Happy Apple
The Jazz Kitchen
Wednesday, Jan. 23, 8 p.m., $10, 21+

Minneapolis punk-jazz trio Happy Apple will make its Indianapolis debut at The Jazz Kitchen this Wednesday, arriving in the wake of their seventh and latest full-length album, Happy Apple Back On Top. It’s taken 12 years for the band to make the trek, although drummer David King has already seen the city – he composes and drums for both Happy Apple and another rock-influenced Minneapolis jazz trio, The Bad Plus, who played the Kitchen last fall.

Named for a children’s toy popular in the 60’s and 70’s, Happy Apple has been described as an abstract post-modern jazz group that uses rock dynamics. Another way to say it: at the core of the group’s approach is collective improvisation, and while the band draws on different musical genres, it doesn’t try to fuse them all together at once.

King says that the band’s sound has changed over the past 12 years, mellowing out with age. “In the earlier days, we were playing more aggressively all the time; we had a more free-jazz mentality,” says King. “Since then, we are more into using different harmonic concepts; we try to bring a lot more harmony into our saxophone[-based] trio.”

Other than the overworked King, the members of Happy Apple are Erik Fratzke on fender bass and Michael Lewis on tenor, alto and soprano saxophones and keyboards.
King admits that drumming for both Happy Apple and The Bad Plus can be challenging. “Both groups work with the no charts philosophy,” says King.

Of course, sharing the same philosophy and drummer means that both groups are readily compatible: King suggests that a tour and recording uniting the two groups under the moniker The Bad Apple may be in the works. “One thing that is cool, and has happened twice now, is that the bands have played together as a quintet and we do an all Ornette Coleman program,” says King.

The band was not only named for the Fisher-Price children’s toy, it also uses it in concert. King deploys the five-inch tall red plastic apple, which has a bell inside that rings or rattles when shaken, as part of his percussion arsenal.