What is a music producer, really? In modern music, it’s hard to know. At any one time, the producer may act as an artistic director, session musician, engineer, arranger, or all of the above. The boundaries between these roles have been steadily collapsing for years, across genres; now it’s sometimes easier to say what a producer is not on a particular record than to try defining what they are. Even then, that can be hard to pinpoint: the producer necessarily leaves fingerprints all over the work, and separating them from it can be almost impossible. I think—almost counterintuitively—that older terms better describe what a producer does. The word itself is useful; the producer is someone who makes music, i.e., produces it. But terms like bandmaster, conductor, bandleader—these, too, are useful. A bandleader, much like a producer (and often they will be both), is an amalgam of things: musician, shepherd, glue, virtuoso, soloist, sideman, soothsayer, navigator, shapeshifter. If there’s one musician who occupies all of these roles in today’s jazz soundscape, it is surely Jeff Parker.
Parker is an artist who, among other things, knows how to find a groove and pull the very best out of it. Happy Today is the latest offering from Parker’s ETA IVtet, named for the oft-missed Los Angeles venue where the four musicians (Parker on guitar, along with bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, and drummer Jay Bellerose) first developed their collective sound. Like their previous releases, the album is not an album in the way we think of it now, but rather a long-play record in the literal sense of the word, made up of only two tracks (“Happy Today” and the almost twenty-four-minute-long “Like Swimwear”).
Unlike their previous releases, this is the IVtet’s sound exploding outward and upward. Described by Parker as a “statement of joy” in the face of Trump’s despotism and last year’s Eaton fire, it was recorded and mixed live at the Lodge Room in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood. It is a larger and airier room than the group has played in before. Far from the intimate confines of ETA, it allows, in opener “Like Swimwear,” the first repeated notes of Parker’s guitar—a simple melody that rises, falls, then repeats—to buzz into the space and ease their way into the ear of the listener. The guitar initially sounds almost scratchy, as though its player were still tuning up. This is achieved by engineer Bryce Gonzales’s use of a Nagra stereo tape recorder, but also by the live nature of the music, which is impossible to get away from. When the thud of Butterss’ bass makes itself known, along with Bellerose’s kit, the sound opens up. When Johnson enters with a haunting, lingering alto saxophone line that floats above the rhythm section, it transcends.
And so on: Parker’s feat is not just one of musicianship (though he is, of course, technically accomplished, as his solos indicate, playing always with a crisp articulation and nose for melody), but of making form and sound malleable. The most exciting moments in each track are consistently the hand-off; the ease with which the music moves from one sound to another, as each musician finds a note or pattern worth lingering in, and their bandmates step back and let them take the lead. When Bellerose changes the groove halfway through “Like Swimwear,” or Johnson plays in harmony with a looped recording of himself in the euphoric closing sections of “Happy Today,” it is a genuinely joyful moment. Not just for the audience—who make their delight known, whistling and hollering throughout—but for the improvisational approach Parker has cultivated: that of total unity and trust between artists, a willingness to go onstage and see what happens.
Gonzales, too, deserves equal praise for the sound he has created on Happy Today. The textures are warm and inviting, unfolding for the listener in broad strokes and an unmistakable physicality. The closing few minutes of the album, for instance, are a series of bold, punchy sounds that make you sit up in your seat; Bellerose flips from a lighter beat to a sweet, crisp rhythm on his snare and hi-hat, cutting sharply beneath the melodic lines with invigorating flair. The others join as though they cannot help but be pulled in, and they move as one to some new sonic landscape.
This happens again and again on the record. Each instrumentalist comes together to repeat the same motifs, sometimes harmonically distorted, traveling up and down scales and modes, but always with that feeling of togetherness that is inescapable. On both Happy Today tracks, the sound gathers in intensity, then slows near the end, before shimmering out of earshot. Fans of Parker—and indeed of the other instrumentalists of this quartet, all of whom exist in this same improvised music space, in their own iterations—will know that this sort of ending does not signify running out of steam, but rather an acknowledgement that the music has had its space to breathe and exist among its players and audience.
Parker’s music with the ETA IVtet is often described as “trancelike,” in part because of how essential the act of repetition is to its form. On this album, the musicians make use of electronics, repeating basslines and drumlines to fold sounds back on themselves—to turn them over and over until they sound like something new, or to dig around in search of a new direction to take their improvisations in. But the use of “trance” is, I believe, a slight misnomer. It suggests a feeling of being dazed or detached, maybe even unconscious. Parker’s music does the opposite. On this album, he has distilled the feeling of being hyper-attuned to one’s surroundings and fellow musicians, of total focus and trust, without making the results sound labored or joyless. Happy Today is a recording of complete attention; forty minutes of musicians who know how and when to make space for each other. In turn, the music they make demands the attention of their listeners. Most impressively, it is live improvisation that only deepens with repeated listens. [International Anthem]
Mariam Abdel-Razek is a writer and critic based in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm, and Varsity.
