Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem, 2024)

By Stuart Broomer

The Way Out of Easyis the second two-LP set to appear by Jeff Parker’s ETA quartet, and like its predecessor, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Eremite, 2022), it consists of live recordings from the quartet of

Parker on guitars, electronics and sampler, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone and electronics, Anna Butterss on bass and Jay Bellerose on drums. The band maintained that Monday night spot from 2016 until 2023, when the club closed

There are immediate similarities. Each is a two-LP set. While the 2022 Eremite release consisted of substantial chunks from different performances recorded between 2019 and 2021, The Way Out of Easy represents four shaped pieces from a single night, January 2, 2023. The band was still named for the club it played in and recorded, the name of a principal setting in David Foster Wallace’s vast novel Infinite Jest.

As Eremite producer Michael Ehlers pointed out in a press sheet for the first release, it is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” As with the earlier set, the band here largely improvises freely, so freely that the works here will include much that free improvisation leaves out: modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded.

In that spirit, The Way Out of Easy’s first side is devoted to an extended treatment of Parker’s 2013 composition “Freakdelic”, the sole composed element on the band’s two releases. The loose spirit of it already demonstrates the band’s special ease, its essentially conversational spirit, the loose way that Butterss and Bellerose maintain structures and the way the 23-minute jam gently wanders into strangely burbling, electronic territory in Parker and Johnson’s extended improvisations.

There’s some contrast between The Way Out of Easy and the earlier set, if only in the fact that these are complete performances rather than excerpts, but the band’s calm liberation is such that It isn’t a major shift. If The Way Out of Easy seems more refined, more assured, more interactive, those are all the things that arise and expand among convivial musicians who are collectively free to interact musically on a regular basis for years, who also choose to create elemental structures and patterns, sometimes retaining them, at other times gently abandoning them. The group is free to compound polyrhythms and include the repeating, unaccompanied, diatonic melody played by Josh Johnson at the outset of the closing “Chrome Dome”, gradually joined by Parker with a recurring tonal center before Butterss and Bellerose join in. Eventually Parker will assume responsibility for a slightly different melody and Johnson will improvise a counter melody. It’s the kind of thing that comes inevitably from a long-shared musical association, often creating a dream-like ambience suspended between an elemental tunefulness and gentle abstraction.

As with the earlier Eremite release, this record triggers a collection of positive associations. There’s something about the music’s distinctive playfulness, a slightly off-kilter, weird conviviality that might suggest The Scope, the electronic music bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , as well as Wallace’s ETA.