Music can transport you, even or particularly when the vacation spot’s unknown. For 22 minutes, that is what Jeff Parker‘s Tiny Desk with the ETA IVtet can provide: an area in your thoughts to meditate on what the music speaks, set to a gossamer groove.
Although Parker is within the group’s identify, equality runs the present: a quiet drone units the tone, then the music is totally improvised. Stillness, adopted by reflection and response. Josh Johnson, an alto saxophonist with a quiet-yet-commanding sense of results, builds little worlds out of loops and fluttering melody. Jay Bellerose, a drummer who’s labored with the likes of Allen Toussaint and Suzanne Vega, is painterly in his brush and stick work, however bursts with a sun-beamed drum fill when the second calls. Anna Butterss carried out subsequent to Jenny Lewis for her Tiny Desk in early 2020; right here, the bassist each offers a grounding presence and the premise for liftoff. Parker — an instantly recognizable, but malleable guitarist recognized for his time in Tortoise, the Chicago Underground and a CV far too lengthy to record right here — performs with repetition till melodic figures reveal themselves. Knowledgeable by the members’ backgrounds in jazz, ambient, funk, rock, digital and minimalist music, the band’s mystical strategy to improvisation by no means bends to 1 sound at a time.
Andie Huether, our audio technical director for this live performance, dug into NPR’s tools archives and set out a Nagra IV tape recorder on the Desk as a nod to engineer Bryce Gonzales, who developed a stay mixing and recording rig with an analogous unit for the band’s units on the now-closed ETA membership in Los Angeles. “Within the days earlier than transportable digital recorders,” Huether explains, “NPR reporters and engineers would take machines like this one into the sphere to seize reporting and convey (or ship) the resultant tapes again to HQ to be edited and integrated into our broadcasts.” We did not file this Tiny Desk analog, however the spirit stays: a dialog captured in small area, one value watching — and listening to — over and over.
SET LIST
MUSICIANS
- Jeff Parker: guitar
- Josh Johnson: alto saxophone
- Anna Butterss: bass
- Jay Bellerose: drums
TINY DESK TEAM
- Producer: Lars Gotrich
- Director/Editor: Maia Stern
- Audio Technical Director: Andie Huether
- Host/Sequence Producer: Bobby Carter
- Videographers: Maia Stern, Joshua Bryant, Kara Body
- Audio Engineer: Josh Newell
- Manufacturing Assistants: Ashley Pointer, Dora Levite
- Photographer: Grace Raver
- Tiny Desk Copy Editor: Hazel Cills
- Government Producer: Suraya Mohamed
- Sequence Creators: Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson
- VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins