Tuesday Q&A: Jeff Parker

The phrase real recognize real ranks among hip-hop's holiest dictums, employed with great import by the likes of Nas, Lupe Fiasco, and Project Pat, among numerous others. And in this thing of ours–if you know, you know–few artists are realer than Madlib. So it comes as no surprise that Jeff Parker, a jazz luminary with an identifiably distinct hip-hop streak, would be among his biggest fans.

"I put him up there with 'Trane," he says of the vaunted producer, as if the burgundy Quasimoto crewneck sported in his promotional photos wasn't evidence enough of his devotion to Oxnard's finest. "He just really goes deep into historical recordings, iconic stuff that he's turning people onto. It's subversive that he's like, my crates are so deep, you don't even know what it is. You can't even figure out what I'm sampling in order to come after me."

While the Berklee-educated Parker became known and renowned as a guitarist, first as a member of Chicago-based post-rock acts like Tortoise and Isotope 217 and subsequently as a bandleader and composer, beat-making has been part of his creative practice for some time. "I started to make beats really as a way to keep myself busy and to figure out how the music that I loved was assembled," he says, recalling a MySpace-era awakening as sampling became increasingly more software-friendly. He'd pore over issues of Wax Poetics for interviews with producers to discover what breaks or records they borrowed from, thus inspiring his own computer-based experiments. "I just was kind of doing it just to have fun, but emcees would hit me up–or they would just take it. They used some third party software [to] jack your beat from MySpace and then rhyme over it."

When eventually applied to his work in the jazz space, as was the case for 2016's The New Breed and 2020's Suite for Max Brown, Parker's hip-hop informed approach earned him newfound acclaim beyond his existing regard among critics and discerning listeners. Deploying loops complemented his longstanding improvisational aims, resulting in head-nod grooves that, speaking from my own experience at a recent Brooklyn concert by Parker's ETA IVtet, can induce a certain meditative quality.

Though subtler than on those aforementioned albums, hip-hop remains present on his latest offering The Way Out Of Easy (International Anthem), featuring his current ensemble with Jay Bellerose (drums, percussion), Anna Butterss (double bass), and Josh Johnson (alto saxophone, electronics). On the record, Parker augments his electric guitar playing with electronics and samples, and the rest of the band bring their respective perspectives and strengths to these genre-agnostic compositions.

"The goal is to never to be a revisionist," he says. "Like, okay, we're going to make something that sounds authentic. What the fuck is that? We're just interested in artistic freedom."

CABBAGES: The dyad of The New Breed and Suite For Max Brown really put it all together for me, but you have some two decades worth of catalog prior to those records. What was it like to get a positive response from people by doing some things noticeably differently from how you'd operated before? 

Jeff Parker: It was cool, man. I fell naturally into making that music, just from being a hip hop fan pretty much from the very beginning. I remember I was in seventh grade when "Rapper's Delight" came out, and I was always attracted to the music. But once the stuff started to get jazzy and it was The Pharcyde and Tribe and the Diggin' In The Crates dudes, that's when I really got interested. I loved the music but had no idea technically about how it was put together. 

By trade, I'm a jazz musician, and I have that side of what I do. My thing with the New Breed records was I was trying to assemble my interest in production and sampling with improvising and composing. I mean, there've been plenty of musicians who've been trying to do that for decades, way before I even put my records out. But I knew that I had my own little take on doing that. It wasn't until I relocated to Los Angeles–I'm sitting here in my studio space–that I had anything like that. I had a space to work on that music. Luckily I reconnected with Paul Bryan; I went to college with him. He had a home studio and, technically, tools to help me assemble these ideas.

The New Breed became a tribute to my father. He got sick and passed away while I was making the record. I was really kind of humbled and surprised that so many people really liked that record. So then I made Suite For Max Brown. It's certainly in the same ballpark, a little bit more loopy and droney, but certainly the same thing. 

How did those two projects inform what you're doing now with your current quartet on The Way Out Of Easy?

Well, it's more like that music and that process just started to work its way into the way that quartet. I should preface it by saying we played at this bar on the east side of L.A. called ETA (Enfield Tennis Academy) most Monday nights for a few years. Josh Johnson, who plays saxophone in that group, is also a touring member of the New Breed project. He played all kinds of keyboards and he also plays saxophone, so he was deeply involved in the New Breed project and Jay Bellerose, who plays the drums, also records on both records. The ETA group, it's pretty much all improvisation. We have a few compositional things that we'll reference, but for the most part, the band improvises. We're kind of exploring these static spaces, as opposed to improvising in a way of that's expected of free jazz or free improvisation.

A lot of that is because of Jay's experience as a session musician in L.A. He's very in demand in the studios. They play really flat most of the time; they don't play like jazz drummers. The music that I was writing for the New Breed project, Josh Johnson playing a participant in that, is kind of exploring these flat kind of static spaces and dealing with loops. And Anna Butters, they're just such an amazing musician. It is just really natural, man.

What I think about, compositionally and conceptually, comes directly from my experience with making beats. You get into this space where you're just listening to the same thing over and over again for a week. Things move slow and, if you listen to it, it can put you in a zone. Your mind can wander and you can maybe think about things and move inward somehow. That's the goal.

You played with Jay Bellerose and Josh Johnson in the New Breed, but not Anna Butterss. What do they bring to the ETA IVtet that changes things?

Josh and Anna are both younger than me. They're in their early thirties, I'm in my late fifties. But they came up listening to my music and kind of gravitated towards collaborating with me. They knew all my records; they studied the stuff when they were in college. I never even knew that people were listening to my music in a serious kind of way until I started to meet people from their generation. They get where I'm coming from.

I imagine you all had a lot of time to sort all that out during these regular Monday sessions at ETA, right?

We started out just playing standards and bebop tunes. Jay's not really a jazz drummer, even though he loves jazz music and has that sensibility. He hadn't had a lot of active participation in playing straight-ahead jazz. A lot of the music that we played on Mondays, in order for us to find common ground, tended to get a bit groovier in terms of repertoire. Eventually, the music started to open up and get away from us improvising in a conventional way on even traditional material. And that's when I started to bring a synthesizer with me to the gig. I started to bring my pedal board; I have a sampling pedals and looping pedals. I started to incorporate different elements into what we were using, different sounds to improvise on this music with. That's when things really started to get interesting. Josh was adding electronics to his saxophone sound. We were improvising more than playing written music, and eventually we committed to the group focusing more on improvising.

The first ETA IVtet record [Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy] came out on Eremite Records, and that got a lot of attention. After that, our shows on Monday started to get really, really popular. It was packed and there was a line down the block because the place was small. I mean, you could probably only fit, I don't know, a hundred people tops, and that's really pushing it.

When you brought these other tools to the Monday shows to augment the music, were you actively trying to challenge what the group could do or become? Or was it more on a whim like, I feel like this might add another dimension?

It's kind of more the latter. Anna would always just show up with bass and an amp, and that was it. There was never any of what Jay calls funny business with them. I remember when I introduced the arrangement of "Freakadelic" to the group, I told Jay, man, just play the Neil Young 'caveman' beat–one and two, three and four, like on "Old Man." The idea was to have a cryptic rhythmic framework for us to build on, and pretty much try and keep it there until we got really bored, adding to it in terms of tonal color.

With any musical relationship that I have pursued, be it with Tortoise and Isotope, everybody who I've collaborated with, the goal is for everyone to be able to express themselves and the stuff that they're interested in completely, and to make something new that that's never genre-specific.

Sonnyjim & Graymatter, Exotic Peng Collection

(buy it / stream it)

A dependable if licentious collaborator, Birmingham UK rapper Sonnyjim spent the better part of the last decade in bespoke duos and groups with everyone from Camoflauge Monk and Giallo Point to Lee Scott and Vic Spencer. His international appeal persists on Exotic Peng Collection, a bakers dozen's worth of tunes produced by Mutant Academy's own Graymatter. Eschewing features entirely, despite a history of pulling acts as big as MF DOOM and Jay Electronica into his world, the Pataka Boys emcee puts himself first for a change on "EuroMillions" and the shimmeringly chill "Solid Gold Bangle." He rhymes like a stoned immaculate, his even-tempered tone on "Cor Blimey" and "Lebowski" a thinly silken veil for brisk lyrics spit on abstract tip. That Coen Brothers vibe on the latter extends elsewhere on the album, with "One Cool Dude" specifically harnessing The Dude's dudeness with a touch of the eccentric in his otherwise impeccable swag. On penultimate cut "Thank The Lord," D.Styles lends a few agile scratches to a swirling and dream-inducing Graymatter beat.

Boldy James & RichGains, Murder During Drug Traffic

(buy it / stream it)

Griselda's Detroit connect Boldy James ended 2024 with a pair of dope releases, The Bricktionary with Harry Fraud and Hidden In Plain Sight with whothehelliscarlo. Now, for the third month in a row, he's somehow got another new project, this time reuniting with his Indiana Jones cohort RichGains. Much like his preceding work with Freddie Gibbs, the producer brings something different and distinct out of the coke rap correspondent with beats that bring him closer to the commercial side of hip-hop than, say, the drumless dissertations of Nicholas Craven. "Achilles" finds Boldy lost in the sauce, veering between vices as he continues to reckon with and recover from a near-crippling car accident. He hits the road with the work for the self-medicated escapade "Custo" and keeps the menacing mafioso rap tradition alive on "Telefono." Guests start to crowd up the joint on the back half, but when he goes bar for bar with fellow Detroiter Street Lord Juan on "Freightliner" you can't help but marvel at the interplay on display.

Three new tracks to snack on...

al.divino, "OSAMA TEZUKA"

Mondo Slade, "W.A.M. (Walk Around Money) (feat. David Jame$)"

Genieure, "96 nauti windbreaker shit (feat. Rome Streetz)"