(or, “The Dialectics of Improvisational Jazz”)
by Maggie A. Clark
I listen to a lot of jazz at this time of year.
Between my graduate studies and biweekly Leninist reading group, I spend many an afternoon with my nose buried in a PDF. But, you see, my mind wanders, and I can’t stand to be left alone with my thoughts for longer than about 50 seconds at a time. Naturally, this is a situation that calls for some tunes, but lyrical music often distracts me from the text I’m supposed to be reading or writing! What’s a girl to do?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. I already gave the answer in my lede: throw on some fuckin’ jazz, baby !!
Released late last year, The Way Out of Easy was recorded on January 2, 2023, at the now-defunct Los Angeles bar ETA — hence the name of the IVtet (which, based on the way it’s represented textually, I assume is meant to be pronounced “four-tet”?). The album contains four extemporaneous jam sessions, as hypnotic as they are meandering. And I do mean “meandering” — the shortest clocks in at 16:45. Because I’m a sucker for this exact sort of self-indulgent riffing, I was hooked instantly.
The opener “Freakadelic” reminded me, quizzically, of a now-deleted post by Twitter user @weedguy420boner about former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who campaigned to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in 2016.
To wit: “Martin omalley [sic] you got a children’s book ass name. You sound like the mailman in a town where everyone’s a bear.” To me, the first few minutes of “Freakadelic” sound as though they’re ripped from the score of the film adaptation of that book. Please note that I cannot possibly begin to justify this claim. It is derived from a thought that sprang to mind haphazardly and without logical basis; it is pure non-sequitur. You will either have to take it or leave it.
“Late Autumn” takes its sweet time to get going but, once all four musicians enter the picture, the pieces slot into place and what follows is an arresting, transcendent bit of improv. At around the 13-minute mark, an audience member can be heard shouting “C’mon!”. Whether this was meant with encouragement or disdain, I cannot say, but I am staring daggers at this person in my mind palace. (“Hey! You brought me out of the most wonderful trance just now. Shut up!”)
To understand why this album — and improvisational jazz more broadly — works, it’s useful to divide the players into their respective sections: rhythm and melodic. Beginning with the former, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Jay Bellerose provide a stabilizing presence, anchoring each composition with a steady, comforting pattern you could set your watch to. Meanwhile, what saxophonist Josh Johnson and guitarist Jeff Parker bring to the table is variation and intrigue (and even, in some of the spacier, drone-adjacent moments, unease). Each section is reliant on — and cannot be understood without — the other. They exist, in other words, in a dialectical relationship.
Just as class struggle is the motor of history, the rhythm/melody contradiction is what propels music forward. In no genre is this made more apparent than in jazz — and especially so in records like this one, where every player is so dialled in. Thus, when a rock star like Randy Bachman asserts that his former bandmate Garry Peterson “can be replaced by a drum machine” or Burton Cummings calls him “just the drummer,” they badly miss the point. In a selfish attempt to exalt themselves as The Only True Artists, they forget that a band succeeds or fails as a collective. A whole cannot exist without the sum of its constituent parts.
And that goes for recording and distribution too! As talented as the IVtet are, I couldn’t have heard them in the first place if not for the efforts of engineer Bryce Gonzales, masterer Dave Cooley, the web administrators who keep Bandcamp up and running, and countless unknown others who gathered, processed, and assembled the metal, plastic, and wooden components of their instruments. The masses are as much the makers of music as they are of history.
So while I would love to end on some sweeping conclusion about how dad rock is a tool of the bourgeoisie — while jazz expresses the true will of the proletariat! — I would not dare to be so bold and self-congratulatory (and, moreover, I have not conducted the requisite social investigation to confirm such a hypothesis). Instead, I will simply say this: I highly recommend The Way Out of Easy. This shit slaps. Thank your bus driver.