Riley Lee

Shakuhachi grand master, born in Plainview, Texas, in 1951 and living in Australia since 1986. He began studying the bamboo flute in Japan in 1971 under Chikuho Sakai, has been a student of Katsuya Yokoyama since 1984, and was granted the rank of dai shihan, grand master, in 1980. He carries both lineages back to the komusō, the wandering Fuke Zen monks of the Edo period for whom playing the honkyoku was not performance but suizen, blowing zen: the breath itself as meditation. He was also the first non-Japanese to play taiko professionally, touring with Ondekoza from 1973. His 1993 doctorate in ethnomusicology at the University of Sydney was on the transmission of the shakuhachi's Zen repertoire, and he has recorded more than sixty albums.