Mondays At The Enfield Tennis Academy (vinyl LP)

Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in LA's Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss and alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful and exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 and 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, patience and grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. Jeff Parker's first double album & first live album, Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan's Live at the Lighthouse, John Coltrane's Live in Seattle and Miles Davis' In Person Friday and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk San Francisco and Black Beauty.
While the IVtet sometimes plays standards and, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It's tensile, yet spacious and relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes and eras —dub and Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient and drone— suffuse the proceedings. Listening to playbacks Parker remarked, humorously and not, "we sound like the Byrds" (to certain ears, the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it).
A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly and fluently in and out of lead and supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they've established in Parker's 'The New Breed' project, Parker and Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead and support. Their sampled and looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered and alive, adding depth and texture and pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker's beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose's animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums and shakers —as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming— bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet's language. A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness and humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground and lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet's grooves flow and clip, loop and repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony and intuition, deep focus and freedom.
For all its varied sonic personality, Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy scans immediately and unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker's unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant and disciplined in execution, Parker's music has an earned respect for itself and for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods and shapes of heart and mind will find utility and hope in a music that combines the autonomy and the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance and in staying power.