Hi, Jon here.
For some time, I had been having trouble with my web hosting company, so at the end of 2024, I decided it was time to move on — before the next bill was due. This is the new site, and my intention is to include all the information from the old site and add new content as things develop.
About Zhongyu
My musical activities started at a young age when I crawled up onto the bench of my grandmother’s Thomas organ and started experimenting with the sounds it could make. Years later, my parents got an antique piano, and I started plunking around on it. I didn’t start formal lessons until I was a teenager, much older than most beginning players, but I learned fast, and my teacher recognized my interest in theory, so she started teaching me about scales and chords in more depth than her other students.
In junior high school, I took up French horn, and played it through high school and into college, where I was a member of the Washington State University Wind Symphony. Also in high school, I played both keyboards and trombone (not much call for French horn) in the jazz band as well as the pit orchestra for school musicals, including Bye Bye Birdie and Man of La Mancha. And I joined my first rock band, a group of older students called something like Double Image, where we covered Doobie Brothers and other current songs. With the addition of my keyboards (actually a Yamaha combo organ borrowed from the high school music department), we added in “In-a-gadda-da-vida” and some Uriah Heep and Deep Purple tunes. I don’t know of any pictures from this band, and I don’t even remember the other guys’ names.
I started writing music while I was in high school, and attended a summer session sponsored by the Centrum Foundation at Fort Worden, where I learned a bit about arranging for jazz ensembles. I did an arrangement of Bo Hansson’s “Solen (Parallellt eller 90°)” for the jazz band, and it was performed at one of our concerts. I studied music theory and composition at WSU for a couple of years before I got discouraged with it and switched majors. But I kept writing music, everything from experimental electronics (with a borrowed synthesizer) to progressive rock, jazz fusion, and rock songs.
In college, I joined up with some others (both local kids and WSU students) to form Eklektix, covering mostly New Wave tunes of the early 80s — lots of Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Split Enz, and Tom Petty. That group morphed into Wild Debbies, which carried on playing in bars and at fraternity events. Over the years, we started incorporating some original music into our repertoire. When three of us finished college, we decided to relocate to Seattle, where we found a new drummer and started playing in local clubs alongside such groups as Young Fresh Fellows, Attachments, Common Man, Room 9, and others. This was Seattle from 1985-88, before grunge hit it big. We played at the Central Saloon, the Owl Cafe, the Hall of Fame, and many of the other clubs of the time, as well as house parties. We even did a road trip back to Pullman to open for the Young Fresh Fellows. It was a lot of fun, and we recorded a four-song demo with Christian Fulghum that we duplicated onto cassettes for marketing. I don’t remember selling any of them.
After the Debbies folded, I started up a new project I called Surreal Estate, working with another songwriter, Pete Chadwick. We recorded a whole lot of demos from around 1988-90, but never played any shows. At first we worked with a drum machine, and eventually tried with a real human on drums, but the guy found our music too challenging — he just wanted to jam, and we had set arrangements and the occasional time signature change. Our scattered stylistic range included purely acoustic tunes, psychedelic folk-rock, jangly rock along the lines of REM, and some more aggressive material with a touch of King Crimson gone punk. But after the drummer left, it all fell apart and I drifted away from music.
I’ve still got all the old four-track demos, and listening to them after all this time has been a real trip — some of the songs I had completely forgotten about. I’ve got them all converted to digital form now, and will be posting them on Soundcloud as I feel inclined.
The hiatus lasted until 2009, when I came back from my China job feeling reinvigorated from seeing all the bands on the Beijing scene. Plus I bought a guzheng that I brought back with me. I started going to shows in Seattle and meeting (or reconnecting) with musicians, mostly those in the experimental territory between jazz and rock. My connection with Dennis Rea and Moraine proved crucial. Dennis had also spent time in China (and wrote a book about it), and there were Asian flavors fused into Moraine’s chamber rock music. Ideas started blooming in my head, and I ended up arranging a Chinese folk song for Moraine, which they recorded on their Groundswell album.
Then I was off and running. I assembled a minimal composing and recording setup at home and started writing music that brought together my interests in progressive rock, electric jazz, and world music. At first I had no real goal for it — I was just throwing together things I thought were interesting. At some point, I realized I had an album’s worth of demos, and I shared them with Dennis. He liked them and asked what I wanted to do with them. Without much thought, I asked, “Would you coproduce an album with me?”
The original idea was that we might have different musicians on different tracks, a studio project rather than an actual band, but once we recruited Alicia and Jim DeJoie of Moraine on violin and woodwinds, then added Randy Doak, a local drummer I was friends with (and who had worked with Dennis in the past) and started rehearsing, things started going so well we began to think of performing live.
As for the name… I wanted something to reflect the Chinese influence, as I was using the guzheng on several of the pieces, and I hit upon the Chinese word 终于 (Zhōngyú) which means “finally.” After all these years, I finally have a band to play the music in my head.