The jazz you are about to hear truly occurred someplace.
So starts Parker’s wonderful brand-new live double-album, “Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy,” its title describing the Los Angeles mixed drink bar in Highland Park where it was taped on specific Monday nights in 2019 and 2021. When it comes to the bar’s name, it is a nod to the setting of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” however do not get too sidetracked by that. The most crucial word in the album title is “Monday.” In addition to describing the crowd’s mindful cool, it likewise indicates this music’s sense of composure, renewal, insight and getting-back-to-workness. And although these fluid, versatile, groove-minded improvisations nearly never ever feel labored, Parker is
at work here. As a long time member of the Chicago post-rock band Tortoise, the 55-year-old guitar player has actually long understood how to produce enduring tunes as if coming across them, publishing a tune’s specifying functions as the outcome of concentration without pressure. With this band– drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, completely called the ETA IVtet– Parker’s playing feels as clarifying as ever, drawing brilliant, tidy lines over attentively propulsive rhythms. His “work” is not about sweat, battle or seriousness even calm-keeping, analytical and determined cumulative development. Which operating design sounds more brave to you nowadays?
There is a lot of play in this music, too, however, and it comes somersaulting to the fore whenever Parker or Johnson start their copycat video games, sending out tune lines backward and forward till the repeating begins to blot out the clock. In an interview at San Francisco’s Amoeba Records this year, Parker described his love for Components, a jazz blend group from the ’80s who “enter into this type of recurring area … that I type of can’t get enough of.” Not having the ability to get enough of something that never ever goes out? Seems like a respectable offer. Obviously, it is offered to us in Parker’s work, too. Repeating does not need to be a redundancy that uses us down. It can be endlessness that enlivens us.
Which takes us back to Highland Park, where this music initially unfolded in an exact parcel of area throughout a couple of limited examples of time. What is amusing is how neither area nor time are genuinely repaired. This bar may have a street address, however it is still stuck on a world being constantly flung around a broadening universe. When it comes to those Monday nights, they ended up being constantly replayable with the production of these recordings, real estate repeatings inside repeatings. Simply put, the incomprehensibility of space-time can feel little and Monday night can last permanently. Plink-plink-plink. Allure you simply heard truly occurred someplace, and it is occurring still.(*)
