Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Six)

 

I guess many among us can think of occasions when we have heard or read about a live performance and then let our imagination float free in a way that allows us to picture ourselves in that particular venue on a specific night. Naturally we will let the romantic in us take over, even if deep down inside our submerged realistic self will tell us we’ve got it all wrong. For me, The Way Out of Easy, that magnificent live recording of the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, immaculately packaged by International Anthem, is the perfect example. In my wildest fancy I was there, standing at the front, nodding along ecstatically, grinning madly.

Somehow, I got my wires crossed, though. I knew ETA, the name of the venue in Highland Park, Los Angeles, was an abbreviation for Enfield Tennis Academy, and in my naivety I pictured an unloved bar or function room which was part of a seedy, run-down sporting facility. I had this great mental image of cool, creative types hanging out there in a gloriously improbable environment every Monday to see Jeff and co., sharing updates on projects and plans, dreams and schemes, as sporting types passed by outside clutching their racquets, oblivious to the racket inside.

It is only recently that I found out that the name Enfield Tennis Academy comes from the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest (which, I confess, I know nothing about), and that the ETA itself was a bespoke cocktail bar in a trendy part of L.A. Oh well. Anyway, it still sounds like it was a special place, one that was at the heart of the city’s jazz, electronic and improvised music scene for quite some time. And, ironically, if you search on YouTube, there is narrow screen footage of the quartet playing at ETA on 2 January 2023, the actual night of the live recording. Somehow, I have not been brave enough to watch it all, as I don’t want to mess with the images in my head. Does that make sense?

Certain records connect at just the right time, and International Anthem’s release of that live set by Jeff Parker with Josh Johnson, Anna Butterss and Jay Bellerose, did just that at the end of 2024. Everything about it seemed just right. The sound is fantastic, the performance is inspirational, and the presentation is phenomenal. The liner notes by recording engineer Bryce Gonzalez are wonderful and wise, and the cover shot of the quartet is so atmospheric. It is a record I have played repeatedly and find it easy to get lost inside of. I am sorry if it is a cliché (what was it Jack K. said about clichés being truisms and that all truisms are true?) but this is a supreme example of healing music.

Josh and Jay were with Jeff for his first International Anthem release, The New Breed, back in 2016, a record that is back in circulation as part of the label’s eleventh anniversary celebrations. The new special edition features notes by bassist and producer Paul Bryan plus excerpts from a conversation between Jeff Parker and label co-founder Scott McNiece, both of which are inspirational reads. As aesthetics are so important to me, I love the fact that Jeff wanted to get involved with the new Chicago label, International Anthem, because their early release of In The Moment by Makaya McCraven (which Jeff was part of) “sounded great and looked great”. And Jeff talks about how the photo of his father and friend worked so well for The New Breed cover with the “deterioration and textures” time had wrought. I like that.

Paul Bryan’s notes are special because of the way he captures how Jeff had specific musical references he wanted to explore, particularly the interface between jazz and hip-hop, which led to an “explosion of learning,” knowledge which in turn underpinned the creation of a great record, the first part of a remarkable quartet of recordings for International Anthem, also featuring Suite for Max Brown (I love the fact that Jeff’s mum’s maiden name was Maxine Brown, and that his dad had a clothing store called The New Breed, hopefully named after the Jimmy Holiday song), the solo masterpiece Forfolks and, yeah, The Way Out of Easy.

I was really taken by the way Jeff spoke about the origins of The New Breed in his conversation with Scott, and in particular his interest, early in the new millennium, in developments in hip-hop by Dilla, MF Doom and the whole Madlib, Madvillain, Quasimoto, Yesterday’s New Quintet et al sphere of activity, and how this raised questions about how he would be able to respond to these challenges, how he could connect to the new sounds in his own music.

Coincidentally or not, I have only just discovered a classic hip-hop set on Chicago’s Chocolate Industries by Diverse, whose 2003 One A.M. LP features production credits by Madlib and Prefuse 73. It is a great record, a lovely snapshot of a moment, with guest appearances by Vast Aire of Cannibal Ox, Lyrics Born of Latyrx and the Quannum collective, and Jean Grae. The closing track, ‘In Accordance’, is based around a recording featuring Jeff Parker, Rob Mazurek and Ted Sirota which is so good that I am still wondering why nobody told me about it back in the day. Maybe they did. I did at least recognise Diverse’s name from an early Prefuse 73 CD, so that’s something.

Jeff Parker also refers to the quest for knowledge fuelled by the magazine Wax Poetics, which I completely identify with, and still bless the day I first came across a copy during one of many lunchtime visits to the wonderful short-lived sprawling Fopp shop on the Tottenham Court Road in the early 2000s. One of the extensive features I remember being so inspiring was an overview of the life and work of Charles Stepney, and appropriately several years later International Anthem would release rare archival private recordings by the great man.

The chemistry between the members of the ETA IVtet seems exceptional and intuitive. I have been particularly attracted to the double bass work of Anna Butterss which underpins everything so powerfully, as well as how on the record sleeve Anna looks so enigmatic. This fascination with Anna’s playing led me to a quartet of other releases they have been involved with, and which International Anthem have released. The first of these I came across (I confess via a Spotify recommendation from my rogue algorithmic angel) was drummer Daniel Villarreal’s Lados B which he recorded with Jeff Parker and Anna B., and which for me proved to be the gateway to the wider IA catalogue of new music beyond their Jeff Parker releases.

Recorded al fresco in, I believe, a garden space in or adjacent to Scott McNiece’s home in L.A. this was not a Heron or Traffic back-to-nature thing, but a practical solution to the restrictions of lockdown or social distancing rules during the pandemic. Anna and Jeff also appear on several tracks on Panamá 77, Daniel’s earlier IA release, recorded at the same open-air sessions. The title, incidentally, is a reference to Daniel’s year and place of birth rather than a tribute to a chapter in Graham Greene’s Getting to Know the General, though maybe there’s some overlap. Who knows?

If the ETA IVtet recordings are all about flow, the ones with Daniel are often about the groove, at times suggesting a stripped-down Meters sound, which is very much my thing. ‘Traveling With’, the opening track to Lados B, is gloriously funky, and somehow manages to be strikingly spartan and immensely rich, and I never want it to end, which is tough on the other tracks on the record.

Jeff Parker also appears on one track on Anna’s 2024 solo International Anthem set, Mighty Vertebrate, but mostly the record is a close-knit combo of Anna with Josh Johnson, Gregory Uhlmann on guitar, and Ben Lumsdaine on drums and much more. Anna’s compositions are a perfect fit for the group. The record has a strong synth presence, adding to a pronounced jazz-funk or fusion feel, and a special serenity and admirable restraint is evident throughout the set, particularly on the beautiful ballads ‘Ella’ and ‘Lubbock’. To these cloth ears, this extraordinary record seems a fresh take on territory explored by Tortoise or Isotope 217° in the latter part of the 1990s, so appropriately the striking cover artwork is by Tortoise’s John Herndon. And this must be the right time to mention Tortoise’s recent return to action with the sublime track ‘Oganesson’ on (oh yes!) International Anthem, which is hopefully a teaser for more new music soon.

Anyway, Anna, Josh and Greg Uhlmann also play and have recorded as SML, with the wonderfully named Booker Stardrum aptly on drums and so on, and Jeremiah Chiu on synths and electronics. Jeremiah’s a name even I recognise from IA sleeve designs, like The Way Out and Forfolks, the latter of which features excellent sleeve notes by Matthew Lux, who had been in Isotope 217° with his old friend Jeff Parker. At the time of writing, IA recently announced Jeremiah’s new record with Maria Sofia Honer, Different Rooms, with cover artwork by Sam Prekop, which will please the addicts of connectivity among us.

The SML record, Small Medium Large, is at the moment my favourite of the IA releases I have heard and has as its basis live recordings from the ETA by Bryce Gonzalez which I believe were then cut up and manipulated and so on. In this group Anna plays electric bass, and the shorter compositions merge into one complete suite. There is often a gently funky feel, sometimes an ambient one, with playful albeit maybe imagined intimations of Fela, dub and Indian classical ideas percolating through the sound, as well as suggestions of something like To Rococo Rot, which may be prompted by recently unexpectedly finding a handsome Peel Sessions Bureau B CD, and which in turn led me back to the likes of Oval and Microstoria, both of whom have connections to Thrill Jockey, the spiritual antecedent of International Anthem.

Josh’s sax playing on the SML set is characteristically unostentatious and unselfish. I’m sure he can play as free as anyone, but that area of music, associated with wild honks, squawks, squeals, and squalls of sound, doesn’t seem his thing, which makes sense when he can play so exquisitely with serpentine subtlety, in such a sinuous seductive style.

He can be heard perfectly on a recent release on IA in a trio with Greg Uhlmann on guitar and Sam Wilkes on bass. Once again, the core of the record is tapes of live performances at ETA. On these unobtrusive gentle explorations, Josh is at his best, making me think of (but not at all really sounding) something like the 1962 Blue Note set Bossa Nova Soul Samba by Ike Quebec, with the great Kenny Burrell on guitar. The closing reinvention of The Beatles’ ‘Fool on the Hill’ (inevitably via Sergio) reinforces that imagined connection, suggesting the late 1960s when a set by someone like Bud Shank would have to feature a Beatles or Bacharach composition or two.

So, yeah, admittedly, I am (characteristically) very late to this particular party, but it has been great fun discovering IA-related things on catch-up. That’s one of the downsides of being a dabbling dilettante: one can miss so much. Plus, IA is impressively prolific, and interestingly the label seems pretty popular. There has even been a Gilles Peterson-compiled RSD special compilation, which looks like it is about to become generally available in all formats. Also there have been many thousands of views of a recent performance by Jeff and the ETA quartet for the Tiny Desk Concert series. The music, understandably, is mesmerising, but of special note is the excellent knitwear worn by Anna and Josh.

Admittedly, there are an awful lot of IA releases I have not heard, and I readily accept quite a few will be very much not for me, but when they get it right: wow! I like the way the output is varied: from the sunkissed melodic hugs of Resavoir to a current favourite, Open The Gates by Irreversible Entanglements, a collection of fierce, inventive fire music, which sometimes burns and sometimes smoulders. Music can be that way sometimes.

The set was recorded on 5 January 2021 in Philadelphia, in those dark times at the unnatural height of the pandemic, when there was so much lingering outrage at the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter protests were still very much in people’s minds, a time covered movingly in Louise Erdrich’s excellent The Sentence, and bizarrely the recording session took place a day before the far right’s Capitol riots. It is a remarkable record, made in unprecedented times, more so as I suspect a lot of it was improvised, partly out of choice and partly out of necessity.

I find the spoken word performance of the Entanglements’ Camae Ayewa quite incredibly powerful and challengingly uplifting. Being an ignorant so-and-so I hadn’t realised when I bought the CD that Camae’s better known to me as Moor Mother, someone whose performances I have sporadically found myself approving enormously of ever since hearing her on Brass with the inimitable billy woods, a force of nature himself, and a man persistently turning hip-hop upside down and inside out. The beautifully confrontational Moor Mother record from last year, The Great Bailout, on the Anti label, is not an easy listen but it is an important work of art which I would recommend strongly.

Open The Gates is, I readily admit, a record that I took a chance on, but from the opening rat-a-tat-tat percussion and Luke Stewart’s inspired bass line, with its no doubt unintentional allusion to ‘Thème de Yoyo’, it’s one of those occasions when you know instantly you have made the right choice. Incidentally, it comes with inspirational liner notes by Alex Smith, who certainly has a way with words: his “their punk rock ethos and crash and bang polyrhythmic supersonic sound synaesthesia” is a neat description of what’s on the record. And, okay, I confess I was initially attracted to it as it looked so cool.

For that’s one of the great things about International Anthem, they do pay attention to detail, and this Irreversible Entanglements record, like many other IA releases, has striking design and layout by Craig Hansen. The label is good at the things that matter to music obsessives. So, for example, they have an annual autumnal magazine, Tracing The Lines, compiled and edited by David Brown, with layout and design by Jeremiah Chiu. They are substantial things, these magazines, with a pleasingly old-school non-glossy feel. Aged punks among us will relish the fact they feel texturally like a 1980 edition of Zigzag.

I am wary of tempting fate, but one of the joys of IA is that they generally make CD editions available, which suits the more cost-conscious among us. Another recent albeit belated discovery on CD is Makaya McCraven’s In These Times. It is rather odd that this eluded me as at the start there is a clip of Harry Belafonte from the Studs Terkel archives, and Studs’ radio shows and writings have been regularly cited around here. Also, the name of the record is shared with a long-running Chicago socialist paper, which I am pretty sure Studs would have had connections to.

The record itself is ideal for those whose lives have been changed by discovering territory explored by Charles Stepney, David Axelrod, Arthur Verocai, and Alice Coltrane. You know, that spiritual feeling. And, for me, In These Times forms part of another quartet of International Anthem releases, the most recent part being a work by a contributor to Makaya’s boldly beautiful creation, Macie Stewart whose When the Distance is Blue is just perfect for me right now amid a growing interest in the interface between classical chamber works, modern composition, folk forms, jazz, and electronics. This is an exquisite suite, which is beautifully minimal, with treated piano, a small string section, and voices and field recordings drifting in and out of the mix.

Another piece of this picture is Tomin’s gorgeous A Willed and Conscious Balance, a special work of what we conveniently now call spiritual jazz. Tomin Perea-Chamblee (to give him his full name) has created something that feels connected to the sort of lost works Universal Sound would at one time salvage, like when in 2005 they released a batch featuring Children of the Fire by Hannibal Marvin Peterson & the Sunrise Orchestra (conducted, I note, by David Amram, an old compadre of Jack Kerouac), Maulawi’s Strata set, and Travis Biggs’ Challenge, a feeling reinforced by a cover of ‘Humility in the Light of the Creator’ by Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, which I was not familiar with.

A Willed and Conscious Balance is such a wonderful, moving record, with Tomin on flute and clarinets etc, Luke Stewart from Irreversible Entanglements taking on the Richard Davis-style bass role, and a blessed cello-led string section. Like Macie’s record, it’s a brief set which means it doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is also true of the truly gorgeous gratitude by saxophonist and composer Cassie Kinoshi with her seed ensemble, the final part in that quartet I mentioned.

IA has had strong UK jazz connections for quite some time, via the likes of Emma Jane Thackeray, Alabaster dePlume, and the Total Refreshment Centre, the evolution of which Emma Warren wrote so powerfully about in her excellent Make Some Space book. Emma’s story starts with a great quote from Christopher Small, who puts in an appearance ‘personally in person’ in Rob Symmons’ Subway Sect story (serialized over four-parts by Ugly Things magazine, and not to be missed) as a music lecturer at Ealing College and as someone who was a great inspiration to the teenage Rob, and who in fact directly inspired the “to learn unlearn” line in the Sect’s immortal ‘Don’t Split It’.

Cassie Kinoshi and IA’s Scott McNiece are among the cast of contributors to Emma’s story of the Total Refreshment Centre in Hackney. Aptly, Cassie was invited by Angel Bat Dawid to play as part of her group at a special concert at the Barbican in November 2022, headlined by Jeff Parker, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of an International Anthem CHICAGOxLONDON showcase at the TRC. In the spirit of openness, I must admit I was completely oblivious to all this at the time. As the song doesn’t quite say, life got in the way.

gratitude seems special, and it feels like another ambitious work, one recorded by Cassie with her seed ensemble, augmented by players from the London Contemporary Orchestra. It is a collective success, but I must mention seed’s guitarist Shirley Tetteh who, for me, at times steals the show. I would like to think that on hearing what she does here, Jeff Parker would have stood up and cheered.

As I mentioned, increasingly I seem to be drawn to works like this which inhabit the borderlands between jazz and classical with all sorts of added elements. Maybe it’s just me, but listening to this record feels like a sort of realisation or vindication of some of the things 4hero were reaching towards at the turn of the millennium with Two Pages and Creating Patterns, joining the dots between Charles Stepney and drum & bass, when electronic purists were essentially telling them to know their place.

Talking of which, gratitude also features turntablist NikNak who stole the show when I saw her as the support act at Om Unit’s performance of his Acid Dub Studies at the Jazz Café back in March. She rapidly won the crowd over, while wrestling with her record deck, and sent me scurrying off to find out more, fortuitously finding her Ireti set, a cassette-release on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label last year.

Very firmly at the Afrofuturist avant-garde end of things, the set features abstract diseased drifts and dusty storms, while occasionally the particles settle into structured compositions, vaguely related to drum & bass or dubstep productions, which are ridiculously special. Two tracks, in particular, stand out for me. One is ‘You Were Supposed To Be Good’ featuring Grifton Forbes Amos on trumpet and Cassie Kinoshi on sax, and the other is the slow-burn ballad ‘You’ve Never Seen a Miracle’ with Chisara Agor on vocals and Cassie again who excels on the freeform ending of what really should be an international anthem.