Tortoise's post-rock experimentalist on how a recent meditative mood led to less improvisation and more hypnotics on the jazz and hip-hop-infused Suite for Max Brown.
Over the course of an evening last October, I got to witness the wide range of Jeff Parker’s musical world. Early in the night, I stood in an empty parking lot in Center City Philadelphia with a few hundred other folks, looking down upon a freshly landscaped abandoned parcel that was temporarily converted into a bandstand as part of a month-long public art project. Joshua Abrams’ eight-piece Natural Information Society, featuring Parker on guitar, performed a slow, meditative set of repetitive, looping figures in search of a transcendent goal. Parker’s soft tone blended with the timbres of Abrams’ guembri (a 3-stringed bass lute) and Jason Adasiewicz’s vibraphone, helping to create a warm body of harmony.
After finishing his section of the hours-long piece, Parker quickly packed up and made his way about a mile-and-a-half down Spring Garden Street to the Ruba Club, where he took the stage with drummer Makaya McCraven’s quartet to a sold-out house as part of the October Revolution festival. In a set of climactic improvisations and hard-hitting beats, McCraven’s groove-based, hip-hop-inspired jazz stood in distinct aesthetic contrast to Abrams’ slowly unfolding minimalism. It was one of the most ripping sets I’ve heard Parker play. He took lots of burning solos, evoking his bluesy, soul-jazz side within a modern context and leading the band through a series of musical peaks.
Switching between such seemingly divergent sounds is nothing new for the 52-year-old who has worked with a wide array of artists over the course of his career. He’s probably best known for his membership in post-rock pioneers Tortoise, and as a sideman with Joey DeFrancesco, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Joshua Redman. Parker’s also a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). But hearing the distinctly contrasting sounds of these two sets revealed something remarkable: Parker has established a personal voice so clear and so strong that he manages to make himself heard and recognized in any group—while always contributing to the vibe.
Hear “Fusion Swirl” from Jeff Parker’s newest full-length, Suite for Max Brown.
Though he’s been honing his sound for several decades, it now seems Parker has reached a new plateau in his career, starting with the creation of his 2016 release, The New Breed. On that album, Parker pulls together all of the interests and inspirations he’d alluded to in his past work, using hip-hop production and heavy sampling to create tracks with funky, sometimes herky-jerky rhythms that combine with live instruments performing composed figures and improvisations. These tracks find Parker drifting toward subtle minimalism, as well as asserting soulful solos to create colorful and engaging music where his guitar is at the center of a much larger sonic world.
In January, Parker released his follow-up, Suite for Max Brown. Created using the same type of studio process as The New Breed, it shows a natural progression that, along with his 2018 single “Blackman,” gives a big picture of the New Breed project. What Parker is creating isn’t guitar music; it’s studio-based composition that draws on all aspects of his voice. Across groove-centric tracks like “Fusion Swirl,” the loose and sprawling “3 for L,” the ethereal “Metamorphoses,” and his warm and meditative take on John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” Suite for Max Brown is the logical next step forward from The New Breed—an expression of an innovative sound that belongs wholly to Parker.
PG caught up with Parker at his Los Angeles home where he was briefly resting between legs of his tour with the New Breed band.
How is the New Breed project different from your previous work?
The New Breed is my way of merging my interest in hip-hop production with improvising. It became a specific way I put together music. For the new record, I’m employing the same kind of techniques and using a lot of the same musicians, but my interests have changed and broadened a little bit in the last couple years and it’s more reflective of where I am now, but using the same process as the first New Breed album.
How would you say your interests have changed between albums?
I’m more into longer loops and make more of the music by myself now, and I’m in a bit more of a meditative state. On the new album, there’s not as much of me trying to blend improvising with the music. It’s more of me just trying to make weird shit. With the first New Breed album, that’s what I was trying to do: mix my interest in hip-hop production with an improvising jazz group. On this, there’s some of that, but not as much.
How did forming the New Breed band inform the music you made on Suite for Max Brown?
This is a follow-up to The New Breed, so it made sense for me to use the same people. The way I choose who to play with is, the people who I think understand where I’m coming from and view themselves as musicians in the modern age in a similar way to myself.
Not everyone, though. [Drummer] Jay Bellerose is a pretty old-school dude. He’s the person you know who has only had a cell phone for two years, barely has a computer, isn’t on social media, and only plays drums from the ’30s. But everyone else is interested in a lot of different things related to merging these worlds of digital and analog music, and is interested in production, and has a pretty broad perspective of the musical landscape in general.
This fall I saw you play two sets in two venues on the same night in Philadelphia. You keep busy with other people’s projects and there seems to be a lot of overlap between musicians in those groups and in your group.
I play side gigs with all kinds of people. Ever since I started making my own music, I’ve always followed this idea of what it means to be a musician as the circumstances change. A lot of it is based in being practical, like making a living, and to be flexible and be open, and also what you can learn from these situations. The more situations you put yourself in, the more experience you have to draw from. If you look at it the right way, it just makes you a better musician.
TIDBIT: Parker explains his album-making process: “I’m a composer first. I have a framework and I assemble the musicians and we record it and improvise off the compositions, and then I try to blend everything together after that.”
Nowadays, musicians have to do everything. You have to produce and engineer your own recordings, and you have to learn how to sample and set up digital music libraries. This is stuff I’ve been interested in my whole career, probably for 30 years at this point. Ever since I heard A Tribe Called Quest in the golden era of hip-hop, my relationship to jazz music really changed. It didn’t just feel like my parents’ music; it felt like something I could relate to as a 20-year-old kid. I started to figure out how they were making that music—sampling it from old records—and it changed the way you’d play, your phrasing, playing with MCs, playing loops over and over again live.
I tend to connect with musicians who are interested in exploring things the same as myself. Makaya sought me out as a mentor when he moved to Chicago because he saw I was DJ-ing, playing with Tortoise, doing all this free-improv stuff, making beats, making my own in-the-cracks records. When he moved to Chicago, I was one of the first musicians he wanted to find and, since then, we’ve become peers. We exchange ideas and I love what he brings to my music, just like he likes what I bring to his.
It sounds like you’re both coming at things from a different angle but achieving similar results.
We make our music in opposite ways. He records improvisations and then samples it and cuts it up and makes compositions out of it. With me, I’m a composer first. I have a framework and I assemble the musicians and we record it and improvise off the compositions, and then I try to blend everything together after that.
How did you come up with the process for creating the music on The New Breed? I imagine you created samples and wrote melodies and guitar lines to build off of those?
Yeah, that’s one way. I also would sample a whole song and re-create it from that. I’d take a song, chop it into pieces and it becomes something else. That’s how the song “Gnarciss” is.
Basically, I use the recording process as a way to make compositions. I don’t so much write music with pen and paper anymore. I kind of removed that part of writing music.
On the 25-year evolution of the daring rock ensemble, blending genres, trading instruments, and coming out of their all-instrumental shell.
For the last 25 years, the Chicago band Tortoise has made primarily instrumental music that, despite often being labeled as post-rock, in actuality defies facile categorization. Tortoise’s commitment to experimentation is evident in its seven-album body of work, in which you’re just as likely to hear a symphonic percussion instrument as an electric guitar or an electronic blast of sound. Rock, 20th century classical, and jazz, among many other influences, are given equal consideration in Tortoise’s musical works.
In subverting the conventional structures and vocabulary of rock, Tortoise has given permission to bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, and Sigur Rós to do the same. To put it another way, Tortoise’s influence has encouraged more than a few bands to find their own experimental directions—not just indie-rock groups, but more mainstream acts, like Deftones, as well.
Tortoise formed in 1990 when bassist Doug McCombs (formerly of Eleventh Dream Day) and percussionist and keyboardist John Herndon (formerly of Poster Children) joined forces as a production team and a rhythm section for hire. That plan never really materialized, but McCombs and Herndon teamed up with drummer John McEntire and bassist Bundy K. Brown (both formerly of Bastro), along with percussionist Dan Bitney, to form the earliest incarnation of Tortoise.
The quintet’s self-titled debut (1993) featured the unconventional configuration of two bass guitarists and three percussionists playing not just standard drum kits, but marimbas and vibraphones. By Tortoise’s third album, TNT (1998), the group had enlisted Jeff Parker, a jazz guitarist known for his association with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). Naturally, improvisation and extended harmony then became more noticeable aspects of their music.
In 2010, the City of Chicago commissioned Tortoise to write a suite of compositions in celebration of the robust local community of jazz and improvisational musicians. The barebones themes Tortoise contributed to the project eventually morphed into the densely orchestrated compositions on The Catastrophist (Thrill Jockey), Tortoise’s first new release in seven years.
On the album, Tortoise expands on its original concept while visiting unexpected territory, like a cover of “Rock On,” by the English singer-songwriter David Essex, and the original song “Yonder Blue,” kind of an R&B ballad with Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley. We chatted with Jeff Parker and Doug McCombs about the concepts at play on The Catastrophist, their idiosyncratic styles—and, of course, the tools of their trade.
Jeff, in addition to playing in Tortoise, you’re a prominent voice in modern jazz. Do you consider yourself a jazz guitarist or a rock guitarist? Jeff Parker: I consider myself a jazz guitarist, for sure. Jazz is where I learned the sounds that I hear, and this informs my approach to music in any situation. I still make a lot of my professional life as a sideman and leader in jazz music. I went to Berklee in the late ’80s with a lot of great jazz musicians. I was classmates with Roy Hargrove, Antonio Hart, Seamus Blake, Mark Turner, Joshua Redman, and Chris Speed, and I still play with a lot of these musicians. Before I joined Tortoise, I made my living playing in jazz organ groups in Chicago—some with Larry Goldings and Chris Foreman—doing a lot of pickup gigs.
How did you become involved with Tortoise? Parker: When I first heard Tortoise, I immediately became a fan. They were essentially just bass and drums: two drum sets and two bass guitars. This appealed to me because I’ve always had a bottom-heavy approach to playing the guitar. When I first started playing music I actually wanted to be a bass player. I picked up my sister’s guitar and played bass lines from Parliament-Funkadelic.
Anyway, the guys in Tortoise and I became friends and they started asking me to sit in. They already had a strong aesthetic thing with the bass and drums, and I didn’t really want to disrupt that. I think the reason they liked playing with me was because I had this guitar style that really fit well with the band. Those guys came up playing in punk bands before they started Tortoise to do something different. At first I blended in, but it’s become less like that over the years. Now the guitar’s more out front—but it’s not as if I’m playing like Jeff Beck.
How does your style fit into the band? Parker: It’s more conceptual than anything. There are definitely certain clichés associated with the guitar, and I avoid them. My approach isn’t about playing loud or screaming leads, especially within the context of so-called rock music. It’s often very sonic or ambient, or just using the guitar to play single-note melodic or repetitive things along with the rhythm section.
How do you reconcile the music of Tortoise with your jazz background? Parker:One of my favorite guitarists has always been Jim Hall. Even though he had a very specific sound and the context of what he was doing wasn’t very broad—usually within a pretty traditional jazz ensemble—he always sounded very open and colorful because of his approach to the instrument. The goal for me is to have a similar approach to playing jazz as I do when I play with Tortoise. But with Tortoise, the sonic landscape is broader than it is in a lot of the jazz I play. It’s music that demands I play with more color, using more effects and experimenting with different timbres, with EQs and percussive elements—there’s kind of an African guitar vibe in a lot of the music I play with Tortoise.
Guitarist Jeff Parker and founding member and bassist Doug McCombs are comfortable trading instruments and roles to pursue the low-end of Tortoise’s ensemble compositions. Photo by Tim Bugbee
Talk a little about the jazz you play. Parker: I play a lot of different stuff, from straight-ahead and standards to free improv, where it’s completely about playing the instrument in an unconventional way. [English free improvisation guitar pioneer] Derek Bailey is another one of my big inspirations; my musical world’s pretty wide open.
How has Bailey’s work informed your style—particularly in the context of Tortoise? Parker:The way he dealt with harmonics—not like the Tal Farlow–style harp harmonics, but finding extended, chiming notes all about the neck. That requires you play with a tight sound. The action of the instrument has to be pretty high, ideally with heavy strings. It requires a lot of resistance, and a setup like this adds presence to percussive sounds. Also, he was a big influence on me in terms of extended techniques: scraping the strings, using feedback intentionally. He was a real pioneer in finding a different way to deal with the instrument, pretty much as revolutionary as Jimi Hendrix, in my opinion. If you study improvised music on the guitar, there’s no way around it. He’s like Charlie Parker in that regard.
Doug, you play both bass and guitar in Tortoise, and guitar exclusively in your side project Brokeback. Do you think of yourself as more of a bassist or guitarist? Doug McCombs: I pretty much think of myself equally as a bassist and guitarist. It didn’t used to be that way. I played only bass for the first 20 years that I was in bands, and then, once I picked up a Fender Bass VI, it was sort of a gateway into guitar playing. I’ve been working really hard on the guitar for the last 10 years, and I’m pretty much sitting around and playing guitar if I’m at home. But after a long period of playing guitar, it’s really a relief to go back to the bass. I love its simplicity—I love locking in with an ensemble.
Jeff Parker’s Gear
Guitars
1950 Gibson ES-150
1983 Gibson ES-335
Amps
Music Man 75 combo
ZT Lunchbox
Effects
Boss FRV-1 ’63 Fender Reverb
Boss RV-3 Digital Reverb/Delay
Crowther Hotcake Distortion
DOD FX-17 Wah/Volume
Electro-Harmonix Freeze Sound Retainer
Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Phase Shifter
Maxon GE601 Graphic Equalizer
Moog MF-102 Ring Modulator
ZVEX Fuzz Factory
Strings and Picks
D’Addario EJ22 (.013–.056 with wound G)
Fender Extra Heavy picks
Doug McCombs’ Gear
Basses
1968 Fender Telecaster Bass
1963 Fender Bass VI
Early 1960s Kay K5915
Guitars
1963 Fender Jazzmaster with Mastery bridge
Baritone parts guitar with Lollar T Series pickups
Amps
Ampeg Portaflex B-18
Ashdown ABM-1000 head
Ashdown 610 cab with Blue Line speakers
Fender ’65 Twin Reverb reissue
Fender ’63 Vibroverb reissue
Gallien-Krueger 800RB head
Victoria Victorilux
Effects
Ernie Ball 250K Volume Pedal
Fulltone Full-Drive2 Mosfet
Last Temptation of Boost
Moog Moogerfooger MF-104M and MF-104Z analog delays
Vintage Pro Co RAT
ZVEX Woolly Mammoth
Strings and Picks
D’Addario EJ21 (.012–.052, with wound G for Jazzmaster)
D’Addario EXL157 (.014–.068, for baritone)
Fender 250B6 (.024–.084, for Bass VI)
Ken Smith Rock Masters (.045–.105, for Telecaster Bass)
Dunlop Standard Tortex picks (.60 mm)
How’d you get into playing the Bass VI? McCombs: The first time I saw one was in a guitar store around ’87. I was amazed when I picked up this instrument that I’d never seen before, and when I plugged it in I heard a lot of weird potential in it. At the time I was getting into a lot of different twang-y sounds: surf music, Ennio Morricone soundtracks, and other guitar-centric music. I’d already been exploring a more melodic side of the bass, and then I discovered this instrument that would allow me to get even more into that. I couldn’t afford to buy one for a long time, and I spent the whole time thinking about what I could do if I ever got ahold of one.
What’s it like to work with Jeff? How has he influenced your playing? McCombs: It’s great. I’ve learned a lot from him—a depth of knowledge about harmonic stuff. He’s really like a closet bass player. He has such a dark sound on guitar anyway, so it’s cool that he can play the bass sometimes and I can play guitar. It’s great to be in a band where everyone can be open enough to let each other play the instruments they’re good at.
The Catastrophist is the band’s first new album in seven years. What took so long? Parker: Our band is called Tortoise, so things tend to happen very slowly…
McCombs: A variety of things. One is that we’ve been together for so long that we try to be conscious about not falling into easy traps and to try to push ourselves away from different things we’ve done before. We always tell each other that it won’t take as long until we make the next record, but it gets longer and longer between records. And it’s just the nature of our band—we’re all sort of compulsively meticulous about little details, and it takes time to work that out.
Talk about the album’s roots. Parker: We got commissioned to write a new piece of music that demonstrated Tortoise’s ties to Chicago’s vibrant jazz and improvised music scene. There are five people in Tortoise and each one of us picked one person in the community we wanted to collaborate with and feature, and we composed a handful of pieces so that each performer could be featured on one. We made a suite of music out of the whole thing, and that’s pretty much how it came about.
Who did you pick? Parker: I picked a tenor sax player named Edward Wilkerson Jr.
McCombs:The person I knew would really add some great stuff to what we were doing is the piano player Jim Baker, who’s also a sort of wizard with the ARP 2600 [analog synthesizer]. He was one of the original five guest musicians we performed the music with in Chicago. Later, we did it in Minneapolis with local guest musicians, and in Paris, we brought some of the American musicians and also invited some French guests. When we decided to sit down and work on a new record, we used these materials to jumpstart it. Sometimes it takes a while for our wheels to get going when working on new material, and it was handy to already have these partially composed ideas.
So what was the music heard on The Catastrophist originally like and how did it evolve? McCombs: The main thing is since we were doing this project with improvisers, we had five pieces of music that were essentially little more than skeletal jazz compositions, like heads or melodies with room for the improvisers to solo over. When we were retooling these pieces for our purposes, we wanted them to be more like Tortoise songs and developed new parts, like bridges and such, to add structure and to make things more interesting. Tortoise isn’t really the kind of band that plays a melody and then someone solos for 20 minutes. That’s fine—and, in fact, fun for a special project—but not at all what we’d go for on an album.
With music that’s so texturally involved, you must have a nonconventional compositional and recording process. How does it work? Parker: One person introduces an idea or ideas to the group that everybody expands on. It could be anything from a sampled drum pattern or just a riff or a chord progression, and everybody adds their thing to it. Sometimes someone will come in with a complete intricate composition and we learn it. When you introduce something to the band you have to be open to the idea that it’s going to change as people add to it. We’ve come to realize that when everyone contributes, it’s the most interesting.
McCombs: Most of the time a song starts as just a little idea, a chunk of melody or some sort of unusual chord sequence, and sometimes just a rhythm. We’re such a rhythm-oriented band and sometimes someone has an idea for an interesting pattern we haven’t tried before. So, 80 percent of the time we’re working on something that isn’t structured at all, throwing ideas around and trying to pull them into some kind of form. We do it not by playing together in a room, but by recording bits and pieces and seeing what happens through editing. Sometimes we might go back and learn [the resulting music] with the band and sometimes not, whatever works.
Before beginning a tour, “we send emails back and forth about what parts each person should focus on and then spend a week or so in a rehearsal room, ironing everything out,” explains Doug McCombs. “It’s the exact opposite of how most rock bands work.” Photo by Tim Bugbee
So recording technology plays a big role in your compositional process. Parker: Yes. I recently did a podcast and was asked how technology has affected the way our music has progressed. It totally has. This current version of Tortoise exists because of the medium of hard-disk recording. Our process very much relies on how easily you can edit and move audio around, to add or remove things. It’s a big part of our compositional process, and it can be compared to making a patchwork quilt.
Talk a little more about the squares in your quilts, if you will, on a technical level. Parker: In the recording process, a lot of songs change meter. Something that started in 3/4 might end up in 5. Somebody might’ve brought a demo of something completely different, and we’ll kind of throw it on a part of another tune and let it become something else. Again, it’s all about taking small ideas and expanding on them, and that’s pretty much what we did with all the source material from the original Chicago suite. Also, this recording process is especially useful these days, since two of us are now in California.
You both play guitar and bass. How do you decide who’ll play which instrument on a given piece? McCombs: It depends on which tune most needs that person’s feel. If the song calls for my particular style, then I’ll play it. If not, I might play guitar and have Jeff play the bass. It all depends on which personal aspects we want to be more prominent on a given song. In general, as far as guitar goes, Jeff and I have pretty different goals for tone and the role that instrument plays in the music. There’s plenty of times were I’ve played all the bass and guitar on the recording and then Jeff has to do one or the other live and vice versa. It’s kind of just mix and match—whatever would be the best and most practical thing for the band.
YouTube It
Although Tortoise’s concerts are ensemble performances that showcase the band’s arrangements, this live duet between guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer John Herndon brings Parker’s improvisational approach into sharp focus. His string scraping and ringing harmonics reveal the depth of Derek Bailey’s influence on his playing—especially when he starts literally digging into his guitar’s strings at the 9-minute mark.
Tortoise tends to avoid vocals, but The Catastrophist has two tracks with singing. How did this come about? McCombs: The first one happened because John McEntire and I were simultaneously fascinated by that song, “Rock On,” by David Essex and we thought it’d be awesome if Tortoise were to do a version and see what happens. We weren’t thinking about putting in on The Catastrophist—maybe a special online release or EP—and in the end the consensus was that everyone wanted it to go on the album. A friend of ours, Todd [Rittmann, of noise-rock band U.S. Maple], did a great job with the vocals.
The other song, “Yonder Blue,” started out like a normal Tortoise song and when we were putting it together it just seemed like a dusty old soul jam to us— something that really should have some singing on it. We’ve been friends with Georgia from Yo La Tengo for, like, 30 years, and we called her and said, “Hey Georgia, can you sing on this?” We didn’t give her lyrics or any sort of restrictions, so what you hear on the record is what she came up with. We all really loved it, and though people have been trying to get us to put singers on our records for years, we didn’t set out to do that. It’s just a coincidence that the record has two songs with vocals.
How do you prepare to tour in support of an album like The Catastrophist, recorded in so many bits and pieces? Parker: We have to do some homework because of all the layering involved in our process. We have to kind of whittle down the tunes to their bare essence. Some of the stuff is tricky—logistically and otherwise. With John’s crazy synth collection, he can’t take that stuff on tour. So we spend a bit of time at home making samples so we can load them onto our software for triggering live.
I do play mostly guitar in the band, so I’ll pretty much just figure out my own parts, but I also learn some of Doug’s parts—he’s a great bass player and a great guitar player. This can be tricky, because you’ve got to consider the various pedals we use and the fact that the guitar and bass sounds get transformed in the mix through various reverbs, delays, and tremolos.
McCombs:The first step is to decide who will play what instrument on what song. We’ve got three drummers who also play keys and mallets and various other sundries. Jeff and I, of course, split our time between bass and guitar, and Dan also plays a lot of bass and a little guitar. We send emails back and forth about what parts each person should focus on and then spend a week or so in a rehearsal room, ironing everything out. It’s the exact opposite of how most rock bands work.Ambient Funk
This adaptation from the song, "Tesseract" shows the influences of dub, minimalism, and funk in Tortoise's music. Notice how the palm-muted lower guitar part, which wouldn't be out of place in a James Brown song, interlocks rhythmically with the bass line. Meanwhile, the melody, played on the higher guitar in contrastingly long rhythms, floats above this bed.