Max Jaffe - Reduction of Man LP
Max Jaffe - Reduction of Man LP
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.
REMAIN is a lightning-in-a-bottle document –– the full-length, living outgrowth of a sold-out 2024 collaborative performance at NYC’s Issue Project Room by the trio of 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Holland Andrews and Portland, OR-based duo Methods Body (John Niekrasz and Luke Wyland).
These three artists have been collaborating for over a decade –– the Brooklyn-based Andrews appearing on records by Wyland’s former project AU and on Methods Body recordings; Wyland on Andrews’ records; all three together as part of Niekrasz’s Orchestra Becomes Radicalized. The sanctity of their friendship and musical bond is palpable on REMAIN. Fully improvised and recorded entirely live at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, REMAIN was engineered by Katie Von Schleicher, mixed and mastered by Aron Sanchez (Buke & Gase) and features the mighty, polymathic multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, who augments the trio on the stunning “Stories of My Mother.”
Like the best improvised music, the pieces that comprise this record hardly feel off-the-cuff. Brimming with uncanny intersections of sleight-of-hand grooves and Holland’s deeply stirring vocalizations and lyrical, ecstatic keenings, this is improvisation at the highest level: a radical act of love and trust. The results are a kind of emergent, urgent, atmospheric art pop, grounded in humanity and concern, but occupying astral spaces and hypnagogic realms. It is a powerful suite of music that cuts to the heart of our time, setting creative practices of freedom against outrage at freedom’s limitations. For these –– as well as aesthetic –– reasons REMAIN acutely recalls the fierce and liberatory recordings of Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes. The elevation of the human spirit, the exploratory aesthetics of revolution, even the eroticization of anger, collective resistance, alternately careening and bludgeoning, dreaming and fighting –– this is REMAIN.
The players play together, but they also play through each other. Niekrasz’s drums and percussion and Andrews’ live vocal processing were routed through Wyland’s bespoke electronics rig, which itself utilizes custom tuning systems and microtonality. This process and flow allows for creative refraction and a sense of multi-tracked production in real time. Andrews drew lyrics from Niekrasz’s collection of writing on the costs of the socialized self, using intuition and chance operations to determine text selection and order. In all this, the trio constructs and explores their own unique systems, leaning into each other’s energies, communally conjuring. At times ruminative and at others propulsive, the music of REMAIN carries a sense of gravity. These pieces are vivid scenes illuminated and punctuated by fires as milestones –– fires of creation and fires of revolution.