Just a minute and 40 seconds into You Want That Too!, Max Jaffe and his cast of collaborators pull off the first of many head fakes. Opener “Up Top Up” builds slowly and softly, with plinking piano, pulsing guitar, and bleepy synth organising themselves like the multicoloured tiers of a bismuth crystal. For a full minute, the quiet concatenation gurgles along, accumulating extra notes and flourishes, suggesting an eventual kosmische surge. But instead, each instrument disappears, and the tempo drops to half-time, leaving only an uneasy chord structure and a lethargic drum pattern. Suddenly, Jeff Parker plucks a sighing six-note guitar run, dropping his shoulders into a solo section that carries the tune to its swooning conclusion. It’s only three minutes long, but at no point could you guess what might happen from measure to measure.
You Want That Too!, Jaffe’s latest release, is filled with these gleefully destabilising moments. It’s the first record the percussionist has made from start to finish under his own name since decamping to Los Angeles from New York, where he spent nearly 15 years pinballing around the city’s experimental, noise, and jazz scenes. He has a vigorous yet graceful approach to the drums, a style that Dave Harrington, who plays in a trio with Jaffe and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, has described as “painterly” and “gestural.”
Working with Amirtha Kidambi’s liberatory jazz group, Elder Ones, was commanding and direct, tethering the group’s freer impulses to the ground while occasionally erupting into quick, controlled explosions. In JOBS, his minimalist pop group with Rob Lundberg, Jessica Pavone, and Dave Scanlon, Jaffe’s rhythms are angular and sharp, carving clean spaces for the other instruments to crowd into. His solo music is a much looser affair, a potpourri of ideas that seem concurrently unintuitive and completely natural. It’s easy to imagine Jaffe seated at his drum kit or perched above a keyboard, smiling mischievously, keen to take a left turn he knows his ensemble will eagerly follow.
Jaffe was an early adopter of Sensory Percussion, a tool that maps sample triggers to drum surfaces, turning a single struck accent into a swarm of noise. On his last record, Reduction of Man, Jaffe inverted his approach, triggering events for his group to respond to rather than augmenting his own playing. That technique resulted in otherworldly sound collages that expand and contract like a creaky door in humid weather. You Want That Too! feels like a spiritual continuation of that method, keeping its predecessor’s methods of rubberbanding space intact, but anchoring the pieces with distinct melodic phrases rather than atonal blasts. Here, Jaffe softens the borders between his dual interests in electronic music and jazz, crafting compositions that are constantly moulting and emerging anew.
“Looking at the Inside of Your Eyelids” is the most tuneful amalgamation of these ideas, a swaying, celestial post-bop number with saxophones swathed in yawning sine-wave bass like stars in the Medusa Nebula. Though it’s the most straight-ahead song on the album, it still manages to traverse three distinct movements within its crisp runtime. Other cuts construct a dense digital lattice before upending their trajectory with more organic elements.
On “Ancestral Creeks,” glassy pads and arpeggios drift around a bit-crushed piano until Jaffe and bassist Spencer Zahn break into a gallop. Eventually, it shifts into a languid waltz, organ tremolos swirling around Meg Duffy’s distorted blues riffing. “Pedro Point” begins imposingly, with gated noise signals slapping against a humming wall of drone, but immediately tempers when Shelley Burgon plucks her harp. After a gorgeous glissando freckled with filtered blips, the song blossoms, Jaffe’s splashy cymbal work and Duffy’s chorused guitar mirroring each other across a bubbling synth sequence. If there is a formula to these songs, it’s a general idea of nonlinear expansion, the quest to find somewhere to briefly land before choosing a new direction.
Despite the extensive and accomplished guest roster, You Want That Too! keeps its focus primarily on Jaffe’s drums, both electronic and acoustic. These are thoroughly rhythm-driven jams, almost all of which begin and end with some sort of hi-res percussion sound, nearly all of which are pushed as wide as a 70mm projection. To drive this home, Jaffe dots the tracklist with three solo drum performances, “S-NARE,” “Putney Waltz,” and “Zen and Pteent.” Each is an intricately layered Sensory Percussion and post-production workout, teeming with textures and locking into far-out grooves. Jaffe never sits still, constantly switching tempos and cadences, but the paths he takes aren’t hard to follow. They swell and burst, and eventually wash over you the way notes looped into a giant ambient chord would.
There’s an exuberance at the record’s core, a palpable sense of enthusiasm animating these tracks. The solo works make the case that Jaffe could find his way to a compelling full-length without any additional players, but he seems to know there are whole worlds he’d miss out on in doing so. In press materials, Jaffe says that “the collaborators tell the story,” and though the album bears his name and distinct imprint, the joy rippling throughout seems to come from the discoveries made through these team-ups. You Want That Too! is a map of the convoluted journeys they took, giddily following a compass that never settles.
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