Jeff Parker - Suite for Max Brown (2020) Hi-Res

The veteran guitarist has created an effortlessly detailed album, full of tradition and experimentation that spans generations. It lives at the vanguard of new jazz music.

Jeff Parker always writes parts that sound unassuming at first listen and unavoidable by the fifth. It’s the X-factor that the guitarist and master collaborator has brought to every project on his long and still-growing list of projects, jazz or rock or otherwise: Tortoise, Isotope 217, the recently reunited Chicago Underground Quartet, his solo work as a bandleader, his work as a soloist, and his supporting contributions for countless others. Despite his ability to do backflips with a guitar, his best-known lick from Tortoise’s 1998 song “TNT” is more like a heel-click—an easy, humble gesture, perfectly timed and placed.

It’s a preternatural thing, of course, but it’s also a skill that he’s cultivated by changing up his scenery and embracing the unfamiliar. A few years ago, while splitting his time between his longtime home of Chicago and his new home of Los Angeles, Parker connected with the players at International Anthem, a new collective of jazz-raised, boundary-challenging musicians based in Chicago. Some of them were exploring the intersection of live improvisation and modern digital recording—loops, samples, beats—which was an area that had fascinated Parker ever since Madlib’s jazz-ensemble project Yesterdays New Quintet blew his mind over a decade ago. Parker had been messing around with these elements for years during occasional DJ sets, thinking about how they could apply to his own playing, and had accumulated several hours of experiments. With this new label, he saw the right opportunity to formally release those results. He turned them into his 2016 album The New Breed, some of the most soulful and beat-driven music he’d ever put out under his own name and his first release for International Anthem.

What Parker tapped into on The New Breed, he blows wide open on Suite for Max Brown, a mesmerizing follow-up and informal companion piece. While his electric guitar remains a highlight, Parker builds out a fast-slashing range of ideas using dozens of other sounds and instruments, most of which he plays himself. They’re disparate in color and texture, pronounced and often short, each one elbowing or sliding its way in front of the one before it, impatient to steal the show. As a player and composer, Parker shines throughout. As an arranger, he catches fire.