Max Jaffe
Max Jaffe wasn’t planning on creating an album commemorating the decade-plus he spent living in New York City while recording Reduction of Man. Operating as a preemptive elegy, Reduction of Man traces Jaffe’s musical trajectory while in New York City - a process of becoming fluent in several musical languages and cultures all at once, rather than the linear education of an MFA musician (which Jaffe also is). Jaffe’s second “solo” album finds him at the helm of an ensemble - leading the project as he plays: one hand drumming, the other composing and editing on the fly, shepherding multiple musical voices towards a single end - a sinewy tension between noise and groove.
As an early adopter of the Sensory Percussion drum set technology, Jaffe has been expanding the drum set into exciting sonic territory. As his artistic practice using SP developed, he began to feel that his relationship with the process had hit a wall. Having previously used the sensor system as a way to trigger and manipulate samples (2019’s Giant Beat being the first evidence of this process), Jaffe took to recording Reduction of Man as a way to challenge himself and the nascent technology’s limitations.
An invitation to participate in the Pioneer Works Music Residency program provided an opportunity to spend a month, in July 2021, dedicated to these creative goals. Max invited trumpet player Chris Williams (HxH, Pink Siifu), guitarist Will Greene (Trigger), and bassist / keyboardist Jesse Heasly (Spirits Having Fun) for a series of core sessions; former Elder Ones bandmate saxophonist Matt Nelson (GRID, Flying Luttenbachers), tenor sax player Nathaniel Morgan (Helado Negro) and multi-instrumentalist Lucia Vitkova joined on additional sessions to improvise and record what would become Reduction of Man. Jaffe would trigger an “event” using Sensory Percussion to which the players would respond through improvisation. Jaffe would then process and manipulate the band's output in real time - drumming with one hand, composing with the other.
This on-the-fly approach allowed Jaffe to tightly compose the chance encounters and momentary fireworks of improvisers playing off and to each other, creating five compositions that sound like worlds being created instead of a discrete set of improvisations. Reduction of Man is an album confidently existing in the in-between. It’s in-between composition and improvisation, jazz and experimental electronic music, recorded in NYC and finished in Los Angeles.
This “in-between” mirrors Jaffe’s life in many ways. Born to a Korean mother who grew up in Hong Kong and a Jewish father, and raised in a majority white suburb of the Bay Area, Jaffe found it difficult feeling connected to his parents’ minority cultures. Likewise, coming up in the Bay Area, Jaffe absorbed musical subcultures as they availed themselves to him: jazz, breakcore, hardcore punk, experimental electronic music, all were formative launch pads into his musical career. Max has drummed in the pointillist noise rock band JOBS, as part of the aforementioned Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones and as the live drummer for EDM artist Chrome Sparks.
While these different expressions reflect Max’s searching for exploratory sonic purchase, it was going to school at the New School for Jazz in NYC that shifted his thinking about his own place in music. Having accessibility to legends like William Parker and Gerry Hemingway allowed Jaffe to experience the spiritual connections between the primarily punk-oriented scenes he started out in and the jazz-oriented world of NYC he had plunged into. In a formative turn, Max was exposed to the free jazz approach to percussion - more energy than metric precision. This allowed him to navigate his NYC experience in similar terms, that there was a groove that existed between and through myriad musical pulses.
Reduction of Man feeds on those same energies. Energy flowing from collective improvisation into Jaffe’s compositional tools and vice versa captures a groove that runs beneath the noise - a vital third thing that is neither Max Jaffe nor the players - it’s the sound of New York City plowing another groove through the center of another listener's musical nervous system.