Co-Presented with (((folkYEAH!)))

Jeff Parker is a guitarist and composer known for his genre-defying work as a solo artist, with his group The New Breed, as part of the legendary band Tortoise. His music in the last decade has ranged from the jazz-informed psychedelic beat music song cycle Suite For Max Brown to the delicate improvisational solo guitar of Forfolks. He has made music with everyone from jaimie branch to Tom Zé to Flea.

ETA IVtet is an improvising ensemble led by Parker. The band—featuring drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—grew out of a weekly residency started by Parker in 2016 at the now defunct Highland Park Los Angeles venue ETA. By the time the venue closed its doors in 2023 the IVtet had evolved from a band that played mostly standards into a group known for its transcendent, long-form (sometimes stretching out for 45 minutes or more) journeys into innovative, often uncharted territories of groove-oriented, painterly, polyrhythmic, minimalist and mantric improvised music.

The band’s audience simultaneously grew from a low key weekly hang mostly populated by friends and regulars, to a high-buzz event with a line of fresh faces stretching down the block each Monday. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, ETA is where the musical language of the IVtet percolated and coalesced into an instantly recognizable, egalitarian group sound. The sum of four distinct and equal voices, that sound was initially captured on two critically-acclaimed records recorded live in the club’s humble corner—2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy.

Happy Today, out May 2026 on International Anthem and Nonesuch Records, is the IVtet’s latest album. Its sound finds the group’s signature syntax, built around long-form minimalist improvisation, expanding confidently into larger space while creating the same hypnotizing and deeply-tuned listening effect on visibly enraptured audiences. The album contains two sidelong pieces recorded as the band performed in the round at Lodge Room, surrounded by an audience of 400 or so deep listeners. (The venue, appropriately enough, sits on the same street and just a few hundred feet away from the storefront that used to be ETA.)

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