Youth Oriented

Happy Apple | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (January 21, 2003)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sunny Side
• ASIN: B00007JGQL
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #180,261 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars David King's Other Band, February 28, 2003

By 

Jan P. Dennis "Longboard jazzer" (Monument, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Youth Oriented (Audio CD)

And quite a band it is. David King, he of the monster drum chops, mainstay of that mega-deconstructionist jazz outfit, The Bad Plus, shows he's by no means a one trick pony. Happy Apple strikes me as no less innovative and irreverent than The Bad Plus, which, alas, seems to be getting most of the attention.

There's perhaps more of a rock vibe happening here, but it's not one you're likely to hear even on college or alternative radio. There's too much of a true jazz sensibility running through this disc to land it in that territory. The instrumentation--sax, bass (albeit electric), drums--is a kind of classic jazz trio with roots in such venerable innovators as Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, and, more recently, Joe Lovano. But what they do with it is something else again.

Featuring all originals--and the lads are no slouches as composers--Happy Apple seems to be more in line with, say Josh Roseman, Ez Pour Spout (though both these do a lot of covers), and Tronzo, Granelli, Epstein (check out their fine record, Crunch), than the traditional pianoless jazz trio. There also seems to be some kind of referent to unclassifyable, free-floating, just-plain-intransigence a la Captain Beefheart.

They succeed because they've created a genuinely new sound that combines elements of free jazz, alt-rock, compositional ingenuity, and true improv.

A note about the packaging. As this is a Nato-generated disc--these are the purveyors of such avant weirdness as the Lonely Bears and the Sam Rivers/Tony Hymas collaboration Eight Day Journal--you get some recurring visual motifs. Oddly, it shares with the latter a faux illustrated story-booklet, supposedly a visual commentary on the music, but really more like an iconic red herring, which, nevertheless, provides intriguing eye-candy, entirely consonant with the music proceedings.

Probably not for everybody (indeed, who is it designed to please?), but certainly worth plunking down a few dollars if you're an adventurous musical hound like this listener.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great !!!, September 23, 2007

By 

Lascarade (France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Youth Oriented (Audio CD)

I don't have much to say... This band is great, and this cd is as great, creative and diverse than all others from Happy Apple...
Happy Apple, since more than 10 years, is creating a great music wich is completly "their" music : it looks like Sonny Rollins meeting The Police, or Roland Kirk having child with Nomeansno (a great hardcore band). And all the poetry, excitment, furor and idiosyncratic beauty of their music come from these strange and monstruous crossings.
Of course, if you want to hear "jazz", with II/V chord progressions, songs of 32 bars and structure in AABA, you will be very disapointed. And if your limit in "avant-garde" is the jazz of the sixties, with this particular feeling it had, and if you can't accept the fact that jazz opened itself since this time to many local and diverse esthetics, you will feel sad about this music, that doesn't look like something you can recognize.
To me, Happy Apple is not an "avant garde" or "free-jazz" band (they like too much beautiful melodies for this), nor a commercial band (they are too much crazy and free-minded for that) but one of the most creative "power trio" of these times.

3.0 out of 5 stars Involving if over-extended, January 4, 2010

By 

IRate - See all my reviews

This review is from: Youth Oriented (Audio CD)

Though fans of BP may be underwhelmed if going in with high expectations, this all but encompasses hip experimental jazzy background music.