Riley Lee

Riley Kelly Lee (born 1951) is an American-born Australian-based shakuhachi player and teacher. In 1980 he became the first non-Japanese person to attain the rank of Dai Shihan (grand master) in the shakuhachi tradition. He is a recipient of two of the most revered lineages of shakuhachi playing, descending from the original Zen Buddhist "priests of nothingness" of the Edo period (1600-1868 CE). His first teachers were Hoshida Ichizan II and Chikuho Sakai II. A later teacher was the late Katsuya Yokoyama (d. 2010).

Riley Lee was born in Plainview, Texas, of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother. He moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma in 1957 aged six. He played bass in the rock band The Workouts when he was 13. The family moved to Hawaii in 1966 where as a high school student, Lee first heard the shakuhachi on an LP record that his elder brought home. About the same time, his father gave him a dongxiao, a Chinese bamboo flute whose ancestry is shared with the shakuhachi, and taught him an old Chinese folksong on it.

Lee first went to Japan in 1970, and returned in 1971, when he began his shakuhachi studies and lived there full-time until 1977.

From 1973 through 1977, he toured internationally as a full-time performer of taiko (festival drums) and shakuhachi with Ondekoza (now called Kodo), a group of traditional Japanese musicians. They performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and other groups, and at venues such as Kennedy Center, London's Roundhouse Theatre, Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris, and the Boston Symphony Hall.

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