Hey, What’s up?
So here we are in February already. I mentioned last month we would be releasing the late Jon Strongbow’s Mystery School albums to the world. To the best of my knowledge, Jon recorded these instrumental albums, made CDs and sold them only at the Pike Place Public Market at his artist booth.They have never been available in stores or on the internet. We are now taking them world-wide – Amazon -Spotify – Pandora, all that stuff. There are five CDs which we will be releasing over the next few months – we will start off with Unusual Tales. Tales is a compilation taken from four Strongbow cassettes, What It Takes (1990), World Without Words (1992), Music For Intense Cities (1993), Short Stories (1994) and Dream Waltz (1995).
Jon at the Pike Place Market with Unusual Tales
I had never spent any serious time with the Mystery School albums until Jon’s death. I have now. My initial “no attention” listen back when was smooth, jazzy, not particularly challenging. A more attentive, deeper re-listen revealed pearls. These are excellent musicians playing in a thoughtful yet intuitive manner. They are worthy of your attention. Pick yourself a comfy spot, hit play and sink into the moment.
In addition to Mystery School relases, we will be making some of Jon’s books available on the GMR Bandcamp site, starting this month with The Hidden World, Jon’s mythic illustrated tour of Seattle circa 1996 . You can read what Jon had to say about The Hidden World and Unusual Tales below.
Next month we have some other treats coming (hopefully) a new single from the True Olympians, covers of Olympia country band The Olson Brothers “I Bleed Evergreen” and “Kill Your Mom” – we love those songs! We are also shooting for our second release from Von Cube, One For The Money.
The True Olympians have begun work on History of NW Rock Vol. 2, our renditions of PNW classics. I have evolved my concept at this point and have decided to split it in two with Vol 2 going 1970 to 1980, to be followed by a Volume 3 going from 1981 to 1986. The current lineup for Vol 2 is songs by Ballinjack, Hendrix, Heart, Jim Basnight, Telepaths, Chinas Comidas, Epicenter, S’nots, The Accident, The Enemy, Student Nurse, Blackouts, The Heats, The Macs, Red Dress, Rail, and the Westside Lockers.
That should hold you for now!
td Feb 2023
From Jon’s site, JonStrongbow.com :
About THE HIDDEN WORLD
After more than 15 years, THE HIDDEN WORLD is back in print, with 16 pages of new stories and art! on glossy paper! THE HIDDEN WORLD is the first of three books based on the Secret City series. It is a meditation on drumming to keep the spirit alive in a bleak modern world. Originally 64 pages, now 80 pages black and white interior, with color cover and retails at $9.95. Cover: The wraparound cover shows Pioneer Square buildings with Papua New Guinea Warrior shaking his spear. See the city of Seattle in a way you’ve never seen it… enter the Hidden World of the Secret City.
About UNUSUAL TALES:
In 1992 and 1993 Jon Strongbow released his first instrumental albums: “WORLD WITHOUT WORDS” and “MUSIC FOR INTENSE CITIES,” both of which contain the seeds for what later would become Mystery School. Both these albums contain Tibetan chants from the Shakya Monastery woven into some of the music.
In 1994 Jon Strongbow embarked on a project now known as “SHORT STORIES,” where 20 musical themes are compressed to three minutes or less. This was accomplished with the aid of the sensational Martin Sutlovich on fretless bass and the extraordinary Patrick Donicht on drums and engineering.
In 1995 this same group of artists recorded “DREAM WALTZ” which contains 10 larger instrumental pieces by Jon Strongbow. This album was created immediately prior to the founding of MYSTERY SCHOOL and has many of the same musicians performing on it.
Jon’s 2010 Notes on the songs.
1. ‘The Wild Side’ was the opening track for Short Stories, an album containing 20 instrumental themes that we completed and released in 1994. The challenge I gave myself at the time was to keep them all at 3 minutes or less. This piece was a lot of fun to create. I could go on for hours about it. Note Patrick’s gorilla voice. Is it any wonder he went on to form a great jazz band called Pocket Monkey
2. ‘Waltz Dream’ was created as a reflection of Dream Waltz, which was on the flip side of the original cassette release. I have this thing for the waltz, and hope to release a compendium of waltzes someday. Note the amazing Clayton Park on violin.
3. ‘Asia on Foot’ was the lead track on side two of Short Stories. Of course there is no such thing as side two any more. It’s all one big digital continuum now, where everything changes and fades or looms up out of nowhere, and we just go along with the flow, traveling towards an unknown mystical destination. We are all travelers, and we all leave our marks, for better or worse.
4. ‘All the Nonsense Inside’ was one of the first instrumental pieces I did. It was from the album What It Takes and was originally called Separate the Rhythm From The Blues, which was a long vocal song about inner contradictions and how they project into outer conflict. I wasn’t happy with the tempo, because it was too fast to fit the downbeat mood of the lyrics, but I liked Leo’s drumming, so on a mad impulse I removed the lyrics and Alakazambed it into the wicked/funny little number it is now. Then we edited it to fit our size restraints.
5. ‘An Ocean in Tibet’ features Tibetan Buddhist members of the Shakya monastery (excuse the heinous typos on the 4-pager in the album) as led by Shakya Dagchen Rimpoche. The piece is about an ocean of spirituality in the middle of the cold continent of China. I really pissed everyone off (except the Rimpoche, who always seems amused) when I showed up with boom mikes and long cords and strange looking engineers. Oh well. You can’t please everyone, but I hope this tune will make up for it. This is from the album World Without Words, but we altered it vastly, using the state of the art jiggery-pokery.
6. When I was living in Europe I loved ‘Riding the Underground Trains’. Sometimes I would ride them all day and all night long, just to sort of cleanse the mind. Note the brilliant hammered dulcimer by the late great Robert Almblade. This is also from World Without Words.
7. ‘What the Elders Said’ features some great backwards stuff, as well as the aforementioned Tibetan Buddhists. I love the juxtaposition of the ominous and the positive in this piece. From the album Short Stories.
8. ‘At the Center of Time’ is one of my all-time favorite pieces, featuring fantastic flute by Robert Almblade’s love: Carolyn Cruso. It is the opening track of the album Music For Intense Cities. It’s a real epic, and also the longest piece on the album! It seems to be about trying to locate the Real Self, which exists at the Center of Time. It is an ode to the pain as well as to the great mystery and joy of absolute individuality. Its construction is based on 333, a dreamtime number discovered by the Mighty Martin Sutlovich, who asked me to tell you that he plays a Garvin Fretless bass.
9. ‘As the Crow Flies’ is one of my shortest instrumentals, and one of my favorites. It seems like the soundtrack to an entire movie in only a minute and 46 seconds! Marty and Patrick are at the top of their game here! Dig those jungle toms and those high bass notes at the end like silver bullets!
10. ‘Mermaids in a Net’ is a great piece from Short Stories. It was a fun challenge putting all the diverse elements together so they fit into a satisfying whole. I especially love the angelic voices of the two gals who used to call themselves ‘Barefoot and Flowers’ But it was Patrick’s engineering stunts that really made this song happen. His masterful tricks were so famous, one of his nicknames became ‘Patchtrick.’
11. ‘Waltz at World’s End’ is from the unreleased Part 4 of Alien City, a sort of musical poem about madness and alienation, which was released on cheap vinyl back in 1979, and has become some sort of collector’s item. Send me money and maybe I can reconstruct Parts 3 and 4. For this version I divested it of most of the lyrics but kept the original stops and starts. From the album Short Stories.
12. The ocean is alive and singing, if you catch my ‘Continental Drift’. This was another little gem from Short Stories, featuring amazing harmonics from the Mighty Marty Man, and a lovely lullaby by a lonesome humpback whale. We totally remixed this piece to bring out my guitar and to upgrade the bass harmonics. Due to an oversight on the album liner notes, I forgot to credit myself for the acoustic guitar!
13. ‘The Opposite of Being Asleep’ from Music For Intense Cities was a kooky idea that pissed all my musician friends off. I allowed each one to play through the entire song solo, but all along I wanted to do a piece where there were all these excellent voices talking all at once and it would be so dense you couldn’t hear anything unless you really listened. I loved this idea, and everyone performed wonderfully, but when I unleashed the amazing Clayton Park, I almost abandoned my original notion, because his performance was so astonishing! Naturally, he dominates the piece, and that’s probably why it pissed off the other musicians. Still, I totally stand by my choice, however I would love to someday release an album that consists of 10 different versions of this one piece, allowing everyone a total solo voice! Send contributions! Help make it happen!
14. ‘Shore Leave’ is a fun excursion into a world I don’t want to have anything to do with. I still enjoyed making a musical foray into a realm where military men explode into town for a night of whoring and boozing after wiping out the enemy. Thanks to Marty’s fun bass lines we managed to turn it into an amusing escapade. From the Short Stories album.
15. ‘Ocean of Dreams’ is from the Dream Waltz project, and another one of those odes to the great bodies of water we seem to take for granted on this ever-lovin’ Blue Water Planet. Instead of using a lot of ocean sounds, I went with Patrick’s brilliant idea of symbol-washes that imply waves and foam. Tina North was a strange but awesome poetess, whose haunting vocals really bring a dark twist to it.
16. ‘Mister Sun’ is a really rocking little ditty, and deserves to be somebody’s theme song. This piece was totally composed in my head while soaring down Seattle’s hills on my trusty bicycle. It is all about flying into the face of things. It originally appeared on Short Stories. Note Patrick’s deft drum track, which was recorded live in one take!
17. ‘Entering the Alien City’ is a reworking of a theme from Part One of the aforementioned Alien City tone poem LP from 1979. Unfortunately the master tapes for this project were lost, including all the work on Part III which was nearly finished, but never released. It first appeared on the album Music For Intense Cities. Note the beautiful transition between Doug’s nasty-snarling wah-wah guitar into the beautiful descending arpeggios. That’s me playing acoustic guitar on the first half of the piece. Another error in my liner notes!
18. Another great piece featuring Clayton Park was ‘Learning To Speak in a Forgotten Tongue’ from Dream Waltz, although the concept and the meter totally baffled him (which was my intention of course). Learning a new language, and in fact communication of any sort can be a bitch, especially if you don’t have a clue. The frustration and the joy found in incremental victories is what this piece is all about. On the album liner notes I made yet another mistake. Tina North is not on this piece. The only vocal you hear at the end is melancholy me, which was actually on a scratch vocal trak, but I buried it so it sounded like it was from another dimension a million miles away, and I liked that effect.
19. ‘A Walk in Space’ from World Without Words is a joyful embracing of life and a rejecting of negativity. That’s me on background marimba and again, the amazing Robert Almblade on hammered dulcimer. Send money for a copy of the lyrics. I intentionally tried to disguise what I was saying, keeping in mind, it was an instrumental album, after all!
20. If you’ve ever wandered out into the so-called wasteland and spent a ‘Desert Night’ gazing into the wilderness of stars and drinking in the sounds of the desert silence, then you might dig this piece from the album Short Stories. Patrick is an amateur stargazer himself, and we recorded this piece at his A-frame cabin in the middle of the night in the middle of the forest on the South side of Camano Island.
21. And here we are in the jungle again, where we started out. ‘On An Elephant’s Back’ pissed off various engineers and critics because of Marty’s subsonic bass tones. It was so over-the-top, so huge and ungainly, but hey, so is riding on an elephant’s back! Try it sometime! I did, back while we were working on a not-so-little album called Short Stories.
That’s it for now, but look for more new releases in the near future. There are 3 new Mystery School projects currently in the works: Child’s Play, Alien Cathedral, and Secret Teachings.
Love: Jon Strongbow, 2010