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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