Japan, Katsuya Yokoyama

condition (records/cover): NM / VG+ (spine wear)

Gatefold sleeve.

Katsuya Yokoyama was the shakuhachi player who premiered Toru Takemitsu's November Steps with the New York Philharmonic under Seiji Ozawa in 1967, and he could have built a career on that alone. Instead he spent decades on honkyoku, the solo repertoire handed down through the wandering Fuke monks who played the bamboo flute as a breathing practice rather than as music. This Wergo double album collects fifteen of those pieces, including Shika no Tōne (the distant cry of deer) and Tsuru no Sugomori, recorded with the microphone close enough to catch the breath before the note.

Yokoyama's line, learned partly from Watazumi Dōso, is unusually hard-edged for the tradition: sudden overblown pitches, long notes that fray at the end into pure air. It is slow music that does not relax, and eighty minutes of it will recalibrate what you think a single instrument can do with silence. German pressing, Spectrum series, with notes.