Jeff Parker and the New Breed will appear at the Wexner Center Thursday, March 28th; details below.
I still remember buying Tortoise’s landmark album TNT right before I turned 18 and about a month before my first trip to Chicago. I was already besotted with a scene I only knew from records and press, fueled in part by Dusty Groove Records. On that first pilgrimage, I bought a blistering free jazz record by Ernest Dawkins’ New Horizons Band at Jazz Record Mart, and within that year, Zach Bodish at Singing Dog (RIP) sold me my first Chicago Underground Duo record. The key component – he was a guest on the duo, a full member of the later Chicago Underground Trio and Chicago Underground Quartet records – of these three eye-opening, and I still think essential, documents – was guitarist Jeff Parker.
Jeff Parker; photo provided by Wexner Center for the Arts
That trip lit the fuse for a fandom that still burns brightly. I’ve been heartened in general by the Wexner Center’s return to jazz in the last couple of years, especially work by the boundary-pushing International Anthem label. Those interests intersect when Jeff Parker and the New Breed comes to the Wex on March 28, 2024 (accessible tickets starting at $6 are available at https://wexarts.org/performing-arts/jeff-parker-and-new-breed) and I was overjoyed to get to talk to Parker over Zoom in advance of his and the band’s appearance.
After the interview, I put together a sampler playlist that’s limited to what’s available on Spotify, of course. For instance, there isn’t anything from the awesome Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy record that features Anna Butterss (best known for their work in Jason Isbell’s band) which we talk quite a bit about, or the stunning Eastside Romp with longstanding rhythm section Eric Revis and Nasheet Waits (Tarbaby), both highly recommended. Below has been edited for clarity and length.
Richard Sanford: Thank you for talking to me. By all accounts, it seems like you had a killer 2022 and 2023. Forfolks, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, Eastside Romp. Was all of this work you did in a short period of time or had much of it been in the can for a while?
Jeff Parker: Eastside Romp we actually recorded back in 2016 but circumstances delayed its release. Forfolks, when things started to open back up, I had a solo guitar tour booked with Steve Gunn. It was booked a year in advance because everything was still pretty unstable, and we weren’t quite sure when things would really open back up. My label proposed the idea of me doing a solo guitar recording just so I could have merch to sell on tour.
I didn’t have any plans to make another solo guitar record – I made one a few years before called Slight Freedom that did really well critically but sold out fast [of its] small pressing.
Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy [came about because] Michael Ehlers who runs Eremite, used to come to LA [when] we were playing almost every Monday night. He really liked the band and [said] I want to put out a record of you guys. [The club’s sound engineer] was making beautiful recordings of [the residency] every week so I had an archive. It was really easy; people kind of did it for me and it worked out well.
RS: With Four Folks, you mention you had that for merch – were the pieces things you’d been sitting on for a while or were they composed to order?
JP: One thing – the version of “My Ideal” - I had a solo guitar arrangement I worked up some years back but most of [the record] was just improved. I had a friend come over, he set up some mics in my garage studio, and I just kind of played guitar for a few hours for a couple of days straight. I had come up with a way [of using] my pedals where I can create ambiance and then play on top of it. I create these sound worlds to play inside of; all improvised.
There are a couple of tunes where I’m playing along with [library] field recordings. [On Slight Freedom], the Frank Ocean tune, “Super Rich Kids,” I have a field recording of city noises of New York in the 1970s.
RS: What draws you to covers? That Frank Ocean piece, the beautiful version of “Lush Life” [on the same record], or your cover of Bowie’s “Soul Love” [from Ziggy Stardust]?
JP: Melody. Like on “Super Rich Kids,” I thought was cool – I really like that album – the chords, the melody, the harmony. I was playing that when Channel Orange had just come out, but it took me another two or three years to record it and another two years for the record to come out, so he already had a new album. You know, the song wasn’t even current anymore.
It’s the same with “Lush Life,” such a beautiful song the genius Billy Strayhorn wrote when he was – I think – 17 years old. I’m not sure what attracts me to want to cover a song.
RS: Tell me about that Live at the Enfield Tennis Academy – how did the band and the residency come together?
JP: When I first moved to LA, I played a gig at this club in West Hollywood called the Soho House. This guy came in, he was a fan of Tortoise and heard me play. He said, “I’ve got this oyster bar in Highland Park, why don’t you and your partner come and hang out?” Big music fan. They started to have music and I played there with this drummer Matt Mayhall. After the gig – I had just moved to LA and didn’t know very many people; I wasn’t being called to do much – I got kind of antsy and asked them “Can I just play here on Monday nights?” To keep my chops together and my brain working.
I knew Jay Bellerose because we went to college together at Berklee and I knew he liked jazz a lot but never really got a chance to play it. He was an LA session guy doing a lot of work with T-Bone Burnett, like singer-songwriter stuff, but he’s a really colorful, amazing drummer.
I also asked Anna Butterss, a great bass player I knew from around Chicago, and I knew they weren’t super busy around LA yet. Their partner is Josh Johnson, so I started asking Josh to come around and play too. We held down that residency for three years - [started] just playing standards and eventually settled into long-form improvisations, incorporating all of our interests like looping and drones and things that move really slowly.
RS: You and Anna Butterss are also on that beautiful Daniel Villareal record, Lados B. How did that come together?
JP: Scotty McNiese [from International Anthem] wanted to make a record with Daniel [who] brought up the idea of Anna and I playing with him. We’ve done two records – the first one is called Panama 77, Anna and I are on some of that. We recorded both in the height of COVID – in 2020 – and we did them outdoors in somebody’s backyard in Highland Park. We’re all, like, 10 feet apart; it was very strange.
The whole thing is improvised. Daniel kind of assembled compositions in post-production. I think he was inspired by the way Makaya McCraven makes music: where it starts with improvisations, he takes some material at home to loop things, chop them up, and make them into something more cohesive.
RS: Makaya McCraven is someone you’ve played with quite a bit – is working with players of your generation and the next generation a specific goal of yours?
JP: It’s more when I choose people to collaborate with on my own projects I’m usually [looking for] a musician who has a sound world they’re concerned with more than just being proficient on an instrument; who has more of a production aesthetic they’re dealing with, and the instrument just happens to land within that.
That’s [also] how I view myself. I try to create an identity as somebody who’s not just a guitarist. I’ve been concerned with larger musical landscapes in, I don’t know, the last 10 years. [Before] I was concerned with that, but I was never really acting on it. The albums I made with Chad Taylor and Chris Lopes were more – for lack of a better word – traditional jazz trio kind of records. With The New Breed and even Four Folks or Slight Freedom I was consciously trying to create in a way the audience could see I was thinking about these things.
RS: You say about 10 years ago – was moving to LA an important part of that or did the two things just coincide?
JP: LA had a big, big influence on that; not so much the community but the circumstances. I came out here and didn’t really know anybody, so I was forced to really work on my own stuff. It was also the first time I had my own recording studio at my house. And weirdly coincidentally, Meshell Ndegeocello called me up to open for her for a three night run she was doing in Chicago.
RS: I wanted to talk to you about that collaborative relationship. I was in New York in January 2023; I went to the Blue Note to see Meshell Ndegeocello and you were sitting in. It was a phenomenal show, then a few months later you were all over The Omnichord Real Book. Could you talk about that a little?
JP: I met Meshell when I was touring with the Joshua Redman band. I worked with them for a year in 2005 and we did a co-headlining tour with Meshell, maybe a week’s worth, on the East Coast. We stayed in touch; I’d run into her intermittently throughout the years.
Right before I left Chicago, I was playing in a repertory orchestra in residence at Columbia College, called the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. The director of the band changed from Jon Faddis to the drummer Dana Hall, and Dana tried to open [the rep] up a little more. We did the music of Charles Mingus and the two bass players [in the band] were Christian McBride and Meshell. I reconnected with her.
Then [after I moved], she scoring the show Queen Sugar so she was out here for a few weeks or months every year. She would come by ETA to hear the band. She played gigs around town, and she’d ask me to sit in. If her guitarist Chris Bruce couldn’t make sessions for the TV show she’d ask me to record with her.
I’m really proud to call her a friend now, and especially a collaborator. She’s brilliant, you know? She’s always got five different projects going on: films she’s scoring, TV shows. She’s such a visionary.
RS: Tell me a little bit about the New Breed. After The New Breed record and then Suite for Max Brown, and you’re billed here as Jeff Parker and The New Breed. Is that an umbrella for band-based projects or is there a certain thematic thing that ties it together?
JP: I’d say the latter. It started with the album called The New Breed, which was in tribute to my father; that’s him on the cover. That [album] started my process of creating these sample based demos, little songs and vignettes that I would come up with and then try and blend them with improvising and that aesthetic: trying to take disparate approaches in terms of expression and composing, putting them together and trying to make sense of it.
RS: Tell me a little bit about the quartet you’re bringing to the Wexner Center, if you wouldn’t mind.
JP: I’ve known [saxophonist and keyboardist] Josh Johnson since he was in high school – he's from Naperville, IL. He came to this gig I was doing with Matana Roberts, and we stayed in touch. He went to Indiana University then the Thelonious Monk Institute – now the Herbie Hancock Institute – then he moved out here; I moved to LA a year later. I’ve always thought he was brilliant; he’s releasing a solo saxophone record April 6 that’s going to blow people’s minds. He’s really on some next level stuff with the way he’s blending electronics with saxophone, and he really knows synthesizers.
Paul Bryan is another person I went to Berklee with in the late ‘80s. He’s a record producer and a great engineer; we’ve done some production work together – he co-produced both the New Breed albums. We reconnected when I moved back to LA, and he was kind of a session guy. He’s Aimee Mann’s main producer and musical director. He’s played with, like, Elvis Costello. But he’s a great jazz composer and bass player who never really got to express that side of his thing. He’s playing bass and bass synthesizer.
Paul and I co-produced the album The Weather Up There for [drummer] Jeremy Cunningham. Jeremy’s a great drummer. My normal drummer for the New Breed is Makaya McCraven; when Makaya couldn’t make this show, the natural choice was Jeremy who knows the material and comes from the same musical community vision as the rest of us. Josh, Paul, and I all [also] play in Jeremy’s band. And Jeremy’s from Cincinnati, he’s a fellow Ohioan.
RS: Thank you so much for your time today. I’m really looking forward to the show.
Richard's a native to Columbus and had his head turned around by campus record stores, used bookshops, bars, and too many older, cooler friends than he can name. He still thinks the next thing he sees just might be the best thing he's ever seen.