International Anthem
The Eleventh Year
Jeff Parker
The New Breed
IA11 Edition
Jeff Parker’s 2016 album The New Breed was a turning point for both Parker and International Anthem, changing the trajectory of his solo career as well as drawing an abundance of attention to our fresh imprint despite our then very limited catalog. Most importantly though, the album is the first to give voice to Parker’s wholly unique take on sample-based beat construction augmented by improvisation and live instrumentation (performed in this case by the high-level crew of Paul Bryan on bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone and keys, Jamire Williams and Jay Bellerose on drums, Parker's daughter Ruby on vocals, and Parker himself on guitar, synths, and other instruments).
What began as Jeff’s interest in understanding his own idea of hip-hop processes (and how they related to his work in jazz) expanded into a blueprint for much of his work since then. (Hear also: The New Breed’s expansive followup Suite For Max Brown, the gentle deconstructionist solo guitar of Forfolks, and the long-form slow bloom improvisation of The Way Out of Easy.)
The IA11 Edition LP features our IARC 2025 obi strip, plus a new 16-page 11x11" insert booklet with unpublished session photos, new liner notes by album co-producer Paul Bryan, and an in-depth conversation between Jeff Parker and IARC co-founder Scott McNiece.
Out June 27, 2025
Available on LP/Digital via our Bandcamp page
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Produced by Paul Bryan and Jeff Parker
Jeff Parker - electric guitar, Korg MS20, Wurlitzer electric piano, Mellotron, loops and samplers, MIDI and drum programming
Josh Johnson - alto saxophone, flute, clarinet, Wurlitzer electric piano, Mellotron
Paul Bryan - electric bass guitar
Jamire Williams - drums
Jay Bellerose - drums and percussion (“Visions” only)
Ruby Parker - vocals
Engineered, edited and mixed by Paul Bryan intermittently from February to December, 2015 in Santa Monica CA. Vocals recorded by John McEntire at SOMA E.M.S., Chicago. Mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters, Los Angeles.
All songs and lyrics composed and arranged by Jeff Parker (umjabuglafeesh music, BMI), except “Visions” by Bobby Hutcherson
The New Breed
Notes by Paul Bryan
Paul Bryan at Jeff Parker’s Sholo Studios, April 2024. Photo by Sam Lee.
Lately my thoughts have been consumed by change.
It is February 2025 and Los Angeles is still reeling from the Palisades and Eaton fires that tore through the city just weeks ago. I am writing this from a little rental in Santa Monica, a mile or so from my destroyed studio and mere blocks away from my former space on 19th street, where The New Breed record was mostly recorded a decade ago. It’s comforting to have retreated to this neighborhood, a familiar perch from which to take stock of what has happened—a place to lean on my past, feel this raw present, and watch for the future, whatever it may reveal itself to be.
Jeff came to me in 2015 with some of his new music in hand. We talked about making a record together. He brought in some finished pieces. Some tidbits. Snatches of thematic material and older demos. Jeff had ideas about composition he wanted to explore—musical references to chew on, thoughts about the porous barrier between jazz and hip-hop, and the differences in their production methods and how these might be combined. In his fashion these directives were often more implied than specifically stated, and I could sense his desire to allow the coming process to dictate the results.
Jeff at Paul Bryan’s home studio in Santa Monica, circa 2015. Photo by Paul Bryan.
Paul Bryan mixing The New Breed at his home studio, Pacific Palisades, CA, circa 2016. Photo by Jeff Parker.
Stepping into the music with this incredible group—Jeff, Josh Johnson, Jamire Williams, Jay Bellerose, and of course, Ruby Parker—was a thrill.
The live tracking moved quickly—short days, with just one or two takes per song. The album opener “Executive Life” was a first take on the first day, and Side B’s starter “Jrifted” had a similarly swift capture. The chemistry was perfect, my studio was ready, and we documented the energy in the room.
Over the following weeks, other pieces came together through different approaches—Jeff’s one-man jam on “Get Dressed” and the album closer, “Cliché”, which evolved from an old demo that had been waiting patiently until its final section appeared to Jeff in a dream. In some cases—“Year Whip” comes to mind—Jeff took recordings we had made, rearranged them, tweaked them, and brought them back transformed into something new. Older pieces, dormant for years, reemerged and became essential to the album’s flow, as if they had been waiting all along for this moment.
The final phase of The New Breed—a blend of editing and mixing—was less about organization and polish and more about amplifying the ideas and concepts that had taken shape. On every level, it was an explosion of learning for me—mixing not just to refine, but to expand on both composition and sonics.
Jeff Parker, during final mixing sessions for The New Breed at Paul’s (then new, now gone) home studio in Pacific Palisades, CA, circa 2016. Photo by Paul Bryan.
Looking back at our work together, I see how the process—strategizing, recording, creating—pushed me forward as a producer, a mixer, and certainly as a musician.
At its best, collective creativity feels effortless. Ideas emerge without thought. There’s a natural flow, an exponential correctness—you don’t make it happen, you just receive it. We were in that place.
Now, ten years on, I can still see us in my old studio on that first day—the low ceilings, the throw rug draped over the worn couch. Jeff, sunburst Gibson ES-335 in hand. Josh in his makeshift booth. Jamire, sublime as ever, behind the beautiful old silver sparkle Ludwigs—now reduced to ashes scattered over the west side. And me, right in the middle. Change imminent. Unbidden. Unknowable. Grab the bass. Hit record.
Paul Bryan
Santa Monica, California, February 2025
Ruby Parker & Jeff Parker at Lula Cafe, Chicago, June 2016.
Photos by Scott McNiece.
Excerpts From
A Conversation
Between Jeff Parker and International Anthem
Co-founder Scott McNiece
Los Angeles, February 2025
SM:You were working on what became The New Breed for a while, here and there, starting in the early 2000s, right? Can you remember the exact moment when you were like, okay, now is the time for me to really get this together?
JP: Exact moment? No. As a composer and a musician, you kind of go through phases, and I've always felt the need to document whatever phase I’m in. Back then I was in a phase where I was making a lot of beats. I was super inspired by what was happening in hip hop at the time, with Dilla and Madlib and MF Doom. Those three specifically were really peaking, they were all putting stuff out, collaborating, and the general atmosphere around their music was really exciting. It seemed like they were inspiring each other to create great stuff and in turn, a whole community. I was inspired by what they were doing, and I was able to try it myself just because I could make beats on my computer. I had samplers in Reason [digital audio workstation software]. I was DJing a lot and buying a lot of records. It was a very inspiring time for me, just as somebody who was making music and trying to learn new approaches to production.
SM: Do you remember generally when this was?
JP: Between 2002 and 2009. That was when I was really active in that way, DJing, digging for records, and making beats.
SM: I was definitely following you on Myspace then.
JP: Yeah, it was right around that time, I think. 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006… I mean, Dilla died in 2006. I remember Tortoise was on tour and my friend Kevin Dineen, who was a student at Santa Cruz at the time, came to the show. I gave him my iPod and he put like a million things on it. And one of the things that he told me that he was really excited about was the Madlib record – or sorry, the Quasimoto record – The Unseen, which had just come out. This was like 1999 or 2000 or something like that. And I heard that record and man… that was one of those records. I listened to it like it every day for a long time after that. The Unseen put me on to Madlib, and I started looking out for whatever he was doing.
SM: So from there, you decided to start working on your own beats, and you knew that you wanted to put something out at some point?
JP: Well, once I heard Yesterday's New Quintet… That was when I knew. I was super psyched. When I would DJ, I always had jazz-sounding records that sounded like hip hop, but now I had a hip hop record that sounded like jazz. I could play them together when I DJed, and all of it was running together.
Jeff Parker and Joshua Abrams DJing at Danny’s Tavern, Chicago, circa 2002. Photo by Angie Evans.
I remember I heard Pete Rock do a DJ set at Smart Bar or Metro, or maybe it was Sonotheque… He was playing hip hop and all this other stuff, and everything felt like one thing. And I was just kind of like: ‘where does my own music fit into all of this?’
Then I heard Madlib’s Yesterday’s New Quintet thing… I remember buying that first EP at Dusty Groove, whenever it came out. I heard that record and I was like: oh man, okay, I wanna make a record that feels like this. But I wanted it to be more like my thing, just with a production aesthetic that really fucking bangs, you know? I started to think about the ways to mix together my beatmaking with the way that I was writing music, and the way that I was playing with the musicians that I played with. I wanted to make it all sound like one thing. I could hear it, you know, I had the sound in my head. I knew how, technically, it could work. But I didn't have the means.
SM: And at some point, you started transitioning out here to LA… What was it that made it a longer process? Simultaneously with developing this idea for something that was more production-based, you were still putting out more traditional instrumental recordings, like Bright Light in Winter, which came out in 2012. Do you feel like it was the transition to LA, that maybe slowed you down, made it so you could focus on developing a new production approach?
JP: I think that I just kind of set it aside. I mean… I always kind of separated things, you know. I felt for many years that I was just putting on hats. I'd be like, okay, I'm wearing my bebop hat for this project. Now I’ve got on my free jazz hat for this one. Then I’d put on my Tortoise hat… But for my own music, I always wanted to find a way to put everything together.
When I started making beats and getting more into production and stuff, honestly, it was more like an exercise, to help me understand how hip hop and sample-based music was put together. Because I had listened to it for a long time, but didn’t really have a clear idea about how that music was assembled.
When Wax Poetics came out… That magazine was really important for me. I think they were the first music publication that really talked to producers, coming from the angle of crate digging. They'd interview Marley Marl and do a thing on Paul C, and talk to Prince Paul and DJ Premier… They would talk about breaks like ‘yeah, everybody sampled this break’ and ‘this is how we chopped it up’. I learned a lot from reading that magazine. I only say that because through that study and learning, and my own experiments with sampling, and DJing, that this kind of music started to become another branch growing out of my own musical tree. Just at first, I didn’t really know how to use it in the context of my own working projects. It was just more of a ‘seeking knowledge’ kind of thing. It would take a while for me to figure out how to work it into my own musical universe and really employ sampling as a way to compose music.
SM: You’ve talked before about Joshua Abrams, and how your conversations with him really informed your approach to what became The New Breed, right?
JP: Totally, that is true. Josh and I had a lot of conversations. We were both working with a lot of creative and jazz adjacent musicians around Chicago and abroad, but were also both DJing and making beats.. We talked about how in hip hop and beatmaking, it’s all about the production, and the way that the music is captured on a recording. When you play that kind of music when you're DJing… the way the music resonates in a space is because of the sound of the recording, and the way it was produced. We had a lot of conversations about that, and about the way that we played when we were writing music, and things that we wanted to do. I think you can hear that aesthetic in Natural Information Society. I mean, Josh started making that music on the MPC. Just him with the guimbri, sampling himself, composing like he was making beats. It came from that aesthetic – repetitive music, the space that you occupy when you start to compose music with this process. That was all stuff that we were talking about, and that was all stuff that I was thinking about. Trying to make music that mixes beatmaking and improvising, and finding a zone where that approach translates to making a record. Or making music that feels like a beat tape. You don't want the music to be climactic, you want it to be dry, with a very limited dynamic range. You want everything to sort of stay in a zone, so it’s very static. It’s about a specific sonic world that you are trying to exist in.
SM: I remember hearing Abrams’s Reminder stuff. Well, I also remember the first time I saw Abrams play bass… He was playing double bass in a live band for Prefuse 73, who I was pretty obsessed with at that time. At the time, I thought Prefuse was making some of the most interesting music I had ever heard. So of course I was like: who's that dude playing a standup bass with him? When I got that Reminder LP Continuum, I also realized he was on Prefuse’s label, Eastern Development. But yeah if I remember correctly, there’s a couple of Reminder records. Continuum is a lot more explicitly ‘beat music’, and the other one’s more ‘out’ and more ‘acoustic’ sounding, but also still seems to have a bit of a ‘beatmaking’ undertone… right? I don't know for sure which one came first, but I would assume the more ‘beats’ style record was first. I say that because when you hear the other one, you can sort of hear an embryonic Natural Information Society in there, you know? Can’t remember the name of that one, I only had Continuum on vinyl, and only heard the other one digitally.
JP: I think it was called West Side Cabin?
SM: Yes! That was it.
JP: Yeah, we were hanging tough while he was making all of that stuff, man. Abrams actually did a Reminder remix of ‘Toy Boat’ for the Japan CD release of The Relatives.
SM: Oh damn, I’d love to hear that one!
So I guess he was making all that stuff while you guys were having those conversations about production. And the thing at Rodan still happening around then too, where you and Joshua and Johnny Herndon played together every week, right?
JP: Herndon and Abrams didn’t start at Rodan until 2008 or 2009. Before that, the Rodan band was with Jason Ajemian and Nori Tanaka from 2004 to 2008.
Early days of Makaya McCraven’s residency at The Bedford, Chicago, January 2013. Photo by Scott McNiece.
SM: I always think of Rodan as the precursor to the series I started at The Bedford with Makaya, which In The Moment grew out of.. When Makaya and I first met at The Bedford to talk about ideas, we both agreed that the Rodan vibe was the vibe… We were both like, ‘let's do something that feels like that’. If I remember correctly, Rodan had either just shut down, or it was about to shut down, right when we were starting up at The Bedford in the beginning of 2013. Makaya and you had separately played at Curio, for the first series I was running. But I didn't know that you guys played together until he started bringing you out to play The Bedford with him. And at that point, I found out that you had invited him to sub for Herndon at Rodan at some point. But anyways, early 2013… hadn’t you already started to transition to living in Los Angeles at that point? When did that process start?
JP: I started to transition out to LA around 2010.
SM: Oh, really? I didn’t realize that was such a long transition.
JP: Yeah. Ezra was born in 2011.
SM: Wow. OK. Well, I feel I keep coming back to the ‘transitioning to LA’ thing because I remember, when we were first released The New Breed, how I was thinking about it and how I was talking about it… The record really sounded like “Los Angeles.” Well, to me, and my idea of LA, from back then. It kind of created a picture in my head of what it was like here in LA. And I remember talking to Carlos Niño not long after we released the record, and he was saying something similar, which further cemented that vibe in my head. If I remember correctly, he said something like ‘this record's a great representation of what’s happening in LA right now’ or something. I could really just feel that.
Thinking further back.. When you first called me about this album, I think it was sometime in 2015… I still remember, I was on the road with my friend Mark, we were driving through the mountains in Colorado, and I had to have him pull off the road because I finally had cell service and was able to call you back. But I vividly remember standing on the side of the road looking at a snowy mountain when we were on the phone about this album for the first time, and I was so excited. I was like ‘oh man, I’m talking to Jeff Parker about working on a record’ haha.
You were like ‘I have these ideas, I want to make this record but I need to do some sessions, and out here in LA it’s not the same as it is in Chicago… so like, you know, if I want these guys to play on my record, I gotta pay them something decent’. Haha. Of course I was like: ‘sure no problem Jeff, just tell me whatever you need, we'll figure it out!’ But the truth was, at the time, the label didn't have any money, we basically had nothing. People were really loving Makaya’s album at the time, and our first pressing of 500 copies was long sold out, but we couldn’t really afford to repress it… partially due to the fact that we were putting the money we made from selling it into expensive promo, and also putting money into a few other records that were not doing as well… also because we had expensive taste in LPs, which didn’t help when we were staring down the estimates for the repress haha. But yeah, not long after our phone call, I called David and told him ‘Jeff Parker wants to do a record with us. We gotta figure out how to get some money to send him. If I have to, I’ll just live off my credit card for a little bit, and we can send him the money I have in my checking account… But we gotta get this record!’ David agreed of course, it was an exciting moment for both of us. And you know how the story goes, our gamble paid off, and the success of The New Breed was a major financial turning point for International Anthem. The first moment that existence beyond our first few releases felt possible. The first ‘LA record’ on our label haha.
Jeff Parker in the lab at home aka Sholo Studios, Altadena, CA, circa 2015. Photo by Ramon Etc.
Jeff at The Blue Whale, Los Angeles, release show for The New Breed, August 2016. Photo by Justin Gage.
JP: Yeah, it was all all exciting. I mean, I could see why Carlos would say that because a lot of the musicians on the record were LA based. When I moved out here, I finally had a space to work on my own music. Also when I moved out to LA, I was very solitary, which as you know is kind of an LA thing.… So, one: I didn't know anybody, and two: I finally had a space to work on my own music.
Not long after, I heard Jamire Williams play, he was playing with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson at The Blue Whale. I think Carlos Niño was on that gig too.
JP: Things were just starting to make a lot of sense. I also reconnected with my old friend Paul Bryan, who is a great bass player and record producer, but also had his own studio. And Josh Johnson… you know Josh had moved out here, and he’s such a beautiful musician… he’s always been. So I had cats that I wanted to work with, and I had an infrastructure. I wanted to talk to you because In the Moment had just come out, and it sounded great, and looked great. The quality of the record was insane. You guys did such a great job with that album. It seemed like you guys just really believed in it, and you had ideas… The promotion behind it was super creative, and the product made it clear that you guys were just interested in making quality records. It was… impressive. I could say inspiring or whatever, but I was genuinely impressed. It all helped with me feeling ready to revisit the ideas that became The New Breed thing.
SM: I guess a lot of people don't know that The New Breed is the original JP's Myspace Beats haha…
JP: ‘Myspace Beats’ didn't have anything to do with it yet. I just wanted to finish the music that I had been demoing in Reason. It was all stuff that had drum breaks in place of real musicians, with sampled material in there to help flesh out ideas. That was what I was interested in doing. A whole record of that stuff.
When I asked you about helping me finish this record, you didn't even ask to hear anything first. You were just like ‘yeah, we're down’. So I started having sessions with Paul, and working on finishing the music. But even at the end of that process, I only had about 20 minutes worth of material. So that's when I started to mix in the older stuff from the ‘Myspace beats’ with the new music that I had written – which was “Executive Life,” “Jrifted,” “Visions,” “Here Comes Ezra,” and “Year Whip” – to fill it out. Once I started to do that, everything started to make sense.
Then my father, getting sick and passing away… I mentioned the thing about how my father used to own a clothing store called The New Breed, and that I wanted to name the album after that. But the presentation of the album, a lot of that had to do with you, man. You asked me if I had pictures of my father at the store, so I asked my sister, and we found some photos. And you helped put the whole package idea together.
SM: You know I was just going through my old hard drive, looking for anything old from around The New Breed times to possibly put in the liners for this reissue…. And I found the original scans of those images. Just reminded me about when I scanned the corrugated cardboard from the picture frame you sent, so that we could use it for the center sticker of the LP. And the backside of the polaroid, scanning that too, so it could be the album’s back cover. Those pictures… they are just so beautiful! I don’t just mean the actual subjects in the pictures, but also the physical photo prints themselves… The deterioration and textures of those images, it is all so beautiful.
Original scans of images that became The New Breed album cover art.
JP: Yeah, I mean, it really became a whole thing. There was a moment, man, it wasn't even anything, you know. It was all just like… love, and just trying to learn. I mean, I wasn't trying to do anything, because I was just kind of making stuff. But my profile as an artist completely changed because of The New Breed coming out, you know.
With The New Breed, I proved to myself that I can make my own music. I wasn't even sure if I could do it. And maybe that's why I wanted to do it, because I was like: ‘man, can I even do my own shit, or do I have to always collaborate?’ And honestly, I'm still not quite sure. It's not easy to make my own music.
SM: Well, in recent years I’ve seen you do some gigs just as a solo guitarist, and a thousand people show up. You’re making it look pretty easy!
JP: Yeah, but, you know… it's very meaningful for me, that it came from me, and my experience. And for you guys, you know, we worked together to put out this record, and it resonated with people, and it put the label in a different place.
SM: No doubt. It honestly probably would have been the end for us in 2016, honestly, if it wasn't for The New Breed. So, yeah, with this record, it was truly the moment that things became real for us. Or just became truly possible. Or something.
Photo by Jim Newberry
Jeff Parker
About
Jeff Parker is recognized as one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative electric guitarists and composers. With a prolific output characterized by musical ideas of angularity and logic, he works in a wide variety of mediums - from pop, rock and jazz to new music - using ideas informed by innovations and trends in both popular and experimental forms. He creates works that explore and exploit the contrary relationships between tradition and technology, improvisation and composition, and the familiar and the abstract.
International Anthem
The Eleventh Year
On December 2nd, 2024, we marked the ten-year anniversary of our first release.
With a full decade under our belt – ten years of commitment to a growing community of artists, and our original mission statement ("to vitalize demand for boundary defying music," among other things) – we've spent a lot of time thinking about how we'd like to celebrate this milestone. What we keep coming back to is: desire to use this opportunity to revisit and revivify music and memories from our first decade; but keeping true to our ethos of always looking forward, all the way.
In that spirit, across 2025, we'll be rolling out a series of releases and events under the IA11 banner. Celebrating our eleventh year. Doing our best to retell essential, foundational stories from our past, while keeping our hearts and minds fixed on the present. Trying to establish new standards that can help carry our mission through another decade of work – and hopefully more.
Stay tuned for releases and news.