Jeff Parker ETA IVtet : The Way Out of Easy
I finished writing a novel two weeks ago—the novel I’ve been working on for eight years, started only shortly after my debut here at Treble. It is 220,000 words long, as if you took over 200 of my reviews and strung them end to end. It’s going to be hell to try to get published at that length and the fact that it evolves (or perhaps devolves) over its span into increasingly avant-garde and syrupy language certainly won’t help. In the wake of it, I feel numb, empty. Or: that I never had a hollow to begin with, have no hope of being filled.
I encounter the suspension of Jeff Parker’s latest record of live recordings from the now-shuttered ETA, composed of four lengthy cuts not unlike the recent SUMAC record, each piece sitting right on what feels like the cusp of a cadence that just will not resolve. The proceedings are too mellow to be described as high-tension, instead hovering, chords without a home, melodies fluttering like birds that can’t find a clear branch to land on. You could map the four seasons to these pieces, mildly implied by a single track’s title of “Late Autumn,” and perhaps that would help differentiate the tonal color of the four deep workouts. The record by that rubric would start with summer with the stickiness of “Freakadelic” before the aforementioned “Late Autumn” comes, followed by the cool winter of “Easy Way Out” and the fertility of the springtime “Chrome Dome.” There is likely zero chance this is the intended read of this text. That’s okay; most critical rubrics, our explicatives, often aren’t.
But that sense of constant turning, of a cadence that would not come, would not resolve, suddenly struck me deeply. This is not a sentiment I or anyone else here at Treble for that matter shy away from, especially in jazz or ambient music (cousin forms, given the crossover of players). Here, however Parker, and his assembled band play these compositions with a deft mixture of the engagement of the melodic instruments and the ambient inclination of the harmonic and textural instruments. The arrangements comfortably blur those genres into a satisfying chiaroscuro, where funk, jazz, ambient and experimental music sit in a deliberately liminal space.
Liminality, that often abused word, had a brief window of overexposure in internet culture, with pictures of dying shopping malls and foggy streets soon leading to people posting pictures of Shrek over badly animated 3D clouds and calling it “liminal.” In the initial Derridian sense however, Parker’s music fits hand in glove, these pieces exploring that ineffable betweenness, the way when you are far enough out at sea on a voyage you can see neither shore or, inverted, how time enough on land can annihilate even memory of those voyages. The resistance to resolution of these passages forms a richly evocative elliptical motion, the emptied mind straining against its own native forgetting, attempting to summon some dwindling will.
Jazz is living music while music itself is a chronicle of life, finds meaning in its alchemical confusions to the flesh of our lives. Our lives are not always days of thrill and excitement; we have the days between, of fallow fields awaiting planting season, where in the half-dark we hover in wait and apprehension of unbegun things. The Way Out of Easy is a series of excursions from a group that seem destined to be engraved like the Necks before them as masters of this form of hyper-extended vamps and minimalist meditations. That this is made by a quartet alone and live, chamber music for the 21st century, is a marvel and a testament to the emotional transparency jazz can achieve. I saw a mirror to myself, haunting and true.
Label: International Anthem/Nonesuch
Year: 2024
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Jeff Parker and the ETA IVtet : The Way Out of Easy
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