Jeff Parker on Playing in the Round, the Era of Leaks, and Saving Stuff for Himself

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Today's installment: It feels like only yesterday that I had Tortoise's John Herndon and Doug McCombs on the newsletter for the post-rock legends' excellent 2025 album Touch, and today Tortoise's Jeff Parker joins us in honor of his great new record with his ETA IVtet band, Happy Today, a live recording that was captured in Los Angeles' Lodge Room last year. (There's also an accompanying concert film that's seeing release on May 29.) Jeff has become a beloved figure in the world of jazz over the last seven years or so, and I thought this was a great opportunity to talk to him about how he's arrived at this moment. He's an impossibly humble and easygoing guy, and I was happy to have him hop on a call recently in between rehearsal sessions with Flea (whose latest album Jeff also appears on). Check it out:

Talk to me about your takeaways from the performance that's captured on this new release.
It was a really nice evening. We played in my studio for a couple of days, which was a really good move for us before going into a more high-profile show. The band, we don't play that often anymore, just because of everyone's schedule. It's really hard to get everyone together sometimes—well, all the time, honestly. We play as much as we can, which turns out to be maybe three times a year, as opposed to when we used to play almost every week. The audience was really essential to the energy of the recording. They were so attentive and giving us so much energy. It was great to hear it so beautifully captured—and to see the video, which I thought was really beautiful, too.

Yeah, I got to watch an excerpt of the performance film that Charlie Weinmann shot. Talk to me about being filmed. It's one thing to perform live, and another to have a camera capturing that too.
I'm pretty used to it, man—especially in this era. Everybody films everything. You play a gig, and everybody who was at the show is posting the thing on Instagram. I didn't even really notice it. It was actually my idea to have it filmed, because I thought it would've been a good document.

Let's talk about playing in the round and the energy that creates.
It's a great way to play. When we used to play as ETA, the place would get jammed, and the way that the room was set up, there was no stage and only 10-15% of the people in the place could see us. Playing in the round, you're just surrounded by everyone and feeling all that energy. It's awesome. I got the idea because SML did it at Zebulon. I didn't see the show there, but I saw some footage, and I was like, "Wow, man, that's a really good idea." But Tortoise had played some shows in the round in Chicago, so it wasn't a totally new thing for me to experience. It's weird and cool. Also, I'm older now, so I don't really like going to shows anymore where I have to stand the whole time.

You've had a few chart-topping records at this point when it comes to Billboard's Contemporary Jazz charts. How did it feel the first time it happened?
Man, to be honest, I didn't really think about it too much. I'm just glad that people people are receptive to the music and that they buy it. But, I mean, if I think about it, it's kind of cool. It's different now, #1, as opposed to #1 25 years ago, when people were really buying records. I'll try and downplay it, but it's really cool, man. I'm just really grateful that people have been so receptive to the band. I did a recording session early last year, and one of the people on the session complimented me on the record. He was a peer of mine, and we both have older children. He was like, "It's crazy, man—my kids really love it," and I was like, "Man." I'm just really grateful that the music is finding a younger audience.

Across the board, your solo work—your jazz-leaning work in general, really—has experienced an increased level of visibility over the last seven or so years. Talk to me about the exact moment in which you realized there was a growing interest in that side of you.
When I moved to L.A., by default from not really knowing anyone here—being isolated—I was forced to work on my own music because I didn't have anybody out here to collaborate with yet. I always had my own ideas about music, but they would be filtered into these collaborative spaces. I was finally forced to to try and figure out how to finish things on my own, which is something I'd never done. At the time, I wasn't sure that was something that I was capable of. I leaned on the people I could to finish things, as opposed to being in a position where I had to make those final decisions myself.

I was surprised when people were so receptive to it, especially when The New Breed. It got so much love, and that's my favorite one, because it's a pretty personal statement. My father passed away while I was making the record, and it kind of became a tribute to him—not in a deliberate way, it was more me just trying to be honest. I mean, I always try to be honest with my work. I'm very conscious that I'm making it for people, and I want them to find enjoyment out of it. But I try and bashfully present my ideas. It's just me trying to do my thing. So I was surprised, but I also felt like people had been waiting for me to do it and egging me on.

My solo guitar career was really set in motion when Meshell Ndegeocello asked me to open for her for three nights in Chicago. I don't know how she knew, but I'd been working on this solo guitar thing as a way of making a record, and not thinking about performing. She asked me to play those concerts, and it steered me in a new direction. Even that there were some people who wanted me to present my own music, her being one of them, once the music finally dropped, that there were people waiting for it...

Did that surprise you?
Yeah, it did. I already considered myself a collaborator. I mean, I'd made my own records. I made Bright Light in Winter and Like-Coping for Delmark and The Relatives for Thrill Jockey. But those records were really collaborative as well. Chris Lopes and Chad Taylor, they both wrote as much music as I did, sometimes even more for that trio. So I had things out where I put myself out front, And to be honest, I was really only doing it as another income stream. When I made Playground with Rob Mazurek, Bob Koester—the proprietor of Delmark at the time, he's since passed away—he told me, "If you ever want to make a record for us, let me know." I kept it in my pocket, and when my daughter was born, I was like, "Alright, I'm gonna make some more money. I'll make you a record." I got Chris and Chad, who were very close collaborators of mine, and I made those records with them.

My main focus was with Tortoise for many years. That was what I'd focus a lot of compositional energy into—presenting ideas to that band. But we never committed enough to the band for us to really be able to do it full-time. So in the slow periods, I had to do other things. The thing that I focused on when I relocated to L.A., during Tortoise's slow period, was my own music. Maybe people are more receptive to individuals than bands. Even if you have bands, they might even just focus on individuals within a collective as opposed to the whole group.

I recently talked to John and Doug for the newsletter about the creative process and kind of your guys' history of working together. I'm curious to hear you talk about how your work apart from the band has affected bringing ideas back to Tortoise.
It's pretty much the same. Tortoise has a specific way that we work. It's a broad specificity, but people present ideas to the group and everything's fair game. Everybody contributes until we finally mold something that seems like it's a piece of music. It's always been like that. The difference now is that I keep things for my for my own music. Before I'd just bring everything to Tortoise, and you could hear it, especially on Beacons of Ancestorship. There are things on those records that sound more congruent with the music that I'm making under my own name now. At that time, I was making a lot of beats. If I had those now, I'd keep them to myself and bring to Tortoise more of what I'd consider easily adaptable things.

You mentioned making records to make money earlier. Let's talk about the business aspect of making music and how you've seen things change. When I talked to Doug and John on this, their take essentially was, "It's hard, but it's always been hard."
I think things have stabilized a little bit. There's been a renaissance for vinyl. Record stores seem to be thriving, and there's some demand for that physical format, which is a pretty recent thing, I'd say, in the last eight years. But yeah, I mean, I agree with them that it's always been hard. But it seems more stable now than it had been in the last 25 years. The thing about Tortoise is that we made the choice to confront when things were moving from analog to digital, in terms of technology and how people were listening to music. There was this awkward time where the world was forced to adjust.

When we made TNT, we sold a shitload of records for an indie band—especially a weird instrumental one. We all kind of became adults after that. We bought property and started families and shit, and then we made Standards. I remember talking to Todd Cook, who played bass for The Shipping News and Slint when they reformed, and I told him, "We got our new record coming out." He didn't really say anything, and then he went, "Dude, man, I heard your guys' new record a month ago." I was like, "What?" Because, you know, somebody had leaked it. That was a new era, man. You'd ride in somebody's car, they had a CD player, they'd pull out those CD wallets, and they were all burned CD-Rs. We saw record sales drop a whole lot. Now, it's a little bit better now. It's way better now than it was 15 years ago, that's for sure.

You mentioned younger generations before. What are your kids listening to?
Both my kids listen to a lot of hip-hop, especially my son. He's 14, he'll be 15 in a couple months, and I had a real proud dad moment with him. He auditioned to get into this arts high school to play drums, and when he was in the audition, the guy was like, "What's your favorite genre of music?" He was like, "Hip-hop." Then he said, "Who's your favorite artist?" He said, "Ghostface." And I was like, "Yeah!" I was very, very proud.