The first thing you notice in the opening moments of Happy Today is the amount of space. Hard-panned to the left and bathed in room tone, Jeff Parker’s round, resonant guitar notes have a decay tail long enough to activate the snare wires in Jay Bellerose’s kit. When Anna Butterss strikes their upright bass, the sound spreads like ink spilled on linen; when listening in headphones, you can feel it vibrate in your temples, and it’s heavy enough to trick you into thinking the ground must have shaken as well. Josh Johnson sustains a long, golden drone on his saxophone, and when he captures a loop of it, it’s as if a second Josh Johnson takes the cue and doubles the note from 10 feet away. Three minutes into “Like Swimwear,” as the ETA IVtet comes into its power, you can almost map the players’ stage positions and the dimensions of the venue, as the reflections suggest a high ceiling and considerable distance between its walls.
Happy Today was recorded at the Lodge Room in Highland Park by Bryce Gonzales, the L.A.-based engineer and bespoke outboard gear designer who captured both of the ETA IVtet’s previous albums. Live, the IVtet is transfixing, playing long-form improvisational ambient jazz that finds the sublime middle ground between Bennie Maupin’s The Jewel in the Lotus and Cluster’s Sowiesoso. The band’s tunes float and dance, unspooling with a quiet, patient grace that comes from being superb listeners with keen instincts, the kind of players that know how to shred but recognize there’s greater potency in building an atmosphere together. Parker is the de facto leader; the group coalesced at a Monday night residency he secured at ETA, a now-shuttered cocktail and oyster bar in Highland Park that briefly served as the nexus for L.A.’s innovative jazz scene. He keeps a light touch as bandleader, sometimes offering one of his original compositions as a launchpad, but otherwise trusting that his three bandmates know how to follow each other into the unknown.
Both of the IVtet’s previous records were recorded at ETA, which, despite its renown, could hold only 78 people at a time. The stage was just a slightly deeper part of the small room, and the audience stood mere feet away from the musicians. Gonzales recorded every ETA IVtet set on a custom-built mixer, assigning one channel to each member, giving them a distinct zone in the mix as they cramped together physically. The magic of those recordings—excerpts from three different nights on Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy and a single night on The Way Out of Easy—wasn’t just the band. They’re spellbinding, of course, but Gonzales was able to capture the feeling in ETA the way few live recordings can. You can hear a little chatter and the occasional clinking of ice in a glass throughout Mondays, which gives you a sense of how small the bar was, how lucky everyone was to be there to witness this conjuring. On The Way Out, the audience is silent, the sounds tight and dry; you can almost hear fingers moving across fretboards and the creak of the musicians’ chairs. It’s close, hushed, and reverent, as intimate as a whispered secret.
Once ETA closed in December 2023, the IVtet immediately graduated to Zebulon, a 200-cap club in L.A.’s Frogtown neighborhood, and once The Way Out of Easy blew up among critics and fans, the group ventured out to play other midsize rooms like Brooklyn’s Public Records and the Garden Club in Atlanta. On August 20, 2025, they were booked at Lodge Room, which holds 500 people and is half a block from where ETA stood on Figueroa Street.
Happy Today is just as remarkably hypnotic as the IVtet’s previous documents, but it’s perhaps more impressive to hear how commanding they’ve become as a unit. On both sidelong tracks, they take their time to establish a vibe, each member finding the right time to add another layer. “Like Swimwear” starts with Parker plucking a delicate figure, eventually sustaining certain notes to build a delicate, droning chord. Johnson follows suit, but plays a dueling figure, as Butterss and Bellerose methodically add more accents into the rhythmic backbone. Eventually, the two fully lock together, allowing Parker and Johnson the space to wriggle around, sometimes finding the cracks and crevices in the motorik churn, other times enveloping it in clouds of pure tone. Johnson experiments with chorus and reverb effects, giving his saxophone the impression of fading in and out of view.
The title track builds at an even slower pace, swirling around itself like a Lonnie Liston Smith or Alice Coltrane deep cut for the better part of 10 minutes before finally breaking into a canter. Parker’s guitar all but dissipates into a constellation of gentle sine waves while Butterss and Johnson solo against each other. Bellerose adds a breathy coating of percussive textures, and you can imagine all four with their eyes closed, playing without even thinking. By the end, Bellerose and Butterss are back in a pocket, and Johnson and Parker are trading knotted, ratcheting phrases back and forth; it’s hard to remember that it all started with a mere wisp.
During each piece, there’s a moment about halfway through where Bellerose transitions from bubbly, tom-heavy rudiments into a straight-ahead Stax pattern, and each time, a few members of the audience cannot contain their glee. Their joyful, stank-face shouts come from deep in the crowd and echo off the Lodge Room’s ceiling, and you’re reminded that this band is playing this music in front of hundreds of enchanted people. Gonzales and Parker leave close to 30 seconds of applause at the end of both tracks, and the audience’s joyful hooting and hollering feels as astonished as it does celebratory. The IVtet’s power is in presence, both in their ability to access it onstage together and engender it in a crowd, no matter the size. The simple act of finding space with other people can help you touch the infinite, even for just 20 minutes at a time.
