Jeff Parker Goes Silent (Way)

We’ve now gotten a taste of the forthcoming The Way Out of Easy album due out November 22 from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, a jazz ensemble featuring Parker (Tortoise, Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Trio) on guitar, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Anna Butterss on bass, and Jay Bellerose on drums. Titled “Late Autumn,” the slowly simmering track — it purposefully never reaches a boil — is one of four on the album, and at merely 17 and a half minutes, it’s the shortest of them. Echoing Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and the work of the Necks, it has a steady pulse above which the musicians ease their way around each other. Both Parker and Johnson are credited with amplifying their instruments with electronics, and Parker also, according to the liner notes, employs a sampler. Those effects are quite subtle, and like the musicianship in general, never try to command attention.