Guitar grooves, as flowing as possible: Jeff Parker
Photo: imago/Votes-Roland Owsnitzki
Two live albums, once by a quartet that assumes productive self-limitation, and once by an ensemble that beams away in all opulence as a collective.
Jeff Parker is active in the orbit of the International Anthem label and is a guitarist, among others, in the band Tortoise, which combined jazz and post-rock in the late 1990s in a much more consistent and multi-perspective manner than all of the numerous epigones that followed. With his ETA IVtet, Parker combines two poles of his work: the jazzy post-rock of Tortoise, and the sound of many international anthem bands that continue Chicago jazz history.
ETA IVtet’s new, second album, “The Way Out of Easy”, was recorded on one of the concert evenings that the quartet played every Monday for seven years at the now closed ETA Club in Los Angeles. You can hear four long pieces, each of which fills a page on the vinyl edition: “Freakadelic” begins with a stoic mid-tempo hip-hop beat, over which saxophonist Josh Johnson pours out an introductory torrent of mini solos. Over the course of the following twenty minutes, the band and especially drummer Jay Bellerose and bassist Anna Butterss repeatedly make small rhythmic shifts, which then have a very far-reaching effect in the hypnotically tuned overall picture, until “Freakadelic” with Tortoise-like minimal music -variations fade out.
In “Late Autumn” Jeff Parker shows how you can play an ambient jazz ballad on the guitar in such a way that pronounced relaxation goes together with high concentration and both remain audibly present throughout. In general, the pieces seem like the results of tasks that the band set for themselves, with the aim of solving them in complete relaxation. With the title track “The Way Out of Easy” the idea could have been to let fragmentary improvisations and gentle grooves alternate back and forth as fluidly as possible.
“The Way Out of Easy” ends with the analogue dub “Chrome Down”, which produces the echoes live and once again nicely summarizes what characterizes the sound aesthetics and playing style of the ETA IVtet: minimal effort, everything seems like it was pulled out of the box , with maximum effect. One of the most musically and conceptually rigorous jazz albums of last year.
In the performance of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, documented on “Live at the Adler Planetarium”, the effort is much greater. Mazurek and his orchestra have reassembled parts of pieces, primarily from his central albums “Lightning Dreamers” and “Dimensional Stardust”. A lot of things are brought up, which then flow into one another. The trumpeter Rob Mazurek had gathered a medium-sized ensemble (cello, piano, Moog synthesizer, bass and two drummers), the experimental singer Nicole Mitchell and the spoken word artist Damon Locks under the artificial planetarium sky to play multi-layered, meandering space jazz fabricate.
When put together, both albums create a beautiful, multi-dimensional picture of the state of affairs in jazz of the Chicago school, which did not cut off the connection to Sun Ra, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and Fire Music, but in other directions, into the more artificial and has continued to develop more abstract ideas.
Jeff Parker & ETA IVtet: »The Way Out of Easy«(International Anthem/Nonesuch)
Rob Mazurek – Exploding Star Orchestra: »Live at Adler Planetarium« (International Anthem/Nonesuch)