By Stuart Broomer
The Way Out of Easyis the second two-LP set to appear by Jeff
Parker’s ETA quartet, and like its predecessor,
Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy
(Eremite, 2022), it consists of live recordings from the quartet of
Parker on guitars, electronics and sampler, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone
and electronics, Anna Butterss on bass and Jay Bellerose on drums. The band
maintained that Monday night spot from 2016 until 2023, when the club
closed
There are immediate similarities. Each is a two-LP set. While the 2022
Eremite release consisted of substantial chunks from different performances
recorded between 2019 and 2021, The Way Out of Easy represents four
shaped pieces from a single night, January 2, 2023. The band was still
named for the club it played in and recorded, the name of a principal
setting in David Foster Wallace’s vast novel Infinite Jest.
As Eremite producer Michael Ehlers pointed out in a press sheet for the
first release, it is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre
meaning of the term.” As with the earlier set, the band here largely
improvises freely, so freely that the works here will include much that
free improvisation leaves out: modes, melodies, key centres and regular
(though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to
include the conventionally excluded.
In that spirit, The Way Out of Easy’s first side is devoted to an
extended treatment of Parker’s 2013 composition “Freakdelic”, the sole
composed element on the band’s two releases. The loose spirit of it already
demonstrates the band’s special ease, its essentially conversational spirit,
the loose way that Butterss and Bellerose maintain structures and the way
the 23-minute jam gently wanders into strangely burbling, electronic
territory in Parker and Johnson’s extended improvisations.
There’s some contrast between The Way Out of Easy and the earlier
set, if only in the fact that these are complete performances rather than
excerpts, but the band’s calm liberation is such that It isn’t a major
shift. If The Way Out of Easy seems more refined, more assured,
more interactive, those are all the things that arise and expand among
convivial musicians who are collectively free to interact musically on a
regular basis for years, who also choose to create elemental structures and
patterns, sometimes retaining them, at other times gently abandoning them.
The group is free to compound polyrhythms and include the repeating,
unaccompanied, diatonic melody played by Josh Johnson at the outset of the
closing “Chrome Dome”, gradually joined by Parker with a recurring tonal
center before Butterss and Bellerose join in. Eventually Parker will assume
responsibility for a slightly different melody and Johnson will improvise a
counter melody. It’s the kind of thing that comes inevitably from a
long-shared musical association, often creating a dream-like ambience
suspended between an elemental tunefulness and gentle abstraction.
As with the earlier Eremite release, this record triggers a collection of
positive associations. There’s something about the music’s distinctive
playfulness, a slightly off-kilter, weird conviviality that might suggest
The Scope, the electronic music bar in Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49
, as well as Wallace’s ETA.