King Midas

Picture a child’s face as he plays a video game—eyes glued to the screen, lips pursed then mashed together, body contorted as he jerks the controller for better leverage. Now put that face on a thirty-six-year-old bald man and set him behind a drum set, eyes squeezed shut then wide open, a smile creasing his face as he looks over at the saxophonist and bassist on either side of him. Imagine this manic, almost childish energy coming from a jazz band at the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul one night in September.

“Tonight it’s all cinema, Mike,” the drummer, David King, tells saxophonist Michael Lewis. Which is vintage Dave King, because when he plays with this band, Happy Apple—or any of his bands—it’s never just about the music. Happy Apple is between songs, and Lewis is sweating and visibly drained. King gives him a breather and introduces the next song, telling an imaginative anecdote involving the Scandinavian history of the previous tune, “Lefsa Los Cubanos.” Leaning against the piano, Lewis knows that King could continue the sometimes wry, often silly banter for another five minutes. Later, King kids bass player Erik Fratzke. “You sound like Flea,” King says, referring to the bassist with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a pop band that has little in common with Happy Apple. The audience, ages eighteen to eighty, howls with laughter.

When King leads the band back to the music, he does it with such furious momentum the break is immediately forgotten.

King writes a good chunk of the music his bands play—besides Happy Apple, there’s his other jazz group, The Bad Plus, and his electronica/pop band, Halloween, Alaska. At the same time, few musicians cover Ornette Coleman with the earnestness they cover Black Sabbath, LL Cool J, or Nirvana. King does, though maybe it’s more accurate to say he covers them earnestly with a wink. But then King’s covers aren’t about defining a musical style or attaching himself to a genre. They are about acknowledging music that informs his own. King is known throughout the jazz world for his improvisational skills, which draw from a dizzying repertoire that includes everything from bebop to nineties pop. For King, there’s no bourgeois or high-brow music, no elite school of rock, no exclusive church of jazz. King is about sound and making good music, not about making good jazz, good rock, or good electronica, though he makes all three.

In the Twin Cities, King is at the forefront of a growing number of rock-influenced jazz musicians who are attracting younger crowds than their more traditional jazz counterparts. Highly regarded in the music industry worldwide, King has worked with major-league producer Tchad Blake, whose work on The Bad Plus’s 2004 release, Give, yielded a Grammy nomination. King has recorded at Peter Gabriel’s British studio three times. Happy Apple has won nine consecutive Minnesota Music Awards. King himself has won multiple MMAs for best drummer. And, as the drummer for several unique bands, he does more than keep time. He’s acclaimed for something unexpected of a drummer—a sense of humor, a playful presence, and the skill and command to take the lead.

Happy Apple’s set list at the Artists’ Quarter this evening, for instance, includes witty, always entertaining compositions that jump musical genres and involve detailed storylines—a neat trick for tunes without lyrics. The titles give a clue: “See Sun Spot Run,” “Tang: The Astronaut’s Drink of Desire,” “Take Wes Chandler for Instance,” and “If This Is Love, It Isn’t.”

Progressive or experimental jazz often sounds free and reckless, but King and his bands carefully select and play each note and beat. Though both Happy Apple and The Bad Plus are considered progressive jazz trios, their sounds don’t exactly compare apples to (happy) apples. The Bad Plus features a standup bass and piano, Happy Apple an electric bass guitar and sax. And while The Bad Plus does improvise, it tends to stick to its elaborate compositions; Happy Apple is rooted more in experimentation and improvisation. Both bands, though considered jazz, definitely rock—and often.

Though some of King’s music is “out there,” he keeps it relatable by playing covers of popular music—with significant improvisation, of course. The Bad Plus covers Nirvana and Black Sabbath; Happy Apple performs snippets of songs by everyone from David Bowie to Gwen Stefani; and Halloween, Alaska’s Too Tall to Hide album includes a rendition of LL Cool J’s “I Can’t Live Without My Radio.”

King, for his part, doesn’t simply bang on the head of a drum with a stick. He uses his finger and his elbow on the drums. He circles the drum heads with his sticks. He meticulously drags a drumstick across a cymbal as if to say, “This is music—sound, noise—it’s not just notes.” When he can’t create the sound he wants with traditional instruments, he improvises—famously with children’s toys. His arsenal includes megaphones that make static noises when he runs them over the drum head, a plastic penguin that jingles, and a child’s drum that he twirls and shakes. His attachment to the toys, he explains, comes from not having a complete drum set when he was a kid. “I built a set out of pots and pans when I was in junior high,” he says. To this day, he uses one of his mother’s pots from the seventies.

“I’ve always searched for things that people don’t have,” he continues. “Instead of going out and buying a Latin percussion shaker at Guitar Center, I would try to find a Fisher–Price toy that would make a similar sound. And it’s not so much that I crave being different, but that I really do want to have a palate that is my own all the time. For a few years, I was playing with walkie-talkies, playing the drums with the antennae. Now I’ve gone on to megaphones that feed back when you hit them on the drum and to weird 1970s Fisher–Price keyboards. It’s not like I just went, ‘Oh, I want to be a weird free jazz guy and have jingly toys.’ It was more like I’ve been carrying these stupid squeezy toys around for twenty years.” He laughs and adds, “I have seniority.”

Happy Apple was in fact named after the familiar Fisher–Price toddler’s toy. His other bands’ names came about just as obliquely. Halloween, Alaska is a fake town. The Bad Plus came from putting together “words that are very simple and sounded like they mean something, but they don’t,” King says. “It’s very kind of pop art–like. You remember it, and it’s a little bit oxymoronic, but it’s not like, you know, ‘The Bad Good.’ Nothing that obvious."

It’s the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, and it’s standing room only at the Artists’ Quarter for the third night in a row. Happy Apple has played the weekend to sold-out audiences that range from high school seniors to senior citizens. Kenny Horst, the AQ’s owner, says SRO for Happy Apple is business as usual. Horst has been booking the band for ten years—since its second show ever.

Happy Apple went through several incarnations before hitting its stride with its current trio of King, Lewis, and Fratzke. The band had had two saxophonists and an upright-bass player when, finally, in 1996, Fratzke came aboard, because, as the electric-bass player says, “you don’t refuse an invitation to work with Dave King.” (King is equally enthusiastic about working with Fratzke. “It was sort of like, ‘This is it, this is how it’s working,’ ” he says. “And from then on it’s like it can’t be anything else.”)

At the beginning, Happy Apple was much louder and more aggressive. “Everything they played was off the deep end,” says Horst. “When they started out, the waitresses wore earplugs.” Now the band’s tunes, both hard and soft, reflect its members’ range and interests, and their determination to meld genres has been a big reason for its success.

King likewise crosses genre lines with his band Halloween, Alaska, which won the 2006 Minnesota Music Award for best electronic artist/group. King and Fratzke also play in The Gang Font feat. Interloper, their new noise/ jazz/rock band with keyboardist Craig Taborn and Hüsker Dü’s bass player, Greg Norton. (Of King’s 225-plus gigs a year, 175 of them are with The Bad Plus, 40 are with Happy Apple, and 10 with Halloween, Alaska.) King, for that matter, has been busy with more than live shows and touring. The Bad Plus recently recorded at Cannon Falls’ Pachyderm Studio with British producer Tony Platt, who’s worked on records for AC/DC and Bob Marley; that CD is due out in March. Halloween, Alaska will release its new CD this spring. And Happy Apple is recording this winter. Of the thirty-five CDs King has appeared on, fourteen were recorded by one of the three main bands. Other CDs include those by Meat Beat Manifesto, Haley Bonar, Mason Jennings, Dean Magraw, Bill Carrothers, Craig Taborn, Love-cars, and Rhea Valentine.

If King has an affinity for local clubs and bands, it’s partly because he grew up here, in Golden Valley, and lives there now with his wife, Laura, and their two small kids. After attending Cooper High School and the MacPhail Center for Music, for five years he played jazz and rock gigs and did studio work in Los Angeles, learning the industry. But as a sideman, he was increasingly interested in doing more original work. “I was living in LA when Nirvana took off,” he says. “All of a sudden, you saw 300 bands trying to sound like Nirvana instead of trying to make their own stuff.” He and Laura returned to the Twin Cities, and he immediately connected with creative hometown musicians, including the guys with whom he would form Happy Apple. “It was really something how much they stood above a lot of the musicians I’d heard,” King says, “and I thought, ‘Wow, if we could start a creative music scene here, I don’t see how it could be ignored.’”

King’s biggest fan is another local—his dad, Dwayne King. The retired IBM systems engineer attends every one of his son’s shows in the Twin Cities, travels to New York when The Bad Plus plays there (including for its recent Carnegie Hall gig), and has traveled to Europe to see Dave perform there. He even hawks CDs at Happy Apple shows. His dad, however, admits to having doubts at the beginning. “Thinking that Dave could build an audience such as he did with Happy Apple two and three people at a time and then make a living at it was beyond what I ever imagined,” he says. “I never envisioned he could actually create his own style of music.”

Dave grew up listening to his parents’ records—1950s rock, jazz, big band, classical, country. When Dave was three years old, his dad recalls, he would lie on the floor and play Buddy Holly and Hank Snow for hours at a time. His older brother, Patrick, was into seventies rock—yet another inspiration. “The more I heard different things, the more I wanted to hear something that outdid it,” he says. “It didn't matter if it was cool, it didn’t matter what style it was. I was really interested in how mysterious it was to try to get really good at your instrument and still retain that street, rock ’n’ roll kind of thing. From then, it just started working backward. I was like, ‘What about John Coltrane or acoustic jazz or 1960s modal jazz, free jazz?’ ” Finally, in high school, he says, “I started realizing what was coming out of me was a combination of all this stuff. I’m into Devo and Rush and John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin. What does that sound like? And I like them all the same. And I like Stravinsky and Charlie Parker.”

King started playing the piano when he was four. By the time he took formal lessons, at five, he had mastered the basics. “He just sat for hours, sounding things out on the piano,” his father says. “And he began making things up on the piano, which led to the improvisation he does today.”

In the fifth grade, King had to choose an instrument to play in the school band. His dad says he wanted him to play the trumpet, but “he tried out for drums, so that was the end of that.” King taught himself the drums, and almost immediately was able to play along with records. When he was in the seventh grade, he bought his first drum set from a friend for $100. “It had his name on the front of the head,” King says, “so every time I played, it said my name was Marty Jackson.”

Soon he added some beat-up cymbals to his set and started taking lessons. He became obsessed with the drums, and, with friends—some of whom he’d later play with professionally—started rock bands in his basement. When he was thirteen, King recalls, he angered a minister at a church function when his band played Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” In high school, he says, he was kicked out of band class for ad-libbing too much. But that, he adds, was a blessing in disguise. “My friends and I were playing complicated fusion music like Weather Report tunes and trying to imitate Jaco Pastorius.” Meantime, the school’s newly formed jazz band was banging away on John Mellencamp’s “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”

The memory still breaks him up.As some of King’s current bands were growing, and he was invested in other local bands—including Love-cars, Rhea Valentine, and 12 Rods—the bands were all more or less on equal footing. But in 1997, when Happy Apple released its first record, the band immediately achieved local renown and started touring. (King had been making ends meet teaching master classes at Musictech—now McNally Smith—and the University of Minnesota, as well as giving private drumming lessons.) Then, in 2002, Happy Apple signed a record deal with Universal Europe, a major label. When, six months later, The Bad Plus signed with Columbia Records, something had to give. King soon quit 12 Rods and focused on touring and playing mainly with The Bad Plus and Happy Apple.

Those two bands have “sort of sparred for space since then,” says King. “But The Bad Plus has received so many opportunities to play, it’s opened doors for Happy Apple,” which does two or three European tours a year, plus plays New York, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and college campuses. The Bad Plus has toured internationally for the past four years.

Meanwhile, King and James Diers of Love-cars started toying with the idea of electronic pop. They recruited keyboardist Ev Olcott from 12 Rods and bass player Matt Friesen—whom King has known for twenty years—and Halloween, Alaska was born. The new band made a record, and Ryko Discs/East Side Digital offered a record deal. Soon Halloween, Alaska was playing on the Current and was played twice on Fox’s prime-time soap The O.C. 

Hollywood was interested in King’s other involvements as well. A sample of a Happy Apple song was included in the otherwise forgettable film The Hot Chick. King is still incredulous about the experience. “We got paid $7,500 for six seconds of a drum beat,” he says. “Six seconds! That’s more than Happy Apple makes on a two-week European tour. Two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, riding around on a fucking train, humping a  cymbal bag and bass and saxophone cases, and being yelled at in French by people for sitting in the wrong seat. Then The Hot Chick. It’s ridiculous. A drum beat.”

From the beginning, King’s sense of humor—sarcastic, witty, ironic, infectious—has been part of the mix, and there are those among Happy Apple’s audience who may come just for the comedy. The jokes and patter, King says, “grew out of the idea of getting a breather for the saxophonist between songs. That’s a wind instrument, and sometimes he looks at me like his head’s going to come off. I just started talking and never rehearsed any dialogue. Your mind is in a creative space when you’re playing, and all this weird stuff started coming out.”

Chris Morrissey, a musician who most notably plays bass with Mason Jennings’s band, says, “There are a lot of musicians who play a part when they get onstage and act the way they think that their crowd wants them to act—but Dave acts the way he is.” Saxophonist Mike Lewis agrees. “He’s really funny, sharp-witted, and passionate, and he doesn’t curtail that for anybody. Onstage, it’s the same deal.”

In December 2000, King, pianist Ethan Iverson, and bassist Reid Anderson played their first local gig as The Bad Plus at the Dakota (then located in St. Paul’s Bandana Square). The following year, they performed another holiday show there, and prior to the performance The New York Times included the band’s self-titled album in its list of the ten best jazz CDs of the year. “For a young group, first album, small Spanish label [Fresh Sound], that was an amazing thing,” says Dakota co-owner Lowell Pickett. “Then stuff really started happening.” December 2006 marked the seventh year the band has played the Dakota between Christmas and New Year’s—prime time at the venerable jazz house, now located in downtown Minneapolis.

“Historically, there’s been this notion that you have to leave town in order to be successful,” says Pickett. “This has been changing in other kinds of music in the Twin Cities for a while—obviously Flyte Tyme, Prince, Soul Asylum, The Replacements, and Mint Condition in rock and funk and R & B. But these were the first guys who did it with a strong existing Minnesota connection in jazz.”

According to Pickett and other observers, underpinning the success of all of King’s bands is the continual search for better music. King himself says, “All these bands are focused on at least trying to stretch out to be interesting. It’s not like they’re all brilliant and trendsetting, but they’re all earnestly attempting to let the limits go within their genres.” That means genre-bending as well. “I’ve always found that the more you can inform your playing by all genres, the more you’re going to be someone who’s able to cross those boundaries and have different camps accept your art and accept your ideas,” King says. “You end up playing like no one else because you’re not informed by only jazz musicians.”

Rolling Stone critic David Fricke says, “One of the great things that [The Bad Plus does] is polarize the jazz community. There’s an insular, almost rabbinical quality to the jazz community. Anything that starts arguments is a good thing, because it brings in new influences. The fact that The Bad Plus covers Black Sabbath without embarrassment is both traditional and a total break with tradition. They’re increasing the jazz tradition, they’re making it bigger, they’re making it a broader church. They’re also one of the most exciting live bands going right now, in any genre. Playing a Black Sabbath song—that’s funny. But it can also be intensely powerful because of the nature of the song and the sound of the original version.”

Happy Apple’s Erik Fratzke says King “visualizes music as a whole, not just from a drummer’s perspective.” Mike Lewis calls King “a very emotional player. He’s very, very interested in push and pull and give and take, as opposed to just a support role that often drummers find themselves in.”

King has a “total fearlessness surrounding his talent, a total and respectful disregard for what’s come before him and a knowledge that he possesses this supreme talent,” says Chris Morrissey. “He takes a lot of flak from some more traditional players and from people who are used to hearing a certain thing, but he’s a true innovator. Even laymen can hear it. People, whether they like it or not, walk away from his shows and say, ‘That was unlike anything I’ve heard before.’ Whether you can explain musically what he’s doing or not, you walk away knowing that it’s this really pure, passionate art from this pure talent."

There are obvious success indicators in a musician’s career—record sales, media attention, awards—and then some markers appreciated only by musicians themselves. Dave King is so highly regarded he’s now sponsored by the cream of percussion manufacturers: Ellis drums, Zildjian cymbals, and Vic Firth drumsticks. Not that King has always been comfortable with the recognition. “I remember going to Zildjian the first time, four years ago,” he recalls. “They handed me some cymbals, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Are they giving them to me, or do they want me to play them and bring them back?’ In the parking lot, I turned around and the guy’s smiling and waving. I thought he was going to say, ‘Come back here—you forgot to pay. It’s really just 40 percent off, Dave.’

“In a way, I’ll always be looking around to see if someone’s behind me who’s really the person they’re cheering for,” he says. “I’m superproud of my shit, but I’m not proud of it like it’s better than anyone else’s. I’m proud of it because it’s mine. It is better, though, than, like, Third Eye Blind. Anyone, other than AC/DC, with a rhythm guitar player. Jesus, my music trumps that shit.”

A month after the Happy Apple show at the Artists’ Quarter, The Bad Plus performs at Ted Mann Concert Hall, on the U of M campus. The audience, nearly 1,000 strong, is the usual mix of ages and presumed musical interests: Two rows behind a black twenty-something with a goatee and do-rag is a middle-aged white guy with glasses and a backward racing cap.

Pianist and frontman Ethan Iverson, wearing a fisherman’s hat and khaki suit, says the first song was “Everywhere You Turn,” adding, “The second was something from myself—‘Mint.’ That song is in perfect condition.” Though King doesn’t take the mike, he is, as ever, the center of attention. Iverson dedicates the next song, Reid Anderson’s “You and I Is a Comfort Zone,” to King and his drum kit, noting that the Ellis people are in the seats. 

Though the extremely appreciative and vocal crowd treats the entire show as though it’s a rock concert, there’s a singular moment that’s especially memorable—and indicative of the connection King and his partners have with their fans. King wrote three songs included on successive Bad Plus albums that play off the same quirky story line: “1972 Bronze Medalist,” “1979 Semi-Finalist,” and, on the band’s upcoming CD, “1980 World Champion.” As Iverson tells it this night, ski-jumping is the sport. A fellow named John Dickens, from Bloomington, Indiana, is in danger of being disqualified for excessive celebration. In “1980 World Champion,” Dickens has toned things down a bit.

When, near its conclusion, the song slows to a soft melody, the large crowd laughs. The wordless narrative has been conveyed by the music. And, as though by magic, the audience gets it.

Online editor Megan Wiley wrote about actor Jack Kaeding in the October issue.