Jeff Parker

After "After the Rain" in 2020, and in before-before times with the Chicago/ LA guitarist zen master

A confession: I didn’t love Jeff Parker’s music the first time I heard it in the ‘90s. Or rather, I had really loved Tortoise and their approach to non-guitar post-rock or what have you, so when Parker joined the band –as a guitarist– I felt rebuffed or whatever dumb kneejerk reaction you get trying to figure out tastes as a teen/ twentysomething and assimilate all of what came before in terms of likes/ dislikes. But in my defense, I would also say I nursed an aversion to jazz guitar in general, meaning that only as I approach middle age have I overcome that allergy and gone full “Pat Metheny,” so to speak.

It would take many, many years before I dug into Parker’s body of work (over 200 records and counting and kicking myself for ignoring TNT for so many years). Not that one would know that, since I have previously enthused over the man and his music.

Circa 2016, I noticed an intriguing shift within Parker’s solo music (though he actually dates it to a duo date with Rob Mazurek from 2015) and couldn’t get enough of it. There were the beats, loops, and lurches, sure, but also a foregrounding of space and dust-mote corners and allowing things to unspool rather than keep building upwards. By the time that Suite For Max Brown was due for release in January 2020, I was spinning this sun-warmed music nonstop. I have a sweet memory of being out in Venice with the homies, basking in the winter sun and scootering around the streets with this on blast.

So by the time Parker and group rolled into New York City in March of 2020, I was tingling with anticipation. We all know what happened next. Five years on, I got to catch Jeff Parker and the ETA IVtet last December and then chat with him when he was back in his home in Altadena. We all know what happened next. Some of this will go to a feature story I’m still working on, but for now, wanted to share some of our chat from after the rain and before the fires.

Holy shit, I realized you were the last live concert I saw before coronavirus hit! Like that night you played and after a beautiful version of “After the Rain,” the crowd got all these notifications: the NBA season is over after Rudy Gobert touched all the microphones with Covid and Tom Hanks has Covid. Our school shutdown the next day and it felt like the world was ending.

It was, you know, very strange to kind of have the country kind of closing up behind us as we were traveling. We played in San Francisco and then played two nights in Chicago. And then played in Philly, played in New York. And it seemed like every place we played the next day the cities were shutting down. So it’s either like the ground crumbling under you or you’re Patient Zero, like both of those things. It was just kind of a heavy time, like being in a Philip Dick novel.

You were already out in California so you are probably three-quarters of the way to being in A Scanner Darkly.

My partner, Leanne Schmidt, the filmmaker, was based out here and I was based in Chicago. We were kind of living in both places. We had a young child. And once he started school, you have to be somewhere. I was kind of forced to choose between trying to live in two places with a family, which was pretty impossible. I was a bit complacent in Chicago. I could have easily stayed in Chicago and stayed productive, but I had some kind of other career things that I wanted to accomplish. I didn't want to sever the ties of 25 years of musical community that I was kind of entrenched in, but I decided to branch out.

You weren’t telling everyone you were “going Hollywood.” But I feel like there was sort of a shift in your sound and your approach. I'm kind of thinking of Slight Freedom era.

It was more circumstantial, I would say. I mean, you know, I moved to California without knowing anyone. So when I got here, I worked on music alone. I rented a rehearsal space in Glassell Park from a guy who would rehearse a few times a week in the evenings. I gave the guy like $100/ month and during the day I would go there and practice with some pedals. I would just go in there and work on this kind of like, “little stuff.” I would put a chord progression in a loop pedal and practice over it. Coincidentally, Meshell Ndegeocello asked me to open for her for three nights in Chicago. And I had been kind of assembling like this kind of solo repertoire where I could play by myself with a looping pedal, some delays and I kind of put together a few short pieces that I played for her, what became Slight Freedom. It also became the groundwork for this record I did with Rob Mazurek, Some Jellyfish Live Forever, which was just basically me and my looping pedal and Rob playing over top of it. I figured out that I could make these kind of sound environments and then I could play over myself.

Does JP’s MySpace Beats also stem from this sort of woodshedding?

I mean that's old music. It’s called MySpaceBeats because that’s when I was doing it. It was kind of like early 2004 2005 and I just kind of had like hours and hours and hours. I would do it on my computer when I was on tour, doing it in my spare time. That stuff became the groundwork for The New Breed.

Most people are going to know you through Tortoise and Chicago post-rock, but was hip-hop your first love?

No, I’d still say jazz. But yeah once hip-hop started to get jazzy, I mean I was in my early 20s, you know. And once I heard that music: Tribe, The Pharcyde, Beatnuts, Digging in the Crates, Diamond D, Large Professor, that stacking of jazz records, re-contextualizing, and putting that music into a different context, that all appealed to me.

When I was in music school, at Berkelee, I kind of felt like I was…I never felt like jazz was my music. I related to it very deeply, but I kind of felt like it was not of my generation. I felt like if I was going to be active in it, I was kind of like bearing a torch, which I didn’t really want to do, you know? I was trying to figure stuff out and but I was always interested in technological or a kind of postmodern way of making music. I got into making music from listening to my father’s records. And the thing that I really liked about hip-hop was that they were making music from records.

From their fathers’ records.

Even just the technical thing. They were making music from recordings, which I thought was very clever. Just a really smart way of putting older music into a new context. And I was always interested in production. I made beats with weird Casio keyboards and me and my friends would rap over. I'd take my father's records and I would make like pause mixes. I was always interested in that way of making music. But I mean, I love jazz. I love my father's records, like Lee Morgan records, Art Blakey records. I really always liked Gabor Szabo, the Hungarian guitarist. He always had a really singing like a singing lyrical style. He was kind of my first guy.

I came up in that fusion era where I got hip to Return to Forever at 14, 15. My father came home from work and he was like, “What are you listening to?” “I’m listening to Return of Forever.” And he was like, “You should check out West Montgomery.” And I remember I said to him, “I heard that guy, man. He doesn't have any chops.” He came home the next day with a record, Full House. They play Dizzy’s “Blue ‘N’ Boogie,” super uptempo. He put it on, and I was just like, “oh man.” Kind of after that, I uh…started to move away from fusion.

When I think of Chicago, I think of these august venues, like Lounge Ax or Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge, where there were these residencies and jam sessions. When you came to LA, did you feel like you had there was any of that? Just that kind of infrastructure?

No there wasn't. I mean it's that's kind of the trope about LA is there's no places to play. It's an industry town and the way musicians work here, it's different. You know a big industry in Chicago is tourism, which kind of kept me in paying gigs.

Here you go to Birdland or the Blue Note, and it’s packed with tourists and just having someone from Europe who wants to go to the “Blue Note.”

Honestly, when I relocated to Los Angeles I didn't really want it to work the same in the same way as I did in Chicago. If I had wanted to do that I would have stayed in Chicago. I came out here looking for other work in terms of scoring, session work, getting placements, making library music, to kind of get off the stage. I was kind of just looking for a different way to produce work. And you know, I mean, it's really good for me to go inward and kind of focus on individually what I had to offer instead of a collaborative space, which was mostly what I was doing when I was in Chicago.

And then I tipped you back towards the collaborative aspect. I started to play at ETA just to kind of keep myself active. Like I said, I moved out here and I didn't really know anyone. You can kind of you know, go crazy.

It’s so beautiful and it’s so nice there, but if you can’t find your people, it can get isolating, too.

Yeah for sure. When I lived in Chicago, I kind of always had several steady gigs in a week. You know, I played at a place on Mondays and then another place on Tuesdays, another place on Thursdays. And on the weekends, I was kind of like working in whatever clubs that had music on Fridays and Saturdays. So when I moved out to L.A., I found myself a steady gig and that was ETA on Monday nights. It's good to have a home base like that. I came to rely on it. Like, where you can play every week, you're keeping your brain working and you're keeping your chops up. You're kind of like, you know, kind of establishing like a culture of sorts.

When I think about these great jazz records of the ‘50s and ‘60s, they were really coming out of bands that held together and had residencies to deepen their bonds, so to speak. And I feel like that infrastructure has become so difficult to sort of maintain.

Yeah, it’s gotten increasingly difficult.

Was there a tipping point for the ETA IVtet in terms of congealing?

We started out just playing standards and jazz tunes. And that’s where the Dionne Warwick, Bert Bacharach, (“This Guy’s in Love With You”) that’s one of the early ones we did. I’m not sure how that worked its way into the repertoire. I mean, we used to, we played that tune with the New Breed Band, too.

When I heard it at Public Records, I was like, “now I want to hear you record standards.” I just loved knowing how far out you guys go and then to hear a pop tune like that snap it all back into place.

I mean we started out playing a lot of standards and jazz tunes, like Charlie Parker tunes. But you know, Jay's not a jazz drummer. And there was always a certain awkwardness with us and he was not comfortable playing swing a lot of times.

And in order to kind of like find more common ground for us to play on, we would kind of play like heavier pieces. Some of the ones we used to play, we played this tune, “1974 Blues” by Eddie Harris, which is groovy and in 7/4. We played more vampy kind of stuff: Kenny Burrell’s “Chitlins Con Carne,” boogaloos, late ‘60s soul jazz, rather than playing swing. We'd also play tunes by Ornette Coleman, things with less harmonic structure.

And once we would play that stuff, the music started to open up and go into different territory. I don't know, our improvising started to get a lot more fluid and we started to find this kind of like common ground. And like I said, I was doing stuff with loops and drones and Josh Johnson was incorporating incorporating more electronics into his setup.

Was Josh’s set-up sort of based off yours or, you know, in sympathy with yours?

You know Josh also plays in the New Breed band, exploring a lot of sounds and textures that I was dealing with. I mean Josh, he's brilliant, man. And I would say some of his solo music, I think some of his ideas were introduced by things that I was exploring. He can sample himself and loop, bounce off that. Sometimes we play, and I think he's doing one thing, but then I can't even tell when I'm doing shit and when he's doing it.

That night at Public Records I kept trying to figure out where these crazy flying sounds moving around the room were coming from.

Yeah yeah, his pedalboard thing is next level. I mean, he has he has stuff with MIDI, stuff that I don't deal with, that he can do in stereo. He has pedals that can pan his sound. He can really create profound sound environments.

I remember hearing that Josh had all of his gear lost by the airline. Did he ever get any of it back?

Yeah, the airline lost his gear, but he got it back. They lost his pedal board on the way to Europe. And he didn't get it back until like the very last show that we played. So for two weeks he had to just play saxophone straight up.

Their presentation is similar, so what do you hear shifting between the Monday Nights record and The Way Out Of Easy?

I'm more confident now. I think we've kind of, I won't say we've figured out a formula, because it's not that at all, but there's a…I can hear us trying to figure it out on Mondays. And on Easy, we've figured it out. There's a lot more confidence, it's a lot less tentative.

A ‘no climax’ sort of feel.

Yeah, you know, we kind of...I mean that's kind of a something we we try to avoid is that kind of arc. We're kind of...

You’re anti-climactic.

Yeah, yeah, I mean we don’t, I don’t, there’s enough of that in improvised music. We try to keep stuff more like a flatter landscape as opposed to it being mountainous.

I’m thinking of this time I saw John Fahey and he talked about how when he plays the guitar, he’s just trying to quickly get into a ‘subconscious mode’ of playing. I wonder if it’s like that for the quartet, where you guys really quickly get into this like certain kind of zone.

Yeah, I mean we're trying to stay in that zone, really. I think we we found a way (or ways) to get in that zone quickly. A lot of it is just from listening and kind of being patient with what one another is introducing. Like being patient enough to kind of just let these musical spaces expand. If the stuff feels good, then the band will…we'll just try and keep it there.

Not filling the space, so to speak?

Yeah, yeah, totally. A lot of that comes from Jay dealing with production, like making loops. He’s quite one of the the most active session musicians in Los Angeles and in Nashville now.

He’s on the Kenny Buttrey tip. And didn’t Jay also play on a Dylan record, like with Joe Henry? (Editor note: not quite, though when T-Bone Burnett set some unused Dylan lyrics to music for The New Basement Tapes project, Jay was behind the kit.)

He’s played with him. He said Bob Dylan’s thing now is crazy, man. He said it’s kind of just like freeform, seeing him play. None of the musicians playing with him even know what the fuck is happening.

Man. I gotta go see him like that.

Yeah, he said it’s crazy.

You went to music school, you’ve had this long music career. Is there something that you would say you have “unlearned” about music along the way?

It’s not about unlearning anything. It’s more about like trying to use the knowledge and apply it in a having technique. You can fall back on your technique when you don’t have actual ideas. And you can use it to find actual ideas. I mean, I did a gig last night and a singer sat in on the gig and she was like, “I want to do ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ in F#.” And we were just like, “oh shit.” I mean, it wasn’t like, she didn’t sing it and want to do it in F or G. She wanted to do it in F#, which is a difficult key. I mean, that’s a hard key. Even if you know a tune, you have to transpose it on the fly. But you use the technique that you learned in order to get through the song. And you know it’s kind of like: F#, relative minor, like it goes. And you’re kind of using these techniques to make music.

I do that all the time. I do it in an improvised music context. I mean, you can hear me doing it on The Way Out of Easy. When we’re playing “Freakadelic” I take a solo and I’m kind of like superimposing these other changes over top of like a static space in order to kind of like create a certain sonic layering thing to the listener. I mean, I’m thinking about it. I mean, it’s music, but it’s also like knowledge. It’s like technique you know it’s just application of of technique.

Behind the paywall, Jeff Parker talks DJing and offers up a few choice cuts, including one pick that’s absolutely a freaked-out, gospel-ized, soul-jazz epic smoker that you have to hear to believe.