Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Max Light Trio - Herplusme


Brooklyn-based Red Piano Records has announced the release of Herplusme, the debut album from New York City-based guitarist Max Light and his trio, comprised of Simón Willson on contrabass and Matt Honor on drums and cymbals. The album features eight original compositions, written and performed with a great emphasis on ensemble interplay and communication. The compositions are short, playful, and concentrated, each of them designed to tell a simple and personal story. The stories are romantic, tragic, humourous, and evocative of childhood memories.

The album opens with Boy, a challenging and raucous piece on childhood exploration. It starts with a deconstructed germ of the groove that pervades the piece and slowly comes to fruition through an additive process, and before long, becoming clear. The disjointed nature of learning and growing and searching is reflected through the shifting subdivisions and meters, as well as the emotional melody. The form plays out, and a guitar solo grows through the form again, with no shortage of interplay with the bass and drums. The piece ends with a metric modulation that slows the groove to a crawl, an homage to the band Meshuggah. 

Overcrooked follows and embraces the same playful spirit of growing up. The piece is about skateboarding and subdivision. An “overcrooked” is a trick in skateboarding where the board is at a 45 degree relative to the front axle on the rail it is grinding on. It is askew and unstable and can fall apart at any moment. This piece reflects that instability by constantly shifting between subdivisions of 4, 5, 6, and 7 sixteenth notes per quarter note. The result is a groove that is both unstable and rhythmically fulfilling for the listener. The high density of the guitar part is broken by a more spacious and lyrical solo. The metal influence is clear in this piece as well, with great virtuosity and plenty of breakdowns.

Pumpkin Pie is about home, and the things that evoke home. It is a slowly moving ballad that draws you in and pulls at your heartstrings. It is the feeling of a mother’s desert the night before leaving home. The song is presented clearly at first in just two voices, the bass and the melody. It moves through a beautiful and compositional bass solo into a guitar solo that starts small, and ends in the euphoria of homecoming.

Dog is a companion piece to the first track on this album. While radically different compositionally, they both reflect the search and exploration of youth, and animality in this case. Dog is a weaving and winding melody that gets constantly distracted by the next passing car. Rhythmic and melodic germs are set upon and explored quickly and with fervor. Sections will come around and around again, like the chase of a tail. The piece breaks apart into an atonal time-no-changes solo section, a la Ornette Coleman, before disintegrating completely, restating the melody and stopping short.

Baby’s Hard Times is a love song built in major-sevenths, major-thirds away from each other. It is in 13/8 - a deeply challenging meter. It is the most involved composition of the bunch, and holds a great amount of musical and emotional meaning. It reflects the melancholy of struggling with life outside of a relationship, with support from within it. The piece starts incredibly small and grows until it is an explosion of bombast and emotion. It reflects both the battlefield and the motivation of a warrior. The cliff-face and the rope that tethers you to it. Matt Honor’s enormous ability and sensitivity is clearly on display here.

The Things You is a radical recomposition of the popular jazz standard, All the Things You Are, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. It is a sort of procedural recomposition that involves removing many bars from the piece, hence the removal of words from the title. The trio’s interaction is center-stage here. The melody is complicated intervallically and metrically, and reflects the notion of plurality within oneself. All the things one is.

Bagel is a circuitous number that is a companion piece to the one desert on this album. If Pumpkin Pie is the night before leaving, Bagel is breakfast the day of departure. It utilizes a six beat cycle in the guitar part, and a ten beat cycle in the bass, causing a slow harmonic phasing effect, inspired in part by Philip Glass. The bittersweet dissonance of this song pervades the whole performance. The melody ends, the guitar solos methodically, and the piece disintegrates into a free and explorative drum solo vamp, before ending in a simple manner.

The final piece, Dennisport, is a complex chord piece with a large amount of influence from the great guitarist Ben Monder. It is about a tiny cottage in a tiny town on Cape Cod during a downpour in November. It is a slowly developing and slowly shifting piece that gradually extends the harmony beyond what one usually thinks of as beautiful, but is nonetheless. It draws again on the influence of metal in its central and crushing breakdown. It eventually drops one sixteenth note from the time signature, and the return to the main chordal theme is skewed and recontextualized in an asymmetrical beauty because of it.


Max Light is a guitarist from the Washington DC area, now living in New York City. He won 2nd place in the 2019 Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz International Guitar Competition. He has performed with Donny McCaslin, Jason Palmer, Noah Preminger, Walter Smith III, Rudy Royston and John Ellis among many others. He was a member of the Creative Ensemble Collective with Donny McCaslin from 2015-2016 and in the summer of 2017 he was a featured artist at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival at National Sawdust. Light has recorded a two volume live album at Wally’s Jazz Club in Boston with Jason Palmer’s band that was released on Steeplechase in 2018. He was also featured on Noah Preminger’s newest album, After Life, for Criss Cross, released in April 2019.


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