A winter view of the Dai Bosatsu Kongo-Ji monastery through the trees from across Beecher Lake.		A Personal Message From Anthony Bez Welcome to my website. I’d like for you to get to know a little about me and for me to be able to share some of my work with you. I recently released a CD entitled Return to Mountain as a follow up to my CD Holy Mountain. The music is composed and played by me at the Zen Monastery Dai Bosatsu Kongo-Ji in the Catskill Mountains. This is a very inspiring and contemplative place. In my first CD I attempt to convey a sense of the Zendo and Monastery through the seasons of a year. It did, in fact, take me a year of visits throughout the various seasons to compose and record this CD. Return to Mountain is the culmination of this “Monastery Portrait” with guitar pieces interspersed with the ambient and environmental sounds of the monastery. I’ve included a CD of the Morning Service at the monastery which is available from their bookstore.
I have long been a practitioner of Taoist disciplines and a student of Buddhism. When I was invited to perform for the Abbot’s birthday concert, I was very honored. I didn’t at that moment know how taken I would be with the gentle humanity I would experience at the Monastery. I had studied Buddhism but never Zen. The Zendo gives a structured and prolonged opportunity to experience a guided meditative discipline. It is a gate to an enlightened way. Surrounded by nature in a forest preserve, we can once again be in touch with a fundamental reality that is incredibly beautiful and healing. I have been told that my work does, in fact, convey these myriad impressions.		The same vista during spring...
summer…	Though I am trained as a classical musician, I am grateful to have grown up with a broad appreciation of music that includes Jazz and Flamenco. The great improvisers of our day have been a tremendous inspiration to me. Such diverse artists as the Paul Winter Consort, Oregon, Ralph Towner, Keith Jarrett and John McLaughlin were a part of my musical landscape as well as guitar composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos and Francisco Moreno-Torroba. Indeed, improvisation was fundamental to the creation of these CDs, Holy Mountain and Return to Mountain. This music flows very easily from me and represents to me a way of the natural guitar. It is Taoist in its natural flow and harmony, it is Zen in it’s being an expression of the moment and it is a celebration of a Buddhist way of life and meditation.
Please take some time to examine my photographs of the seasons at the Dai Bosatsu International Monastery and some of the things that have been said about my work. Please listen to the representative sample for each season. There is also contact information at the end of this website. I hope you’ll purchase my CDs from one of the sources listed and find a way to visit the Dai Bosatsu mountain for yourself. Please be patient when downloading photos and samples for listening. The background music you have been hearing on the home page and here is a looped sample of “By the Buddha”. More complete samples are available at CD Baby by clicking here. Thank you.		and fall.