JEFF PARKER ETA IVtet “The Way Out of Easy”

ARTIST

Jeff Parker

ALBUM TITLE

“The Way Out of Easy”

LABEL

International Anthem

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For the sake of brevity, Jeff Parker needs no introduction. With his quartet, he performed every Monday evening for seven years at the Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) in Los Angeles, effectively becoming the venue’s resident band. This remarkable residency produced Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Eremite Records, 2022), drawn from recordings made between 2019 and 2021. Now we have the opening concert of ETA’s 2023 season – the year the club would finally close its doors.

Comparing the two albums reveals the quartet’s ongoing evolution through extended minimalist improvisations. Starting from standard forms, the group moved steadily toward polyrhythms and hypnotic grooves. This new release pushes further in that direction, arriving at something close to a funk destination. The perennial dilemma of musicians grappling with time – whether through dilation or stasis – is here addressed by continuously intensifying rhythmic structures, sometimes repeated obsessively.

It is also worth noting that engineer Bryce Gonzales, who recorded both albums, explains in the liner notes that he built a custom mixer specifically for this quartet. His system used just four controls and one microphone per musician, designed to capture the group’s spontaneous creativity as directly as possible. The result is extraordinary: cohesion, interplay, and responsiveness emerge with striking clarity, recreating the immediacy and emotional impact of the live event even more convincingly than on Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy.

The music once again raises – and transcends – the unproductive question of genre. The quartet’s creative processes diverge from those of traditional jazz musicians, drawing instead on minimalism, electronic music, and structures rooted in rock and post-rock. Yet their improvisational, conversational, and cyclical approach is deeply indebted to lessons from the mid-1960s, above all Miles Davis’s groups, which became a crucial component of the African American cultural legacy. We like to think that those fertile spores have spread widely and borne fruit.

Simply put, this is an album not to be missed – one we wholeheartedly recommend.

—Sandro Cerini

DISTRIBUTED BY

intlanthem.com / Warner

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