that week, I had to skip out early from the vending section to do a shakuhachi workshop at the Tibetan Museum in Staten Island.
Everyone got to make their own PVC flute. They even got a sound right away!
All in all, a great week in NYC!
Posted by Perry Yung at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2004
Shoddy shakuhachi repairs!
This is a photo of a shoddy repair. It was done by an American working out of Kyoto. This is the case where getting a repair done can do more damage to the flute than the original crack.
The owner of this flute brought it to me explaining that she wanted the flute to look better. I was a bit shocked to see the work and she even said the guy apologized for doing a bad job. She wanted the thin rattan, the standard used in inlay repairs these days. But, the person in Kyoto used this less expensive thicker grade. In addition, while doing the repair, he ended up marking up her flute with deep file gouges, heavy grade steel wool scratches and left over super glue. Doing this kind of work is sort of like corrective surgery on a botched operation. It's a lot more work to cover up a bad job than to do it from scratch.
There was a discussion last week at the Fourth Annual World Shakuhachi Festival in NYC where Yamaguchi Shugetsu said repairs should be done by professionals. His remark was made to someone in the audience who asked for advice on working on flutes when he has nothing to do late at night.
Monty Levenson said he should do all he wants to the flute since that's how he got started. I agreed with Monty, if it wasn't for my own inquisitiveness, I would have never gotten into shakuhachi making. But, after having seen this shoddy repair, I now understand where Shugetsu San is coming from. I mean, you can dig into your own flute and mess it up all you want but you should not dig into another person's flute, scar it up, and then charge for it! That's just not cool..
Here's what it should've looked like.
Posted by Perry Yung at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)