Jeff Parker: The Return of The New Breed
The guitarist and member of Tortoise discusses how his landmark solo album 'The New Breed' merged jazz improvisation with hip hop production, marking his transition from collaborative work to solo artistry.
Today, the Spotlight shines on guitarist, composer, and producer Jeff Parker.
For nearly three decades, Jeff has balanced solo work with his role in the post-rock band Tortoise. His 2016 album The New Breed takes hip-hop beats and puts them in the hands of live musicians. Named after his late father’s clothing store, the album just got the deluxe reissue treatment from International Anthem.
He’s here to discuss how moving to Los Angeles shaped his sound, why making “identifiably human-made music” matters more than ever, and what it’s like transitioning from being the youngest musician in the room to becoming a mentor.
If you enjoy this episode, check out our discussions with Josh Johnson, Gordon Grdina, or Daniel Ögren. All are available on spotlightonpodcast.com.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Jeff Parker’s album The New Breed)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Jeff Parker at jeffparkersounds.com and follow him on Instagram and Facebook
• Purchase The New Breed (IA11 Edition) from International Anthem, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Jeff Parker’s discography on Bandcamp
Collaborators and Musicians:
• Paul Bryan - producer, bassist, mixer of The New Breed
• Miguel Atwood-Ferguson - arranger and composer in LA beat scene
• Scottie McNiece - International Anthem co-founder
• Josh Johnson - saxophonist and keys player
• Josh Johnson on the Spotlight On podcast
Some of Jeff Parker’s Other Projects:
• Tortoise - official website and Bandcamp
• Isotope 217
• ETA IVtet
• Chicago Underground Collective
• AACM
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Your experience with this re-release of The New Breed and some of the other projects that International Anthem is doing—I'm really curious about how much you have to participate, and more importantly, what's it like for you to return and revisit some of this material, especially given that you're a busy cat, always working, always creating. What's it like to reflect like this?
Jeff Parker: It's good, especially The New Breed. That record is very meaningful to me. I'm really proud of that record. It's kind of my favorite one. It's the first record where I feel like I put a lot of pressure on myself to make a record that wasn't collaborative.
Even my projects before that—Like-Coping, The Relatives, and Bright Light in Winter—they weren't like that. That trio was a band, you know? I put myself out front, but we were a band. Those guys wrote as much music as I did. With this one, it was me really stepping outside of my comfort zone. I realized that I could make my own music on that record, and I really liked it.
It feels a bit weird to say because you hear a lot of artists where they made something and they don't listen to it, they move on. All my records, I pour over them pretty hard, and I want myself to be able to like them. I want it to be something that I want to listen to. That's why I haven't made that many records, because I like my records. I like to listen to them. I don't listen to them that often, but when I do, I like to look at them and be proud of the work that I've made.
Lawrence: Last year I had Josh Johnson on, and we talked a little bit about the role of Paul Bryan. A couple of things that I pulled out that Josh had said: one, that sonically he gives things a sense of space, which I thought was a really interesting path to explore. But the other was that he said, "He keeps me from overworking things." I'm really curious, especially since it was your first non-collaborative project, does that resonate for you in terms of having somebody give you at least some guardrails or some guidance? What was your dynamic and working relationship?
Jeff Parker: Paul is somebody I really like—very detail-oriented, technically proficient as a recording engineer, mixer, and producer. That was mainly my relationship with him. I had a specific sound in mind for The New Breed project for sure. That kind of took him out of his comfort zone. I wanted my things to not be so clean. I wanted them to be dirty. I was dealing with samples, sampling stuff from old records and trying to get the ensemble playing to mirror this aesthetic or sound concept that I had from sampling. I wanted to try and bring the two things together so that when the listener hears the record, it's cohesive in that way.
Paul is great. We both learned a lot in The New Breed projects that we did.
Lawrence: You've talked in the past about—I'm curious about place. I love to talk to artists about how place informs a project, and you've talked in other places about how The New Breed sounds like Los Angeles. You've lived in interesting places. Chicago obviously is such a musical hotbed. You attended Berklee. You and I actually have a little bit of shared history—I grew up in Connecticut as well, although I gather it was more of a birthplace for you than a real place of growing up. How conscious are you about place? Do you realize that about The New Breed in retrospect when you listen to it, or is place in you while you're working?
Jeff Parker: Not so much about place geographically—it's more about the communities that you create, the interactions that you make. With The New Breed, the ideas behind The New Breed I've had for a long time, like decades, before I was actually able to be in a place where I had an infrastructure where I could make that music. Paul had a home studio that he offered to me and his technical expertise. I had the music and met musicians out here that I wanted to collaborate with.
If I had made The New Breed in Chicago, it would've been completely different. I would've been involved in a different community, and the aesthetics that that community of musicians had would've worked their way into that album, and it would've sounded completely different. It's more about the community than the actual place geographically.
Lawrence: That's actually really helpful because I made sure I spent time with the record right before our call because I hadn't listened to it in a fair bit. That really resonates for me. I'm not inclined to necessarily ask artists to dissect their work in this way, but your response is very illuminating for me because you can hear elements of that scene. It really does appear. It's not about a sound of Los Angeles per se, or trying to be a tone poem about Los Angeles, but you can hear what was going on.
Jeff Parker: I was aware of the beat scene out here, and one of the musicians who I had been fortunate enough to work with since I moved out here—and it was one of the people I actually sought out when I got to Los Angeles—was Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Certainly some of that music of that scene was definitely working its way into the music that I was making out here, even though the skeleton for that music was all made when I lived in Chicago.
Lawrence: How would you describe the skeleton? Was it your idea to pursue beats and sampling? What was the skeleton?
Jeff Parker: Basically that was it—just components and, as an exercise just to keep myself busy, I started to make beats from samples, just from being a fan of that golden era hip hop in the nineties—Tribe Called Quest and Pharcyde. Not having a technical understanding of that music, I started to just try and do it on my own. Sometimes I would try and recreate beats that I would hear on records. I would figure out the source material and then try and see what they were doing.
It was an exercise of me just trying to have a deeper understanding of that music and try and figure out how to work it into my own music in some way. So I had hours and hours of beats, and I was working in a specific DAW called Reason, which was one of the earlier sample-based workstations. I just started to demo music in that.
My idea was—because I consider myself an improvising musician; my improvisation is based in jazz and bebop—I was trying to figure out a way to use my background in jazz improvisation and composition and arranging with making beats. That's essentially what it was. That's not anything new—people have been doing that for a long time—but my own take on it was what I was trying to get out there.
Lawrence: As you were digging in and learning about the production techniques, I'm really interested in what was revealed to you. Were you surprised at how easy it was or how difficult it was, or did you come to see some of the music you were already enjoying—whether it was the Golden Age hip hop, or you mentioned Dilla and Doom and Madlib—did you come to have a different appreciation for what they were accomplishing as you started to learn more about the how?
Jeff Parker: I already had pretty deep reverence for what they were doing already. I think the thing that I learned the most was how to incorporate it into my own music. It just expanded my palette as a composer. That was my goal—that's what I was trying to get out of it. I like to make beats and stuff, but I have so many other things to offer just as a guitarist and as a composer.
It's the same way—even as a jazz musician, I didn't really have any aspirations to learn jazz so I could regurgitate music from recordings. It's the same thing with hip hop—I was looking to deepen my understanding as an artist.
Lawrence: When I hear you say that, whether it's jazz or hip hop, it feels like there's a contribution to a lineage going on. You're not trying to be a tribute band or regurgitate. You're trying to—it could be just one little brick that you're adding to the wall of the music, or you could have your own little mosaic here in the corner. But it's this sort of never-ending story that the players who view it as a lineage really do get to contribute to.
Jeff Parker: I definitely look at myself as in a lineage of the musicians who mentored me, and the musicians I've studied. It's definitely a lineage. You want to contribute something—it's just creative energy really, trying to put something positive out into the world. People hear your music and then they carry it on.
Lawrence: And ideally build on what you did.
Jeff Parker: Yeah, sure.
Lawrence: Well, on the topic of lineage, tell me a little bit about the album title. If there were no other story or connection beyond, it's a great framing device for what you were doing with this music. It describes what you are after in a really poetic way. Almost literal. Obviously, there is a deeper connection to your life in the title, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that connection, how you chose to adopt the title. Was it homage? Talk to me a little bit about that, if you would.
Jeff Parker: I was working on the material for the record, just making stuff, not really anything behind it. But my father passed away while I was making the record, so it kind of became a tribute to him naturally. It wasn't like I was like, "Oh yeah, I've got to make a tribute to him." It just became what I was dealing with in my life.
But he had, for a short time, owned an Afrocentric lifestyle shop called The New Breed. There was a very small chain of stores. I decided that I wanted to name the album The New Breed after the store. So I did start to do a little bit of research about it, and I found out more about the chain. Then Scottie McNiece from International Anthem helped me to realize that visually—he was like, "Are there any pictures of your dad in the store or anything?" I reached out to my sister and she found a couple of photographs around the shop, and one actually became the cover photo. It's the only photo of my father that I can find of him in front of the store. He's just giving a handshake to a colleague. That's the cover of the record.
Lawrence: I love how the photo carries the same aesthetic in a way as the music in that it doesn't look like it was terribly digitally cleaned up. It's got its analog quality. I think a lot of the music, similar to what you were saying earlier, sounds terrific, but it's not this pristine digital sound. It's got a really nice, almost dynamic range. It's got a—I think that adds to the timelessness of the record. You can't place the production at any one time.
Jeff Parker: That was the goal. I'm glad to hear you say that. That's what I was trying to do.
Lawrence: I'm really curious about your role as a solo performer or a solo creator and your role as a collaborator. How do you navigate those two creative identities? Do they ever come into conflict? To use a really bad analogy, you often see with rock bands when people start working on things outside the band, it's usually a sign that something's not going correctly. I'd struggle to find a lot of examples of bands who went their separate ways and came back and made their best music. Does that lead to hoarding your best compositions for your own work? Or how do you then subsume your ego again to the collective? Do you find that those two roles difficult to navigate, or what is your lived experience of that?
Jeff Parker: It's harder—ever since I started to make my own music, it's been harder for me to collaborate. That's a really good question because for a long time, especially when I first started to collaborate and be in bands around when I first moved to Chicago, I had Tortoise, Isotope 217, we had the Chicago Underground Collective—there were a lot of bands. I was doing a lot of collaborative projects. A lot of music journalists would be like, "Well, when are you going to make your own music?" And I was like, "Well, I'm making my own music. I'm in all these bands with my friends. I'm writing music for all of us to play." It's a beautiful thing—we're all sharing this collective experience. But there's always compromise. It's always like, well, that part's not right, but so-and-so's doing their thing. It is what it is.
It wasn't until I moved to LA and honestly, it was because I didn't know anybody out here. I was really forced—if I wanted to make my own music, I had to do it myself because I didn't really have collaborators out here like that. I had my own studio, which I'm in right now—it's just a converted garage space. But for the first time I had a space where I could work on my own music, and I didn't know anybody. That's how I even came up with my whole solo guitar concept—I had a looping pedal. I'd go to this practice space and practice while my partner would work, and I came up with this solo concept repertoire.
Gradually, once I started to make my own music, it put me in a different headspace.
Lawrence: You returned to collaborating though. You haven't forsaken it.
Jeff Parker: No. Tortoise is active again, and everybody in that band's been doing their own thing. Tortoise was dormant for four or five years. We didn't really do anything. We played our last gig right before lockdown in Japan in February of 2020. Then we didn't do anything else for another five years. During that time, that's when I started making The New Breed and doing my solo records.
It's gotten more difficult for me, honestly. I don't write that much music—it takes me a while. I'm not prolific in the way that some composers are. That's an interesting question.
Lawrence: I suppose you're about to be knee deep in living the answer.
Jeff Parker: Yeah, I am.
Lawrence: Along those lines though, when you all decide to work together again as Tortoise—and obviously I'm not asking you to be a spokesman for the collective, I'm asking specifically for your experience—how important is it to you that there's something new to contribute to the ongoing story? Because I'd imagine when you go away for a while you could probably get a paycheck just by coming out and pulling out something you did fifteen, twenty years ago, and people would be really thrilled to see it and it would be completely legitimate to do commercially, and you might even enjoy it artistically revisiting something. It seems like there's a push to have some new music or a new take, at least on the old stuff. You all are pretty good about revisiting the music in terms of mixing. So I'm really curious about how important it is to you to keep building on it as opposed to revisiting it.
Jeff Parker: It's important. Tortoise has been one of those bands that, for better or for worse, doesn't really look backwards. There have been a lot of times where people tried to get us to do the vibe report out of the cell to the band. I was always the one—I came and joined Tortoise as a fan. I loved the band before they asked me to be in the band. I'm always like, "Yeah, let's do the thing with the two bass guitars and the vibes and shit." And those dudes will just be like, "No, we already did that." And I'm like, "Oh, come on man. That's like classic." But I love that. We all want to move stuff forward. If you're in a band and people like your band, they come to your show and they want to hear you play the music that they know. So we have to play the old stuff, but we like to have new stuff too, for sure.
Lawrence: You mentioned earlier about mentors, and it was something I wanted to explore a little bit with you, especially your role in AACM and the influence and the benefit you've had from mentors. I guess this also plays into our conversation about lineage, especially in the jazz tradition of the lessons you learn on the bandstand, the oral tradition part of jazz, what the old-timers teach young players. I'm curious about how becoming someone that people look to as a mentor—any roles you've played formally or informally with younger musicians—what's that like for you? Does it impact your own practice?
Jeff Parker: It's weird to settle into being the older person in the band, to go from being the young dude in the band to being in the middle, and then to being the older person in the band. I've taught formally—I've taught a lot at workshops. I was recently on the faculty at Cal Arts, and I taught at CSUN at Cal State Northridge. I was on their faculty for a year.
I think a lot of mentors for me—it's not just giving advice. It's more to give you confidence to be brave enough to present your own ideas. That's the thing that I got most from my mentors: they gave you support and practical advice and guidance, and just somebody to model yourself after, an example of somebody that's trying to navigate whatever they're navigating.
I had no idea—it wasn't until I got older and I met musicians like Josh Johnson and Makaya McCraven who'd been watching my career, seeing me play straight-ahead jazz, DJing, making beats, playing weird pre-improv with Scandinavian dudes, playing on pop records. For me, it's just working, but trying to present it like I'm still an artist but still work and be creative. It wasn't until I met people who'd been watching that I even knew that I was doing something.
Lawrence: It sounds like in a lot of ways, because of the curiosity that you exhibit through your work, you show other people possible paths. They don't have to be a straight-ahead jazz cat. They don't have to be a session player. They can do it all.
Jeff Parker: It's hard. It wasn't even anything I was trying to do. I think if I had moved to New York, I wouldn't have found that. Because I was scared to move to New York just because I would see a lot of musicians go to New York and become regular—they moved to New York and now they're really straight-ahead. Now they're a jazz guy and New York jazzer. I didn't really want to do that, but I thought that was what I was supposed to do, even though I didn't really know.
I came to Chicago and I met the musicians from the AACM and I met the indie rockers, and I was really just trying to work. I had to make a living, and I just wouldn't turn down any gigs. The next thing you know, I was doing a lot of different stuff.
Lawrence: So in the same way that somebody like Josh saw that in you, was there somebody you were looking at and saying, "That's a career I wouldn't mind having," or "That's a path I wouldn't mind emulating?" Or was it not that conscious for you?
Jeff Parker: No, it wasn't really anything like that. I had musicians who I looked up to—I think about Herbie Hancock or Bobby Hutcherson, and those guys. If you look at where they started and where they ended up, especially somebody like Herbie, Patrice Rushen and Bennie Maupin—musicians like that was who I always aspired to. They could do anything. You think of Bennie Maupin—he made that record The Jewel and the Lotus, which is this beautiful minimalist kind of—I don't know what you'd call that music, new music. But then most people know him from playing with Herbie Hancock, but then he's a jazz journeyman playing with everybody in New York in the sixties.
I always modeled myself after musicians like that who just didn't seem like you could put them in a box. But then also great musicians who had their own voice. I remember when I was in high school, they had one of those big festivals like Farm Aid or Live Aid. Santana was playing at Live Aid and Pat Metheny was playing with him, and I was like, "Whoa, that's like—" He was just doing his thing. He didn't put on a hat. He had a really strong, singular voice on his instrument, and the music would change around him, but his voice stayed the same. Miles is really the most perfect example of that.
Lawrence: When I think about analogies or people that are doing something similar to what you're doing, I can't help but think of Nels Cline. His solo work is so exploratory and all so different, and then his ability to be in the peak indie rock band, but really just so impressive and not losing that sort of experimental curious edge. That's the thing that I really admire.
Jeff Parker: Me and Nels always bonded over just that. We've always been close in that way.
Lawrence: There is something very unique when I speak to musicians who are either from or who have spent significant time in Chicago. It seems like a town where you can work as a musician if you're willing to adopt some of the attitude you articulated. There are so many opportunities across style and genre that if you're willing to and you can do it, you can have a really interesting livelihood and really scratch a lot of different types of musical itches.
Jeff Parker: Chicago is—I always say it, and people might get mad at me—it's definitely the deepest musical city in the United States for sure. Everything is there at a very high level, and it's independent. It's a tradition of independent infrastructure in Chicago because it's not beholden to the industry that exists on both coasts. There's also the big African American population, which was the center of black enterprise in the United States for so long. All the independent distributors and radio stations were all in Chicago, and it was just its own little independent island where stuff branched out into the rest of the world.
Everything—and it's crazy that in the jazz scene in Chicago, the AACM and the avant-garde, it's totally absorbed into the mainstream. It's not separate at all. It's an amazing place. Chicago definitely—the community there made me the musician that I am for sure, just from having to exist in it.
Lawrence: I gather from hearing you talk about it and from immersing myself in reading about the record and about The New Breed, it really opened up—I don't know what the right metaphor is—another path or another lane or another branch of your musical tree, however you want to say it. It was the beginning of something new for you. I'm curious, so a decade or so later, where are you on that path? What are you still trying to figure out through music, or what's surprised you as you've had this moment to look back on the record? Where are you now, a decade later from where you were then?
Jeff Parker: I'm trying to figure that out. I know that I want to make The New Breed bigger—not bigger in terms of just bigger, like a bigger or more expansive work, maybe bigger ensemble, more orchestration somehow. I think The New Breed really helped me to discover that I really like to make records. I like to work in the studio. I don't like to go on tour so much anymore, so I'm trying to figure out how to really expand on that as a composer, arranger. I'm trying to work at it. I'm trying to find the time to do it.
