Jeff Parker and his ETA IVtet can shake a groove in any direction, falling into it with an air of ease and inevitability then riding it out to its farthest extent before twisting and turning once more, as though they were affording us a view through their own shared kaleidoscope or laying out an undifferentiated mass of iron filings and luring them to and fro by way of their highly magnetic field.
The guitarist has been in busy collaborative mode over the past couple of years, contributing to albums by Amaro Freitas, Paul Cornish, Holly Palmer, Max Jaffe, Matthew Stevens and his International Anthem cohorts Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer while comprising part of a new west coast quartet on the bassist Billy Mohler’s album The Eternal and being a handpicked member of the band on a couple of recent standouts in the form of Gabrielle Cavassa’s debut Blue Note stunner Diavola and the solo outing Honora by Flea. At the same time he has continued to embellish his record as a bandleader and composer, with the defining post-rock outfit Tortoise releasing Touch to general acclaim as their eighth studio album and first new work in almost ten years.
The ETA IVtet though now seems as much as anything to be his creative outlet of choice. In fact the existence of a Jeff Parker ETA ensemble stretches back roughly a decade, to when the guitarist took up a weekly Monday night residency at the Enfield Tennis Academy, an intimate cocktail bar in the Highland Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles which was named after the elite tennis school in David Foster Wallace’s sprawling novel Infinite Jest.
Coming to consist of Parker on a guitar strewn with effects, Anna Butterss on the upright bass, Josh Johnson on the alto saxophone also with pedals for electronic processing and Jay Bellerose on drums and other percussion, the ETA IVtet was documented for the first time on Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy which captured four jams performed by the quartet between 2019 and 2021.
The Way Out of Easy meanwhile spotlighted the band’s gradual transition from one that might riff on standards or roll out original compositions to one that elaborates more improvisational grooves, albeit still rooted in their penchant for legible melodies and the steady iteration of short phrases, looped beats or motifs. Unbeknownst at the time of recording – which was once again overseen by the engineer Bryce Gonzales, who is also responsible for this new release – The Way Out of Easy would also capture one of the later sets by the ETA IVtet on home territory as the bar closed unexpectedly at the end of 2023.
Spreading their roots and sparking chemistry beyond the confines of the quartet, the bassist Butterss released her solo album Mighty Vertebrate in 2024 with contributions from Parker and Johnson while like the guitarist she served as a member of the Honora backing band. Beyond the aptly named Unusual Object, his own smeared solo intimacy, the saxophonist Johnson has featured alongside such artists as Meshell Ndegeocello, Brandee Younger and even Miley Cyrus while sharing several trios with Bellerose plus the likes of Nate Mercereau, Carlos NiƱo, Gregory Uhlmann and Sam Wilkes in a general commingling of that west coast scene.
Butterss and Johnson with Chiu, Uhlmann and Booker Stardrum make up the curious quintet SML whose sound, while rooted in jazz improvisation, often draws equally on the practices of modular synthesis and scalpel-like post-production while steering towards aspects of psychedelia and kosmische. This year Johnson produced Flea’s album Honora and was part of the band on personal statements by Joel Ross and Matthew Stevens. The drummer Bellerose meanwhile has spent plenty of time orbiting experimental contexts but is perhaps best known for his tremendous body of work as a band member and session musician for a slew of major jazz, country and roots stars.
Happy Today grasps Parker and the ETA IVtet beyond the confines of the Enfield Tennis Academy for the first time on record. It also grabs hold of the bandleader amid the tumult of a difficult year, as he and his family were displaced for eight months by the Eaton fire which devastated Los Angeles at the onset of 2025. Eight months later in August the guitarist and his quartet were ready to head into the studio to put down a new album. Instead the two long sides of Happy Today stem from a concert which capped that weekend and was deemed by Parker and the band to better capture their sound.
Playing at the Lodge Room, also in Highland Park and just a short distance from their old stomping ground, before a larger audience of about 400 attentive fans, the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet found a certain solace and uplift in the communality of the live setting. Bryce Gonzales returned to mix and record the performance, which was filmed by Charlie Weinmann and finds the band on a square stage in the centre of their audience, suffused in a slightly seasick palette or patina of copper and bronze as they are lit with shifting red-green and ambery lights, a kind of Night CafƩ or La Berceuse.
For roughly a quarter of the first long side ‘Like Swimwear’ the percussionist Jay Bellerose tinkers down railroad tracks. He then shifts into a cymbal glide, as Josh Johnson continues to blurt out these gently blaring horn accents and Anna Butterss underpins the ensemble through the moaning low-end of the bass. Jeff Parker meanwhile locks into a groove, the first of several. From six minutes he begins to take a more circuitous line, going for a wander and finding his way back. Johnson produces gaseous vapours from his alto saxophone and Bellerose begins to intersperse his insistent cymbal patter with some ratcheting effects from his drum sticks.
From around the eleven-minute mark, as the quartet approach the halfway point of their long and shifting improvisation, the bass and drums slow down into a kind of leather-clad strut. Eventually the manner becomes more shrugging and the ensemble begin to move with arms and legs akimbo, as Parker and Johnson share deft figures and hazy atmospheric textures against the pooling of the bass, percussive bell chimes and strikes.
The method is always to establish a groove and carry it all the way out before discovering or indeed almost lapsing into a variation. Sometimes this habit belies the audience’s expectations of when a groove or even a piece of music has reached its end. ‘Like Swimwear’ gets a big climactic round of applause only to emerge out the other side through tenuous woodblocks and shakers and a pizzicato bass solo that builds a tune again. Overtones from the guitar establish a shimmering field. Some of Parker’s work here reminds me of Oren Ambarchi’s recent output whether with Eric Thielemans or his Ghosted trio as layers of guitar loop and sustain and blend into some sighs from the horn.
As a result of the guitarist’s early background – not only with the post-rock trailblazers Tortoise but with equally innovative Chicago icons like the Chicago Underground and Isotope 217Ā° – and the crossover potentiality of his oeuvre, his music has sometimes wrought comparisons with the jazzy concoctions and beat-laden soundscapes of Makaya McCraven, a frequent collaborator, plus J Dilla and Madlib. Forfolks his 2021 collection of solo pieces might share something with the wry miniatures or wriggling earworms of Bill Orcutt on Music for Four Guitars or the acoustic album Jump On It.
But when it comes to longform groove-oriented improvisation the closest counterparts today are probably that Ghosted trio where Ambarchi wafts over the rhythms laid down by the Swedish duo of Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin or Fire! where it is Mats Gustafsson on the tenor and baritone saxophones plus a plethora of other woodwinds who gets down and gritty with Werliin on the drums and Berthling on the bass.
Whereas the Ghosted trio conjure shimmering spectres or streaming neon highways and take oblique strategies in terms of texture and terrain, the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet is more rooted in the blues though no less shifting and exploratory while Fire! can lay down a stomping blues in perhaps more of a barroom or blues rock kind of way.
Otherwise over shorter forms of composition Angel Bat Dawid can summon an incantatory groove in the manner of a cultural sƩance or spiritual transfiguration and James Brandon Lewis can play swampy figures, funk licks or angular lines with a boisterous attack as exemplified by Apple Cores or his work with the Messthetics. On the guitar Mary Halvorson draws from the circuitousness of math rock while on the cello Tomeka Reid shares in some of that wiriness with more of a saunter and bounce, with the drummer Daniel Villarreal, especially in collaboration with Parker and Butterss like on his International Anthem projects PanamƔ 77 and Lados B, often imbuing his grooves with psychedelic washes and Latinate flavours that he has linked to his varied interests in punk rock, funk and trance.
The second long side and title track ‘Happy Today’ starts with some tone painting from Parker as sustained notes and their overtones on the guitar suggest the drones of a tanpura, harmonium or pipe organ or the image of the sun cresting the horizon. He is joined by wisps and puffs of horn and a slowly emergent pizzicato bass figure as drums clatter faintly in the backdrop of the scene.
Steadily the saxophone ascends as Butterss at the low end and Bellerose through shakers begin to scrabble over the landscape. The world that the ensemble have crafted now starts to tilt. Rumbling drum rolls and lofty pitches from the horn allow Parker to pluck his way out from underneath, combining with squawks and scrapes from the alto sax to make the ensemble sound as though they are shifting furniture.
Eventually by such means they have managed to cleave enough space to launch into a fully-fledged groove come the midpoint of the composition, impish and funky, somewhat staccato in terms of its constituent parts though the whole moves with a willowy slinkiness, ‘Happy Today’ proving sensual and assertive then stomping towards the close to the hoots and hollers of those gathered in attendance.
