Jeff Parker
The New Breed
Now Available
Jeff Parker - The New Breed
What people Are Saying
“A fully realized vision of melding bass-throbbing hip-hop production with the interstellar space of improvised music, The New Breed cements the indelible mark he’s made on music over the last three decades.”
“This is a genuinely intriguing album.”
“It’s a killer record — one of our most listened to of the year — equally rooted in jazz and funk, and built upon beat-making experiments…”
– Jason P Woodbury, Aquarium Drunkard
“What can’t Jeff Parker do?”
“…the music spans an impressive amount of musical territory with deep and varied grooves.”
– Martin Johnson, The Wall Street Journal
“…discursive and funky, as if Grant Green were playing for dancers against a James Brown groove in a small club.”
Announcing IARC0009: Jeff Parker - The New Breed
Released June 24, 2016
Available on LP/CD/Digital via our Bandcamp page
Best known as a multi-instrumental member of Tortoise and a pillar of the Chicago jazz and experimental music scene, Jeff Parker has been incomparably prolific over the last 20+ years while merely producing 5 albums as a “lead artist” (just 2 since 2005, including 2016’s duo recording with Rob Mazurek on Rogue Art). “Lead artist” is in quotes here, because though his name is seldom seen in marquees, his distinctive guitar sound has been essential to every project he’s been part of. It was in that sense that we at International Anthem came to work with Parker during the production of Makaya McCraven’s In The Moment, an album which ultimately showcased said essentialness (of Parker’s “side man” sound) on 9 of its 19 tracks.
Over the course of the In The Moment sessions in 2013 and 2014, Parker was slowly transitioning his personal belongings from Chicago to a new home in Los Angeles. It was when finally settled that he found opportunity to re-open some home recordings and beat projects that had been dormant on his hard drive for years (early versions of some could have been heard in the late ‘00s on his Myspace page). Parker had long been in silent study of vinyl sampling and beat conduction, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that new residence in a city aflame with experimental R&B, jazz and electronic fusers (i.e. L.A., e.g. Brainfeeder, Leaving Records, Low End Theory) spurred him to dig back in to the practice and produce with more purpose.
By early 2015 Parker had refined several compositional ideas around his samples, and enlisted local friend Paul Bryan (Aimee Mann, Meshell Ndegeocello) to engineer and play bass guitar in sessions with Chicago ex-pat saxophonist, Thelonious Monk Institute protégé Josh Johnson (Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Esperanza Spaulding) and drummer Jamire Williams (Robert Glasper, Carlos Niño). The recordings were conducted to capture composed passages as well as free playing that used Parker’s beats and sample suites as improvisational criterion. After completing 7 songs with the band, the last of which with vocals from his daughter Ruby Parker recorded in Chicago by John McEntire, Parker named the project The New Breed (after a clothing store his late father Ernie owned and operated in the ‘70s) and finished the album by stitching the band tracks together with intermittent pieces of beat memories from his archive.
The final presentation is a retrospective tapestry that explores Parker’s past both musically – as a potent compositional tribute to his influences (J Dilla, Thelonious Monk, Charles Stepney) held together by literal fragments of his life’s work – and patrilineally – as a collaboration with his kin held together by clippings from the family photo album. The New Breed is Jeff Parker’s most vibrant and comprehensively personal work yet, appropriately the first in 11 years with only his name in the “lead artist” column.
Notes
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
All rights reserved.
About Jeff Parker
Jeff Parker (1967) is a multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer. A longtime member of the influential indie-band Tortoise, 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.