Jeff Parker once turned down a job from Joni Mitchell.
It was early 1998, and the luck of the guitarist, newly 30, suddenly seemed to be shifting. He had been in Chicago for just less than a decade, cobbling together every gig he could find—weddings, funk bands and Motown acts, free improvisation with men hunched behind computers—to pay rent. But he had just joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a clearinghouse of adventurous jazz players and advocates for radical Black expression. He was now in two exciting Chicago bands, Tortoise and Isotope 217, interwoven outfits that wordlessly insisted there should be no walls between dub and jazz, rock and electronica.
In fact, Parker had just finished his first full album with Tortoise, the rapturous TNT, when Mitchell’s invitation arrived. He had played on the band-leading debut of drummer Brian Blade, who had recently been on acclaimed records by Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris. Mitchell wanted the Fellowship to join her on the road. “I remember telling Tortoise, ‘Man, Joni Mitchell wants Brian Blade’s band to be her band. What should I do?’” Parker tells me, grinning in his studio just outside of Los Angeles, in Altadena, in early April. They told him to go, that it was a possible fast track out of musical penury. “They said we’d have to cancel our tour, but I wasn’t going to do that. The decision was made right there.”
Parker’s choice to take the path less certain was, by that point, a habit. When he was 22 and four years into his studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston, just shy of graduating, he dropped out, wanting to cut himself free from any fallback plan, like teaching, that a degree might facilitate. He hoped to live only by playing. He knew he’d have to cover his outstanding student loans himself, since he’d let his parents down. Though potentially lucrative gigs awaited in New York, he opted for Chicago, which felt more like an unknown artistic frontier.
And then, after nearly a quarter-century there, playing as many as four nights a week and establishing himself as one of music’s most distinct guitarists and zealous improvisers, he cut that cord, too, following his partner, the filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt, to California in 2013. He intended to quit improvised music, not only because he was a stranger in Los Angeles but also because he didn’t think an enclave really existed there. He culled his records and CDs to make ends meet. Maybe he’d write film scores, settle into making music for commercials.
“In Chicago, improvising’s a real culture, just as much as straight-ahead jazz—someone gets a gig, they get together, and play. People weren’t as comfortable with that here,” Parker remembers. “Honestly, man, if I wanted to stay in a creative music community, I would have just stayed in Chicago.”
But then the unexpected happened: A creative music community formed, at least in part, around Parker. To keep his mind and fingers limber, he started playing Sunday sets in an Atwater Village bar alongside John Herndon, the Tortoise drummer who had also decamped to California. And then, through the serendipity of a bar owner wearing a Tortoise T-shirt, he landed a Monday residency at a cocktail and oyster bar called ETA, a stage-less spot named after the tennis academy in Infinite Jest. Local musicians began to drift to the shows, maybe sit in, and perhaps find spaces where they could do something similar.
“Going to ETA those first couple of times, I was like, ‘There’s nobody here. It’s insane that I can see Jeff with 10 people,’” says Jeremiah Chiu, the SML synthesist who had grown up in the Chicago suburbs admiring Parker from afar. “I don’t think he had a plan, other than to find a space and establish a routine.”
