There’s perhaps a less of an established tradition of live improvisation being steered by the ethos of hip hop-orientated groove construction.
Based on the hypnotic, slow-burning workouts of Happy Today, Los Angeles-based guitarist Jeff Parker is willing and able to narrow (if not totally eradicate) the gap between jazz’s historic position as a ‘serious’ improvisational art and its potential for locking in on a robust head-nodding groove.
Initially, the only thing that seems to have changed since Parker’s previous two live albums with the ETA IVtet – 2022’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy, both superb - is the duration and the recording location. Unlike its predecessors, Happy Today isn’t a double album, and since the micro-club that gave the quartet its name (as well as contributing to the group’s formation, thanks to the tiny Enfield Tennis Academy being a magnet for LA’s open-eared, jazz-leaning players) has now shuttered, these side length tracks were recorded in August 2025 at the city’s much more sizeable Lodge Room.
Keep listening, however, and an increasingly sharp focus
and sense of purpose permeate the proceedings, almost as if Parker and
co. (bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson and drummer Jay
Bellerose) had been conscious at the time of conjuring these craftily
expanding and intensifying extemporisations on stage that there would be
less room to capture their musical communion for posterity, and as such
also less time for the idling that is usually an almost inevitable
byproduct of creating music out of thin air, script-free, totally in the
moment.
As a member of recently reactivated, Chicago-based
post-rock originators Tortoise, Parker has considerable previous
experience of generating sounds that hop gleefully over any restrictive
genre barriers. Although rooted in improvisation, Happy Today
is certainly recognisably ‘jazz’, but its unhurriedly evolving sides
(clocking in at roughly 20 minutes each) also evoke impressions of
ambient music, various post-affixed iterations of rock, funk and hip hop
as filtered through funk, perhaps also – at a push – the appreciation
for space and echo that characterises dub. Both tracks start slowly like
a flame starting to take hold with a restrained and liminal, fluttering
pulse around which Parker and Johnson (who has just produced one of the
year’s other vibrant jazz-orientated gems, Flea’s Honora)
exchange abstracted flurries of notes. The audience becomes an audibly
thrilled fifth member of the band whenever Butterss and Bellerose land
on a more steadily rooted groove, which renders the initially hushed,
seemingly telepathic exchanges between the musicians into a collective
effort to work up a muscular and hypnotic musical sweat.
There are records that share a similar steering aesthetic
of bridging the divide between jazz and beats: Makaya McCraven’s recent Off The Record, notably. Happy Today’s
defining drive to blur the genre divide entirely live, unedited and
untweaked – with joyous, vibrant results – belongs to Parker and The
ETAIVtet alone.
