The Way Out of Easy

Guitarist Jeff Parker, 57 years old and with a few dozen albums out in the world, is having a moment. Some of that energy comes from his association with the International Anthem label, both as a leader and a sideman. As was true with his work with Tortoise, Isotope 217, and other groups on Thrill Jockey in his early days, it’s a hometown imprint that specializes in a style of experimental music that reaches new audiences. And Parker’s playing style—probing and melodic, exploratory yet always coherent—endears him to the jazz-curious and old heads alike.

After the ambitious cross-genre set Suite for Max Brown, Parker moved to another extreme with the lyrical solo offering Forfolks before settling into yet another mode with the 2022 live set Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The latter was cut with his quartet—or IVtet, if you like—comprising Parker, alto saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose during three evenings in 2019, as part of the group’s extended residency at the Los Angeles club ETA Highland Park. In one sense it found Parker in the most traditional of settings, playing small-group improvised jazz in an instrumental configuration that goes back to the form’s earliest days. But this group has an uncanniness born of its patient and process-oriented sound.

The Way out of Easy, cut with the same band at the same club in 2023, is certainly a sequel—it’s another double album, with four side-long pieces—but its differences suggest how much flexibility and surprise are possible within these parameters. The music seems slightly more emotionally open-ended, less likely to guide you to specific references or modes of feeling.

The opening “Freakadelic,” a Parker tune that dates back more than a decade, is taken at half the tempo of that earlier recording, and the slower speed allows for more air between the notes. The rhythm section carries a whiff of funk, hinting at the Art Blakey groove on “A Chant for Bu” that later formed the basis for A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions,” and Parker plays wry, Monk-like phrases, like he’s posing a series of riddles to the band that they try to answer.

These are mellow improvisations, easy to zone out to, but they’re also playful and surprising. Not quite halfway through “Freakadelic,” electronic processing is added to Johnson’s horn, and suddenly it’s as if it’s been beamed in from one of Jon Hassell’s imaginary worlds; then Bellerose doubles the tempo, adding a flurry of tumbling tom rolls. Toward the end of the piece it starts to break down, dissolving into a soup of hissy feedback and piled-up drums, but Parker’s harmonic taps continue ahead.

“Late Autumn” is comparatively impressionistic. This time Parker’s repeating guitar pattern steers through a fog of cymbals while Johnson sounds like he’s weeping quietly through his horn. Its hissing and humid atmosphere reminds me of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” and Parker’s use of feedback is remarkable. Little clouds of drone escape from his amp, sometimes almost imperceptible and sometimes the center of the music. The piece invites you to zoom in on details and then pull back and take in the whole, so even though it would work fine in the background, it’s better if you come at it like a participant.

The third track, “Easy Way Out,” has a slightly unnerving sense of drift, as if it’s floating away from you, that brings to mind the folding-in-on-itself circularity of Miles Davis’ “Nefertiti,” but the group’s approach to structure has antecedents from outside of jazz. In longform music of incremental change like this, your mind constantly moves back and forth between what’s changing and what stays the same. From Steve Reich to minimal techno to the slow-burn, CD-filling improvisations of the Necks, such music serves as a reset, causing you to interrogate what you reflexively listen for and how you construct meaning from variation.

Ambient Jazz’s Quiet, Forceful Return

It’s fitting that the liner notes for The Way Out of Easy are written by Bryce Gonzales, the engineer who recorded these sessions, partly because the fidelity is superb but also because the nakedness of the sound is essential to the music’s hypnotic effect. Compared to Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, the noise of the small crowd is lower in the mix, and the friction of fingers on strings and breath through metal is higher. Every rimshot tap and fingering squeak is audible, and the set is so live-in-your-living room that the real-time processing—effects like flanging and reverb, applied on the fly—hits with extra force.

On the closing “Chrome Dome,” the quartet takes its time establishing a groove, and then bits of dubby echo and pinches of equalization enter the fray, lending the tune a kind of graceful yet druggy wobble. Sometimes extended improvisation carries with it an expectation of drama, where you think about what just happened and what might come next. This exceptional record fixes your attention on the present moment.

Jeff Parker: The Way Out of Easy

$37 at Rough Trade

$33 at Amazon