Hideki Ishima

Hideki Ishima (石間 秀機, Ishima Hideki, born March 21, 1944 in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan) is a Japanese musician, known primarily for his work with Flower Travellin' Band. A guitarist and sitar player for nearly forty years, he now exclusively plays the sitarla, an instrument he invented in 2000 that combines aspects of a sitar with an electric guitar.

cover of Japanesque with Akira Ito and Joe Yamanaka.

Ishima started playing guitar at 19, at the behest of a friend who wanted to be in a band. His first group was Jarōzu (ジャローズ) in his native Sapporo shortly after graduating high school. He moved to Tokyo and formed the group sounds band The Beavers in 1966, who had released four albums and one single but had not had major success.

Ishima began playing sitar at 24, after researching Gábor Szabó at the suggestion of a woman and learning that the jazz guitarist also played this instrument he had never heard of. He taught himself from Ravi Shankar's 1968 book My Music, My Life, looking up the Japanese translations for the English words.

In 1969, while in the blues band Mystic Morning with Joe Yamanaka, the two of them were scouted by Yuya Uchida for Flower Travellin' Band. When they went on hiatus in 1973, Ishima recorded the solo album One Day and joined a group called Trans Am. After a few years off, he followed this with the Donjuan R&R Band with Kenichi Hagiwara. During the 1980s he was in Co-Colo alongside Kenji Sawada and Nobuhiko Shinohara, before being fired.

Ishima quit guitar in 1990, citing money problems. After a 40-minute sitar lesson from Manilal Nag during a trip to Japan in 1998, Ishima became a student of Nag's Japanese apprentice.

He made a comeback in 2000 exclusively playing the sitarla. That year, he recorded the album More-ish with the multinational group Pythagoras Party. The improvisational instrumental group View was formed in 2007.

• One Day (1973)