Max Jaffe expands the boundaries of possibility for composition and collaboration through the drum set. His music draws from many different genres and seeks to break down the boundaries between them. He is part of a cutting edge of drummers that have embraced SUNHOUSE and their Sensory Percussion technology that has shifted the paradigm of the instrument. His powerful solo performances exploit the physicality of the drums to create narrative through movement, defying visual expectations and logic for what a “drum solo” can express.

As a collaborator, he is a longtime member of experimental rock collective JOBS and was a founding member of Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, Leverage Models, and several other groups. He has toured with EDEN, Chrome Sparks, Steph Richards, Peter Evans, Rubblebucket, Delicate Steve, Cass McCombs, Oberhofer, Ava Mendoza, and many others. He has performed at a diverse range of festivals including Moers Festival, Big Ears, Panorama NYC, Berlin Jazz Festival, Movement Detroit, Vision Fest, and more. He holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and was a 2021 Pioneer Works Music Resident.

https://www.maxjaffedrums.com

and/or you

In Portland you might’ve seen him on stage at a jazz club, at the Laurelthirst playing balkan folk music, or accompanying experimental theater in a chicken coop in deep SE. He may have been getting deeply weird with guitar astronaut Mike Gamble at NO FUN or singing a haunting duet with Kelli Shaefer at Mississippi Studios. He’s also spent time on the road all over Europe and North America with artists like acclaimed songwriter and composer Julia Holter, Brooklyn art rock vets Barbez and DIY avant pop power couple Teton. In the last decade + as a multifarious bassist for hire, Andrew Jones has been hard to pin down. While his work as a session musician, improviser, arranger, recordist and mixer has appeared on dozens of records and hundreds of gigs across sylistic universes, Jones has also been crafting his own unique musical world. Under the name and/or you, the multifaceted musician is distilling the elements of his full length self-titled The Crenshaw, a collaboration with drummer Chris Johnedis, into a more focused and vocal driven art song. Unfolding body-moving beats lay a foundation for dastardly vocal/upright bass counterpoint, drawing the ear from one evocative turn of phrase to the next like a train down a winding track. With a voice that’s at times detached and darkly humorous and others urgent and earnest, Jones depicts images of postmodern life illuminated by virtual synths that ring and shimmer in shifting harmonic colors. Aspiring to ‘personalize the universal and vice versa,’ and/or you doesn’t forge a pastiche of influences so much as it reaches to find a musical form that’s true to itself.

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