The early 1990's were a particularly fruitful time for Apfelbaum and the Hieroglyphics Ensemble. The Grateful Dead championed the band, inviting them to open several of their shows during this period, and Apfelbaum received the Dead's annual Rex Foundation Award for Creative Excellence in 1991. The band secured a record deal with Antilles/Island and released Signs Of Life in 1990 (which received a Grammy nomination for the composition Candles and Stones) and Jodoji Brightness in 1992. The band travelled to Germany, appearing at the Leverkusen and Berlin festivals, and won the 1992 Down Beat Critics Poll award for Big Band, Talent Deserving Wider Recognition.
Apfelbaum put the 17-piece group on hold during the mid-90's, forming a sextet comprising Hieroglyphics musicians and acoustic bassist John Shifflett. The group recorded Luminous Charms (Gramavision/Ryko) in 1996 and became Apfelbaum's working unit for the next few years. He also toured with Jai Uttal's Pagan Love Orchestra and Ann Dyer's No Good Time Fairies during this period.
In 1998 Apfelbaum moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he soon formed a New York version of his Sextet, featuring Josh Roseman (trombone), Charles Burnham (violin), David Phelps (guitar), Patrice Blanchard (bass) and Dafnis Prieto (drums). He also began touring as a duo with electronics pioneer/inventor Don Buchla, appearing at festivals in Italy, France, Iceland and Mexico in 1998-99. In the Summer of 1999 Apfelbaum returned to the Bay Area to reconvene the Hieroglyphics to perform Yihat, a piece written for the group by Muhal Richard Abrams, at Stanford University.
Apfelbaum toured Europe with several NY-based groups over the next few years: Joe Bowie's Defunkt Big Band (1999), Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra (2000), Kamikaze Ground Crew (2000), and the Groove Collective (2001). In the Spring of 2002 he joined Phish frontman Trey Anastasio's band, with whom he would play four sold-out U.S. tours, appearing on the David Letterman Show and the Tonight Show, among others. Apfelbaum also began appearing with Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista's Beat The Donkey (with whom he travelled to Morocco in 2004) and was hired by the legendary singer/activist Harry Belafonte to arrange and compose music for his 2003 European tour.
In February of 2003 Apfelbaum formed the 11-piece New York Hieroglyphics, adding to the personnel of his New York Sextet a second guitarist, Viva De Concini, and four original Hieroglyphics members who had moved east: Peck Allmond (trumpet, reeds), Tony Jones (tenor sax), Jessica Jones (alto and tenor sax) and Norbert Stachel (baritone and bass sax, flute). The band played two sold-out nights at NYC's Jazz Gallery, and other local gigs followed. Apfelbaum had recommitted himself to the idea of having a large group of like-minded musicians to write for and perform with, and in the Fall of 2004 the band went into the studio to record a new CD of Apfelbaum compositions. The resulting CD, It Is Written, was released on ACT Music in August 2005. The band toured Europe in the Spring of 2006 and performed at the 2006 Monterey Jazz Festival and High Sierra Music Festival, as well as at Freight & Salvage and other prominent West Coast venues.
In addition to the New York Hieroglyphics, Apfelbaum continues to perform regularly with Steven Bernstein's Millenial Territory Orchestra, the Trey Anastasio Band, Dafnis Prieto's Quintet, the Josh Roseman Unit, and Kamikaze Ground Crew. His music has been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the National Swedish Radio Orchestra of Stockholm, the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, Harry Belafonte, Kamikaze Ground Crew and the Trey Anastasio Band. Apfelbaum compositions that have been recorded by other artists include Pillars (Dave Ellis - In The Long Run, Monarch, 1998), When I Close My Eyes AKA Theater Piece (Ann Dyer - When I Close My Eyes, Sunnyside, 2003) and Peter's Tune (Peck Allmond - Kalimba Collage, SoniCulture, 2004). The Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble commissioned Apfelbaum to write a new piece for the award-winning band, which was premiered in March 2006 at Yoshi’s with Apfelbaum conducting. Apfelbaum has also worked with Cecil Taylor, Nana Vasconcelos, Charlie Hunter, Joseph Jarman, Bill Laswell, Steve Kimock, the Chicago Children's Choir, the Jazz Mandolin Project, Levon Helm and the late Jim Pepper.
Apfelbaum has stated: I feel that one thing I have in common with others in my generation, like Steven Bernstein's Sex Mob, Graham Haynes, Josh Roseman, Charlie Hunter, Will Bernard, and Medeski, Martin and Wood is that we see the dance music of our time (or groove music, as MMW calls it) as having potential for creative development. He also aligns himself with the restructuralists (Braxton's word), like Braxton himself, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Karl Berger, Ed Wilkerson, Tim Berne, Doug Wieselman, Carla Bley, Warren Smith, Julius Hemphill, Leo Smith, Arvo Paart, Sam Rivers, Ron Miles, Oliver Lake, Gina Leishman, Pierre Dorge, Bob Moses, John Zorn, Anthony Davis and others who, in the aftermath of the explosion of musical structure in the sixties, are putting the pieces back together in different ways.
Apfelbaum says, At no point in the process of composing have I made a conscious decision to incorporate African elements or, for that matter, any other cultural or stylistic elements. I just write and build and adjust the shape of it all. My vocabulary reflects the fact that I started life as a drummer and was trained as a sub-teenager in jazz theory, blues, gospel music. As a teenager I was inundated with jazz, African and Latin music, was involved in group improvisation on a regular basis, listened to a lot of 20th century classical music, worked in R&B, reggae, blues, Latin, African, Jazz, Funk, Middle Eastern and Indian bands, and for as long as I can remember, have been fascinated by how sounds fit together.
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Quote from The Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 2: At the threshold of the new millennium, Signs of Life appeared as one of the finest recordings since the jazz-rock revolution at the end of the 1960s by showing the potential of jazz to reinvent itself in a cogent, unified and original way. His [Apfelbaum's] music sounded like a peek into a multicultural world beyond our own that somehow made so much jazz of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s sound dated. Perhaps more important, it revealed not only a compelling vision of jazz in the present, but with the onset of the millennium, what jazz might yet become. ��end of the final paragraph of the final page of The Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 2: Modernism to Postmodernism (p. 796). Mansell Publishing, London & New York, 2000. Show less