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Recorded and mixed in situ at Lodge Room by engineer Bryce Gonzales with a custom-made analog mixer and Nagra stereo tape recorder, Happy Today is the sound of Parker and the IVtet—drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—engaged in their signature, minimalist, form-bending improvisational syntax across two sprawling, LP side-length pieces.

Happy Today captures a bright moment during dark times. As Parker shares: “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family. Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.”

The album is ETA IVtet’s first recording made outside of the widely-beloved Los Angeles micro-club ETA. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, ETA was where the band’s collective sound coalesced over the course of a storied seven-year Monday night residency that yielded two critically-acclaimed records: 2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy.

With Happy Today, that sound—honed in such an intimate setting—is scaled up for a much larger audience and space at Lodge Room. But the essential formula remains the same, and has the same hypnotic, deeply-tuned listening effect. The almost alchemical musical communication creates a feeling of connection not only between the band members but also between the band and their audience, an ongoing trust exercise that invites listeners to become part of the exchange and experience the joy of deep listening.

Also released is a full-length concert film of the performance as captured by director Charlie Weinmann. The film offers a rare opportunity to see the elusive ETA IVtet in action, encircled by the audience while they perform in the round.

In August, Parker and the ETA IVtet will do a run of Happy Today album release shows in California that includes a three-night stand in-the-round at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 23–25, almost exactly one year after the album was recorded in the very same place.

January 2nd, 2023. Aside from being the second of a new year, it was a pretty ordinary night at ETA in Los Angeles, where guitarist Jeff Parker, alongside his ETA IVtet—saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose—had been holding down a regular Monday night gig since 2016. Nobody knew it was fated to be their first gig of the final year that ETA would be open for business. 

Over seven years of holding down that residency, Parker’s ETA ensemble evolved from a band that played mostly standards into a group known for its transcendent, long-form (sometimes stretching out for forty-five minutes or more) journeys into innovative, often uncharted territories of groove-oriented, painterly, polyrhythmic, minimalist and mantric improvised music.

With that musical growth, the crowds for Parker and his band at ETA grew across the years too. What started as a sparse gathering of weeknight drinkers, friends, family, and Chicago expats (coming to get a shot of nostalgia for the atmospheres Parker used to create at Rodan across the ‘00s and early ‘10s) grew into a Los Angeles nightlife staple with a packed house and a line down the block for every show.

By January 2023, interest in Parker’s music was stronger than ever, coming off successes with the 2021 release of Forfolks, a collection of solo guitar works, and the 2022 release of Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, a double LP chronicling the ETA IVtet’s distinct, expansive approach to improvisation across four side-length tracks recorded and mixed live by engineer Bryce Gonzales. 

Mondays introduced the world to the ETA IVtet’s signature sound with a gathering of unnamed recordings from dates between 2019 and 2021. Parker’s new ETA IVtet offering stays true to that formula in some ways—as he returns to Gonzales’s archive of analog captures to gather four long recordings totaling around 80 minutes—while zooming in on a more particular moment in his journey. The Way Out of Easy provides us a macro-lens view of the ever-refining, infinite organic essence of the ensemble as they stretch out across a single night of soundmaking.

Gonzales is well known for the high-end audio gear he builds as Highland Dynamics, and even designed a custom mixer to be able to record the IVtet, specifically, while only taking up a single space at the bar. In his liner notes for The Way Out of Easy, he colors his process and approach: “There are many different ways to make recordings and they all have their place. But for this band, the most important thing to consider is not doing anything to get in the way of what they are saying to each other.” He refers to the simple schematic he used for capturing these performances—basically only 4 level controls for one microphone per player—which allows for an incredibly pure, honest, transparent and transporting experience of the music as it unfolds and is created in real time. 

The set begins with an extended take on Parker’s composition “Freakadelic,” a tune he originally recorded for his 2012 Delmark release Bright Light in Winter. The B-side piece, “Late Autumn,” finds Parker swaying in alliterative, arpeggiating cycles using just a few plucked notes as he lays the compositional foundation. At first it almost sounds like an echo of the humble tunes he wrote alone with his guitar on Forfolks, but in this space his ensemble joins him to help build a beautifully multi-textured, gently-shifting, four-dimensional construction out of a simple idea. On “Easy Way Out,” Butterss’s bobbing bass line leads, paddling the ensemble into a placid expanse of tender psychedelia while Bellerose dusts off the drums like an archaeologist unearthing ancient artifacts. 

It had become customary for the IVtet to end their shows every week with a standard or a tune, a practice that Parker embraced for wanting to give the audience something warm and familiar to take home after a long night of taking them out on creative limbs. Some of Parker’s more common calls were “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Burt Bacharach, “1974 Blues” by Eddie Harris, or “Peace” by Horace Silver. In this set, the IVtet closes not with a familiar song, but a familiar sound in the form of a dub/reggae groove (given the name “Chrome Dome” by Parker in post), developing spontaneously out of lyrical ad libs by Johnson on solo saxophone.

In early December of 2023, ETA co-owner Ryan Julio was forced to make a sudden announcement that the venue would permanently shutter at the end of the year. On December 23rd, Parker and the band played at ETA for the last time. 

On July 22nd, 2024, the ETA IVtet gathered to perform together for the first time since then, playing for a sold-out crowd of several hundred listeners—a smiling Ryan Julio among them—at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Gonzales was there, recording with his compact analog setup just behind the band on stage. The space may be gone but its spirit lives on and the music moves forward into new vessels.

Recorded live at ETA, a bar in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss and alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful and exploratory music making. Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy is two LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv.

Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 and 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, Mondays at ETA is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic and the melodic. Patience and grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, ceiling echo, Los Angeles. Mondays belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan’s Live at the Lighthouse, John Coltrane’s Live in Seattle, and Miles Davis’ In Person Friday and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk San Francisco and Black Beauty.

While the IVtet sometimes plays standards and—including on this recording—original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group, just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It’s tensile, yet spacious and relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes and eras—dub and Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient and drone—suffuse the proceedings. Listening to playbacks Parker remarked, “we sound like the Byrds” (the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it).

A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly and fluently, in and out of lead and supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they’ve established in Parker’s project The New Breed, Parker and Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead and support. Their sampled and looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered and alive, adding depth and texture and pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker’s beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose’s animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums and shakers—as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming—bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet’s language.

A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness and humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground and lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet’s grooves flow and clip, loop and repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony and intuition, deep focus and freedom.

For all its varied sonic personality, Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy scans immediately and unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker’s unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant and disciplined in execution, Parker’s music has an earned respect for itself and for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods and shapes of heart and mind will find utility and hope in a music that combines the autonomy and the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance and in staying power.

Announcing Forfolks—an album of solo guitar works—released on December 10, 2021. The album includes interpretations of Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” and the standard “My Ideal,” plus six original compositions including “Four Folks,” a tune first written by Parker and recorded in 1995, and “La Jetée,” a tune he recorded with Isotope 217 in 1997 and with Tortoise in 1998. The four totally new original compositions are loop-driven, stratiform works that marry melodic improvisation with electronic textures. As Parker describes: “I’m trying to create a sonic world for me to wander around in.”

The album was recorded by Graeme Gibson at Sholo Studio in Altadena, California (aka Jeff’s house) over two days in June 2021.

“Forfolks is a galaxy in eight tracks—these songs orbit each other wordlessly, leaving near-tangible tracks of light in their wake.” Under the Radar Magazine

“Forfolks… never feels showy or vain; it’s joyous, Parker delighting in the ideas he unearths as he plays along with the sound of himself.” Pitchfork.com

Jeff Parker’s latest album is named for and dedicated to Parker’s mother. The picture on the cover is of her when she was nineteen. Suite for Max Brown features nine original songs as well as “Gnarciss,” an interpretation of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus,” and John Coltrane’s “After the Rain.” Parker plays the majority of the instruments on the record and also engineered most it at home or during his 2018 Headlands Center residency in Sausalito, CA. “The veteran guitarist has created an effortlessly detailed album full of tradition and experimentation that spans generations,” says Pitchfork. “It lives at the vanguard of new jazz music.”

Parker’s bandmates on Suite for Max Brown, dubbed the New Breed, include pianist-saxophonist Josh Johnson; bassist Paul Bryan, who co-produced and mixed the album with Parker; piccolo trumpet player Rob Mazurek, his frequent duo partner; trumpeter Nate Walcott, a veteran of Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes; drummers Jamire Williams, Makaya McCraven, and Jay Bellerose, Parker’s Berklee School of Music classmate; cellist Katinka Kleijn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and his daughter Ruby Parker, who sings on the opening track.

Parker says of his new album, “I used to deejay a lot when I lived in Chicago. I was spinning records one night and for about ten minutes I was able to perfectly synch up a Nobukazu Takemura record with the first movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and it had this free jazz, abstract jazz thing going on with a sequenced beat underneath. It sounded so good. That’s what I’m trying to do with Suite for Max Brown. It’s got a sequenced beat and there are musicians improvising on top or beneath the sequenced drum pattern. “That’s what I was going for. Man vs. machine.”

“It’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error,” he admits. “I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn’t really know I could do. I always look at this process as patchwork quilting. You take this stuff and stitch it together until a tapestry forms.”

Jeff Parker’s 2016 album, The New Breed, changed the trajectory of Parker’s solo career. The album was the first to give voice to Parker’s wholly unique take on sample-based beat construction augmented by improvisation and live instrumentation. What began as Jeff’s interest in understanding his own idea of hip-hop processes, and how they related to his work in jazz, has expanded into a blueprint for much of his work going forward.

Performed in this case by the high-level crew of Paul Bryan on bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone and keys, Jamire Williams and Jay Bellerose on drums, Parker’s daughter Ruby on vocals, and Parker himself on guitar, synths, and other instruments.