Jeff Paker, ETA IVtet

Another stunner from Jeff Parker and the ETA IVtet, this time venturing outside of the comfort and confines of the ETA itself. As the last document closed a chapter on the club, a shuttered shelter for improvisation that served as the spark that lit the quartet’s current journey, this record opens the door on the next. The record serves as a happy accident of sorts, an album created in the shadow of another. The band had just worked through a weekend in the studio, a session that was meant to serve as the band’s first record away from the live space. They celebrated the session with a show at The Lodge Room, a venue that stood just a few hundred feet away from their namesake club, The Enfield Tennis Academy. A sizable jump in size from the cramped interior of the ETA, The Lodge Room still contained a dedicated core of folks who showed up to see the band work through their symbiosis live in the room, the realm where they shined the brightest.

The band seemed to agree, as the set, and its subsequent recording and video serve as the basis for the album in the stead of those planned studio recordings. The theme of the night was Joy, a fleeting moment when even the heaviest hangups were sloughed off in favor of a dynamic conversation held in rhythm, tones, strums, skronk, thrum, and a metered pulse to pull it through. The set feels joyous and the accompanying video from Charlie Weinmann lets those that were not among the lucky 400 on the floor into the round to celebrate alongside the IVtet. The band locks into lean and limber phrases. They don’t shy away from their penchant for the longform, letting the two songs here linger on the tongue and loll in the ear until they transform and ultimately transmute sound into understanding, jadedness into joy. Someday, maybe, those studio tapes will hit the streets, but it’s clear from these two tracks that connection and commune will always be the band’s most potent fifth member.

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