Remembering Gary Stroutsos

1954-2024

Yesterday I attended a celebration of life for Gary Stroutsos, a flute player with whom I collaborated quite a bit over 25 years ago in Seattle. He passed away last October. I had not had much contact with Gary for the last decade or so, but our musical collaborations were all very satisfying to me.

I firmly believe in the healing power of Vibrations, and there's nothing we want now more than Peace, right?. The vibrations of Music brings Beauty, Truth and Justice dressed up as Melody, Harmony and Groove. They are the main ingredients for Music and Peace to be realized.

Gary was from a Greek-Italian family, and had been involved with a number of Native American musicians, singers and storytellers for a few years before we met.

In the mid-1990s, I was invited by Gary and by David Swenson, senior producer and engineer at Makoché Records in Bismarck, North Dakota, to add some synths to an album he was recording, Winds of Honor. Along with percussionist Nonda Trimis, we created a blend of ancestral melodies from the original inhabitants of North America with improvised orchestrations done on my Kurzweil sampler layered over the earthy beats that Nonda created.

You can listen to Winds of Honor here:

In 1996 David Swenson, happy with the textures we created, brought us to the Makoché Studios in Bismarck and we recorded live takes of our Trio, which became The Native Heart. This release had a lot more interaction, because we were playing live in the studio, and I had a cast on my right hand because of a broken wrist:

Top left: Nonda, JSN and Gary - Top right: Gary Stroutsos

Bottom left: JSN (photo was inverted, see cast on “left/right” wrist - Bottom right: Nonda Trimis

Listen to The Native Heart here:

While recording this album we got to visit the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, ancestral home of the great warrior Sitting Bull. We met the elders of the community and I cooked a Brazilian churrasco for the children. What a thrill!

In 2000, in preparation for the 200th. anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of The Corps of Discovery, I was commissioned to write string and orchestral arrangements of beautiful songs of the Mandan Tribe, living in North Dakota near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. I met my friend Keith Bear there. He is a fantastic storyteller who sings in the Mandan-Hidatsa language songs of love and longing.

Here is the Mandan Heartbreak Song, sung by Keith Bear, arranged by me and recorded with a string quartet in Seattle. Nonda is on percussion and Gary on flutes;

If you need to unplug from the wild world for a few minutes, listen to People of the Willows:

Because the music business is so segmented into “styles”, a project like this confuses the algorithms. No one knows if this is “contemporary”, “classical”, “world”, “native”, so it falls through the cracks. This is why I am sharing this music with you, as a way to remember and honor Gary Stroutsos’ contribution to modern music, interpreting and reinterpreting ancestral melodies in collaboration with Native communities all around the Midwest and the Southwest. I am proud to have brought my seasoning to this mix. I hope you will enjoy this music.

Below is a special gift for my paying subscribers: an unreleased track of me and Gary Stroutsos accompanying a Lakota singer: