Jeff Parker's Adventures in Inner Space

The stage at Brooklyn’s Public Records is only a couple of feet off the ground. When the room is packed, you realize it’s made more for immersion than observation. In early December, as part of the 10-year anniversary celebration for beloved Chicago jazz label International Anthem, guitarist Jeff Parker and his band, the ETA IVtet, performed for a stylish sea of 200-plus winter coats and beanies all huddled together in hushed excitement. As Parker and co. took the stage, a volley of applause broke out and died down quickly as they sat—save upright bassist Anna Butterss, whose face and headstock barely peeked above the crowd. Then, the sound of Josh Johnson’s alto saxophone rose up, almost imperceptibly at first. He tapped one of the pedals at his feet to loop it into a drone. A few beats later, Parker’s guitar gently settled on the same note, and the two built a delicate chord. A text notification chime rang out in the crowd, but no heads whipped around to shush; it was perfectly in key.

The IVtet, whose ecstatic improvisations move from chiming soundscapes reminiscent of classic German bands like Harmonia and Neu! to interlocking rhythmic passages in line with contemporary jazz-adjacent minimalists like Natural Information Society and Dawn of Midi, released one of 2024’s most enveloping instrumental albums in The Way Out of Easy. The band got its name from a seven-year residency at ETA, a now-shuttered bar in Highland Park, Los Angeles, where the album was recorded. Every Monday night, Parker, Butterss, Johnson, and drummer Jay Bellerose would cram into the tiny space, take a breath, and open a portal. 

At first, it was a low-key gig: four friends getting together to explore the catalog of jazz standards. They’d all encountered each other in different permutations: Johnson and Bellerose played in Parker’s band the New Breed, and Johnson and Butterss currently play in both Butterss’ group and SML, another groove-oriented jazz ensemble on International Anthem that honed its sound at ETA. Despite their intersecting orbits, the members have disparate backgrounds: Parker is a member of Chicago post-rock institution Tortoise and has worked with everyone from Yo La Tengo to Mackaya McCraven to Clipping. Butterss tours with indie rock acts like Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers, and Jason Isbell. Bellerose’s lengthy session CV includes work with T. Bone Burnett, Aimee Mann, Elton John, and Regina Spektor. Johnson was the musical director for soul singer Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022 and has played on records by Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, and Meshell Ndegeocello. “For us to find common ground, we’d stumble into getting away from playing swing or jazz,” Parker explains a few days after the New York shows. “It became more groovy.”

Johnson started experimenting with pedals to process his sax tone, and Parker would sometimes incorporate small synthesizers and loopers in his rig. These light electronic touches gradually worked their way into the group’s sound, which is when “the music started to get really interesting,” as Parker puts it. Each rendition of a standard would open up into something more expansive—the difference between a tight snapshot and a wide panorama. As they embraced this improv-heavy approach, their setups became more complicated: Johnson significantly expanded his array of effects, and Bellerose would bring an extra-large 30-inch bass drum or cymbals that Parker describes as “sounding like thunder.” Parker often used two amplifiers, one dedicated to drones and loops and the other for a clean guitar sound. Their aural expeditions, though always rooted in jazz, resembled a more candlelit version of krautrock’s surging forward motion or gnawa’s spiraling, psychedelic polymeter. They emphasized texture and groove, suspending melodic phrases above repetitive rhythms, everything occasionally dissolving into rippling pools of sound.  

Michael Ehlers, whose label Eremite Records put out Parker’s 2016 album Slight Freedom, would frequently travel from his home in Santa Fe to Los Angeles, scheduling appointments around the IVtet’s residency. He noticed that Bryce Gonzales, audio engineer at United Recording Studios and founder of Highland Dynamics, set up in the back of ETA with a Nagra tape machine and a small handmade mixer, documenting each performance. Floored by the spellbinding sounds of the IVtet, Ehlers told Parker that he wanted to make a record of their work, so the two combed through Gonzales’ archives for the most mesmerizing pieces.

Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, the resulting album, brought new attention to the IVtet’s performances. “People really started to seek us out,” says Parker. “We were offered other gigs, and I was like, ‘No, to hear us play, you gotta come to ETA on Monday nights.’” In Tracing the Lines, International Anthem’s annual zine, ETA co-owner Ryan Julio describes the audiences as reverent, whispering orders to the bartenders who’d turned off the fridge and faucets to cut down on extraneous noise: “Musicians could really work off of a shared tension with the crowd to find something new once that trust was established.”

You feel a part of that symbiosis when listening to The Way Out of Easy. Instead of the first album’s highlight reel, the album presents a single Monday night at ETA. Its four side-long pieces, all captured on Gonzales’ tape machine on January 2, 2023, range from 16 to 24 minutes. It’s warm and intimate, every pluck of a bass string or tap of a saxophone key as clear as if the band were mere feet in front of you. They play with masterful restraint, finding moments of dazzling rhythmic interplay and quietly billowing modal exploration. There’s a profound patience to this music, a respect for the space between each instrument, and an unwillingness to crowd out any one sound. It’s jazz but not jazz, ambient but commanding, thrilling but subdued. When I ask Parker how the group found its minimalist approach, he simply says it was the natural way they played together.

The second set at Public Records opened with “Freakadelic,” the first song on The Way Out of Easy. Its initial incarnation appeared on Bright Light in Winter, a 2013 record Parker made in trio with bassist Chris Lopes and drummer Chad Taylor. That version is frenetic and wild-eyed, constantly circling itself like a building cyclone. “It was much more harmolodic,” Parker points out, referencing Ornette Coleman’s philosophy of free jazz, wherein harmony, melody, and tempo are all given equal weight in a composition, a way of organizing sound that may seem chaotic to the uninitiated. With the ETA IVtet, Parker wanted to slow the song down, to keep it in a “flat, barren landscape,” to temper its frenzy and find freedom in simplicity. “I told Jay to play the beat from Neil Young’s ‘Old Man,’ then Anna did that bassline, and we played the head over top of it,” he says. “We just tried to keep it right there until we got tired of it.” 

On the record, the band keeps the lumbering groove intact for about 12 minutes before it dissipates. At Public Records, “Freakadelic” was even more spacious. The crowd had more of a lubricated, late-night feel than the dinnertime politeness of the first set, and easily fell under the song’s trance right alongside the band. Parker wove together a tapestry of loops that sounded like celestial voices; Butterss kept their eyes closed, left hand moving across the fingerboard like automatic writing; security scolded a man for lying down and blissing out on a bench in the adjacent hallway. By the time the set ended, there was a palpable vibe shift, a communal exhale. Parker thanked his bandmates, remarking on how privileged he felt to forge a musical path with them. 

During our Zoom call, I ask if that path has a destination. “No,” he says, “but as an artist, I try to communicate with people. That’s not really a destination, but there is intention behind it.” That seems to be one of the driving forces of Parker’s work, especially with the ETA IVtet: creating space where people can reflect on the intention—or lack thereof—behind their actions. The IVtet’s New York shows were on a Monday, just shy of a year from the night The Way Out of Easy was captured. There was gravity behind every note they played, perhaps even more behind the ones they didn’t. 

When Parker and his bandmates assemble, and when we gather to watch it happen, no one among us knows where we’ll end up. We move as one organism toward the goal of transcendence—or, at the very least, presence. “I always tell people that it’s hard to get comfortable with the ether,” Parker tells me at one point. It was a response to a question about improvising but applies in a more overarching sense. We may not know where we’re going, but we get to go there together.