There is of course an extensive history of improvisational live jazz being mined for samples for beats. There’s perhaps a less of an established tradition of live improvisation being steered by the ethos of hip hop-orientated groove construction.
Based on the hypnotic, slow-burning workouts of Happy Today, Los Angeles-based guitarist Jeff Parker is willing and able to narrow (if not totally eradicate) the gap between jazz’s historic position as a ‘serious’ improvisational art and its potential for locking in on a robust head-nodding groove. Initially, the only thing that seems to have changed since Parker’s previous two live albums with the ETA IVtet – 2022’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy, both superb – is the duration and…
Tag Archive: Jeff Parker
The New Breed is Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker‘s first solo album since 2004’s The Relatives. It’s also his first solo work since relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles, a city with a highly productive music scene blending jazz, hip-hop, soul, and electronic music, as represented by labels such as Brainfeeder and Alpha Pup and weekly club events such as Low End Theory. Parker has experimented with samples, loops, and hip-hop production for a while, but he hadn’t really explored these techniques in his own music before.
On The New Breed, Parker builds improvisations around wobbly loops sourced from scratchy old vinyl records, nodding to underground hip-hop producers such as J Dilla but never trying to replicate their style. The album is still clearly…