Hi Eugene,
I'm not sure if this answers your question, but if you are looking for recordings to play along with Jamey Aebersold has a whole line of jazz CD's with charts that are designed for students to play along with. The rhythm sections are all respectable jazz musicians. It's not like playing with real musicians but to figure out your melodies and scales it's user friendly.
http://www.aebersold.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc
You will probably want to start with the blues because the natural pentatonic scale of the shakuhachi closely resembles the blues scale. It would also be relatively easy to play along with some of the modal pieces. Which brings up a pertinent point. Although Phil Gelb said the shakuhachi is a chromatic instrument it's not easy to use it that way. Pragmatically it's not advisable to try to play all music on one shakuhachi. It's an instrument which CAN be played chromatically, but it never was until recently and that's not what it was designed to do. Chromatic implies equal temprament and the traditional scales use microtones. For purposes of playing western music on it you will want to focus on keeping as many of the open holes in play as possible for the chord or scale you are using. 1.8 shakuhachi low note is D, so if you use ro as the starting point of your scale you can easily play in Dm.
If you want to play in a lot of different keys you will also want flutes in different lengths so that at least the most important notes of the scale (usually 1, 4, 5) are open holes. I suppose you could play in the key of C# on a 1.8 shakuhachi if you want to make an exercise of it, but it's will sound better and be easier for you to use a 1.9 (C# root note). To complicate matters you can also use other holes of the shakuhachi as the root notes of your scales. For example on I.8 if you use re (third hole, G in western pitch) as your starting point you are playing in G. Start on chi and you're playing in Am, etc. It takes a lot of experimentation to find which fingerings on which length flute sounds best for whichever scale you want.
It takes some time to learn how to relate the notes on a 1.8 shakuhachi to the western pitches.The real pain in the ass comes when you try to relate western pitches to the fingerings of the other shakuhachi lengths. It's very difficult to read western music on odd length shakuhachi. Transposition becomes an issue. Thus choosing the shakuhachi which sounds best for the key can really complicate the task of reading the music. I wonder if anybody has come up with a slide rule or chart correlating western pitch to the notes on various lengths of shakuhachi?
In practical terms if you learn a melody and changes you can tell the other musicians to play in the key you are in. You can play the same song with the same fingerings in different keys just by changing the length of flute. But for example a song like "Mr. PC" by John Coltrane is always played in C. So you better learn how to play in that key if you want to sit in with conventional jazz musicians. Best thing in that particular case is to learn how to play it on a 2.0 length shakuhachi.
I've really oversimplified things here, but as I was writing I realized how confusing the whole thing is! Use your ear, trust your heart and hope your brain and fingers can follow!
BR
On Thursday, May 26, 2005, at 06:03PM, Eugene Sukhorukov <eugenedent@juno.com> wrote:
>Hi everybody,
>
>Does anybody know where to find chord progressions that can be played
>along with shakuhachi on guitar, keyboard or other western instruments?
>
>How does the type of scale played on shakuhachi affects the chord
>progression?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Eugene
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