Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – Happy Today
Just before the 11-minute mark on the first track of Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s third live-recorded album Happy Today, “Like Swimwear,” we hear something of a glass shattering moment. As the long-running group of guitarist Parker, bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson and drummer Jay Bellerose make an extended transition out of the lengthy piece’s more understated opening half and seamlessly all enter the same groove as if in a trance. Johnson is the one at the forefront, his sax leads cycling through the same melodic motif with varying volume and intensity, reshaping the space around it like a dubmaster at the controls. But it’s immediately after Johnson hits his snare when it happens: a spontaneous ecstatic whoop from someone in the audience, and then another, and another, some applause, and a few more, increasingly louder howls of rapturous approval.
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s previous pair of records make explicit that they’re live recordings—2022’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy‘s title references the L.A. venue residency from which the recordings were taken, and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy shows the group, led by the prolific and innovative Parker, playing in front of a crowd right there on the cover. But otherwise, the fourth wall rarely if ever breaks, their music meditative and focused, yet endlessly exploratory, rarely holding its shape for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s live, yes, but more importantly, it’s alive.
Happy Today is, perhaps even more so than its two predecessors, a bright and joyous set of improvisations, four musicians continuing to build something out of both musical chemistry and friendship. Recorded at the Lodge Room, rather than the since-closed Enfield Tennis Academy where their previous two efforts were committed to tape (and which gave them the ETA in their name), Happy Today‘s session took place after a dark year in which Parker and his family were displaced from last year’s Eaton fires. Its two lengthy tracks—which make this a relatively short release by ETA IVtet’s standards at a combined 44 minutes—don’t so much provide catharsis as an alternately soothing and celebratory listening experience. It reaffirms the beauty of both the music shared and brought to life by the players as well as the community formed as a result of these collaborative live improvisations—their own rapturous outbursts as much an essential part of these recordings as the ETA IVtet’s performances.
Those actual performances, though? Nothing less than mesmerizing throughout those ever-shifting 44 minutes, sequences of levitating drone slowly sprouting into bright flashes of melody on the title track, Johnson’s saxophone in brief, intermittent segments dissolving into dissonance before eventually being caught up in the funky strut the band cooks up about halfway through. “Like Swimwear” seems to be constantly but slowly building up momentum, then suddenly paring it back in the final third, ultimately congealing into a kind of atmospherically immersive space jazz, with every chapter in Parker’s greater and wildly influential catalog—Tortoise, Isotope 217, et al.—hinted at along the way.
“In all modesty, we have a thing. Even at our worst, we’re pretty good, because we’ve been doing it so long,” Parker said in a recent interview. If he’s wrong, it’s by a matter of understatement, the four musicians having over time built something so singular and special. Where Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy might have arrived with more of a hazy mysticism in its slowly unfolding epics, Happy Today builds on a similar idea by charting its path toward even more accessible climaxes and moments of unfiltered ebullience. It’s a hell of a thing.
Label: International Anthem/Nonesuch
Year: 2026
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Jeff Parker ETA IVtet : Happy Today
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