{"id":12889,"date":"2025-05-06T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/?p=12889"},"modified":"2026-05-07T14:24:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T19:24:33","slug":"album-review-jeff-parker-eta-ivtet-the-way-out-of-easy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2025\/05\/06\/album-review-jeff-parker-eta-ivtet-the-way-out-of-easy\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review :: Jeff Parker ETA IVtet ::THE WAY OUT OF EASY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

 (or, \u201cThe Dialectics of Improvisational Jazz\u201d)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Maggie A. Clark<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I listen to a lot of jazz at this time of year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019m supposed to be reading or writing! What\u2019s a girl to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a rhetorical question, of course. I already gave the answer in my lede: throw on some fuckin\u2019 jazz, baby !!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Released late last year, The Way Out of Easy<\/em> was recorded on January 2, 2023, at the now-defunct Los Angeles bar ETA \u2014 hence the name of the IVtet (which, based on the way it\u2019s represented textually, I assume is meant to be pronounced \u201cfour-tet\u201d?). The album contains four extemporaneous jam sessions, as hypnotic as they are meandering. And I do mean \u201cmeandering\u201d \u2014 the shortest clocks in at 16:45. Because I\u2019m a sucker for this exact sort of self-indulgent riffing, I was hooked instantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opener \u201cFreakadelic\u201d reminded me, quizzically, of a now-deleted post by Twitter user @weedguy420boner about former Maryland governor Martin O\u2019Malley, who campaigned to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in 2016. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To wit: \u201cMartin omalley [sic] you got a children\u2019s book ass name. You sound like the mailman in a town where everyone\u2019s a bear.\u201d To me, the first few minutes of \u201cFreakadelic\u201d sound as though they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLate Autumn\u201d 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 \u201cC\u2019mon!\u201d. Whether this was meant with encouragement or disdain, I cannot say, but I am staring daggers at this person in my mind palace. (\u201cHey! You brought me out of the most wonderful<\/em> trance just now. Shut up!\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand why this album \u2014 and improvisational jazz more broadly \u2014 works, it\u2019s 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 \u2014 and cannot be understood without \u2014 the other. They exist, in other words, in a dialectical relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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 \u201ccan be replaced by a drum machine\u201d or Burton Cummings calls him \u201cjust the drummer,\u201d 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<\/em>. A whole cannot exist without the sum of its constituent parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that goes for recording and distribution too! As talented as the IVtet are, I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So while I would love to end on some sweeping conclusion about how dad rock is a tool of the bourgeoisie \u2014 while jazz expresses the true will of the proletariat! \u2014 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<\/em>. This shit slaps. Thank your bus driver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 (or, \u201cThe Dialectics of Improvisational Jazz\u201d) 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\u2019t stand to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1420,1738,1737,1736],"class_list":["post-12889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-album-review","tag-chicago-born","tag-jeff-parker-eta-ivtet","tag-the-way-out-of-easy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12891,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12889\/revisions\/12891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}