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Last time we heard from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, they were blowing our minds with The Way Out of Easy (2024), a pulsating amalgam of hard bop, free improv, psychedelic funk and melodic minimalism. The jazz at the heart of that album was a tool for exploration: it fired illuminating flares into new and old musical forms (gospel, folk, modernist composition), and traversed wide philosophical territories, corralling notions of togetherness, transcendence and resistance into a single musical language, complex yet easily identifiable. Happy Today makes only minor changes to that highly effective blueprint. While the sound is more expansive than ever, the mood remains intimate; in fact, the album isn’t just intimate, it takes intimacy as its primary theme.
A quartet in the most democratic and inclusive sense of the word (Parker’s role as producer allows him to give equal weight to every voice), drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss and saxophonist Josh Johnson began playing with Parker in 2016, when they held down a weekly residency in LA’s fabled Enfield Tennis Academy, a now-defunct jazz bar in the Highland Park neighbourhood. That Monday night residency would last for seven years, and saw these four musicians develop a rare kind of rapport, so it’s no surprise that intimacy has become almost a precondition of their practice. Happy Today (recorded live at the Lodge Room last August) sees them develop that togetherness over two long tracks. The first, Like Swimwear, begins with one of Parker’s characteristically spidery guitar lines. The bass and sax feel their way into the tune, and the drums follow. But such is the swirling, organing nature of this music that before you know it, the rhythm section is calling the shots. Things change place in the blink of an eye, but the overall sound remains.
The IVtet have always been groove-oriented, and that’s still the case. A real groove is often based on minimal ingredients, and Parker’s crew know just how much spice to throw into the stew. Johnson’s sax plays a motif based on just a few notes; it rises and falls like the waves on an ECG. The guitar, for a few minutes at least, is all about movement: it creeps into corners then jumps out, or skitters down hillsides, dislodging stones as it goes. All the while, the bass and drums provide that transcendent cosmic minimalism. And then, after ten minutes or so, Bellerose kicks down a gear. The groove instantly becomes more insistent, more mesmeric. Elements of atonality seep in (Parker plays a drawn-out drone), we get a long, deep, rhythmically diverse solo from Butterss, which coalesces into another groove with even more cosmic elements. This is music that is not just live, but truly alive.
The second side is given over to the title track. Again, we notice the band’s willingness to follow when one or other of them sparks a sudden shift after a long period of apparent stasis. In this case, the track begins in the realm of minimal composition: the guitar provides a drone, the sax mirrors it, the bass feels its way in, initially more as free-form decoration than with any rhythmic drive. The drums rise and cease and rise again like small provocations, and in response, the sax begins to feel its way into melodic expressiveness. After seven or eight minutes of this, you realise that, despite the apparent stillness of the piece, you are a long way from where you started musically speaking. The band has taken you on a journey without you even noticing. Then, when the rhythmic soup clears and the groove locks in again, you’re in the best possible place to appreciate it. It’s a lesson in dynamics you didn’t know you were being taught.
It might sound like a truism, but we need this kind of music more than ever in a time of diminishing attention spans and the easy temptations of doomscrolling. We need to go deep every so often, to a place constructed with care and attention and absolute creative freedom, by people who understand each other innately as human beings and artists. The ETA IVtet are those people, and with Happy Today, they have exquisitely documented the joy of contemplative, considered collaboration.
Happy Today (May 15th, 2026) International Anthem
Bandcamp: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/happy-today
Watch the album-length Concert Film
Directed, filmed and edited by Charlie Weinmann