About the band
Happy Lucky Combo began as a street band. The instrumentation was bass drum, snare drum and accordion. This combination of percussion and accordion is popular worldwide. These instruments are loud enough to be heard while competing with the urban soundscape. They also permit the musicians to rove.
As Happy Lucky Combo developed musically, clarinet and string bass were added. Pippin began using his trap set for stage performance.
The band performs as a duet, trio and quartet, sometimes roving, sometimes performing on stage.
The members of the band come from diverse musical backgrounds.
Dave Yohe, bass player, comes from a musical family. His father was a jazz musician and friend to Art Pepper. Dave says, “When I was a child my dad would bring me along to gigs. I got to play with these incredible musicians.”
Nick Lewis, clarinet player, comes from a family with deep roots in the southern gospel tradition.
Pippin Barnett, percussionist, spent formative years in Japan. Asian melody and percussion continue to interest and influence him. Pippin says, “As a child in Japan music was everywhere, coming out of shops and sung by street venders.”
Barry, accordion player, has had a lifetime attraction to the “diasporic modes of longing”. “I was deeply moved by the chanting of the cantor when my friends would take me to synagogue”. Later he found that same beauty in the blues and the modal jazz of the 1960’s.
Although Barry writes most of the songs, other members create their own parts. “I provide the skeleton and everyone else puts meat on the bone. Everyone’s part of the creative process.”
Nick describes describes the band as, “like the link between the oral tradition and the written tradition.”
People’s responses to hearing the band are varied. A Croatian man came up and said it sounded like music from his homeland. Others are convinced it’s Klezmer or Romanian or Zydeco. Japanese listeners always smile at the band’s hip-hop version of a popular Japanese folk tune. On the street, the band attracts Hispanic listeners.
“It’s those ‘diasporic modes of longing’”, says Barry. “We’re all motherless children, a long way from home. We’re all homesick. It’s the human condition and music is the medicine.”
Photos by Tommy Drexul and Isaac Harrell