Green Monkey Records has been a part of the Seattle music scene for a long time — Tom Dyer started the label in 1983. When I first moved to Seattle in 1985, I met Tom and a bunch of people who were part of the Green Monkey family. Check out their Bandcamp page, as a lot of their great catalog is available there.
One of the semi-regular Green Monkey traditions is to release Christmas music. In 2018, Tom put out the call for submissions for a new compilation, and I decided it would be fun to bring a little Super Z weirdness to the effort. Back in college, when I was studying jazz arranging, one of the things I worked on was a big band arrangement of the classic “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” which I always thought had one of the most compelling melodies in the standard repertoire. And being an old prog-head, I heard it slipping from 3/4 into 5/4… and thus was born “We Three Super Kings.”
We recorded it live at Jim DeJoie’s house, and I took the tracks home to mess with them. Maybe the result’s a mess, but I kind of enjoyed it!