Jeff Parker - Slight Freedom

Pitchfork 80

What does the concept “slight freedom” mean when you’re a musician like Jeff Parker? Is the qualifier tongue-in-cheek? It’s not like he must hear the word “no” very much. Since the 1990s, as a linchpin of Chicago’s music scene, Parker has developed his singular voice across a variety of contexts. He’s a core member of Tortoise, where his playing often feels like the glue that holds the band together; as a co-founder of the Tortoise spin-off Isotope 217, he tackles looser, spongier strains of jazz-funk. Then there are his sideman gigs—for Toumani Diabaté, Matana Roberts, Meshell Ndegeocello, among many others—and his activities in a number of more traditional jazz ensembles, including his long-running trio with bassist Chris Lopes and drummer Chad Taylor.

Even as a frontman, though, Parker is a stealthy player, not a limelight-hugger; he’s known for his restraint and his carefully controlled tone. His uncluttered playing seems to hew to the tenets of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: “Discard anything that doesn’t spark joy.”

This past year has seen Parker moving outward, in multiple directions—filigreeing the edges of Tortoise’s sly, energetic comeback, The Catastrophist; exploring tangled textures and timbres alongside cornetist Rob Mazurek on the album Some Jellyfish Live Forever; and rolling up a decade’s worth of beat sketches on The New Breed, a laid-back set of soul-jazz experiments colored by his recent move to Los Angeles.

With Slight Freedom, he tries something new yet again. Unlike The New Breed, where a handful of collaborators helped execute his ideas, Slight Freedom, his first totally solo album, is all Parker. He recorded everything live in the studio with no overdubs, using a Boomerang Phrase Sampler to layer loops and drones in real time. But where some users of looping pedals are prone to building up towering stacks of tone, Parker’s restraint still prevails. He constructs the title track like a spider spinning its web: Using a dubby, percussive pattern as the main support, he lays down fine, almost invisible fibers—seemingly wispy yet deceptively sturdy—that are more structural than ornamental. There are no wasted motions. Yet the whole, which seems to hang in mid-air, glistening, remains deeply expressive, despite its extreme economy.

“Slight Freedom” sets the tone for the whole album. All four songs, including a drowsy instrumental cover of Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” and a loosely woven instrumental version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” are quiet, atmospheric mood studies that tend to conceal more than they reveal. Sometimes it seems as if Parker is intent upon hiding behind his own shadow: In “Super Rich Kids,” his muted, almost bossa nova-like plucks are nearly obscured by sounds pouring in through an open window: braking buses, car horns, the occasional burst of police siren, terse and menacing. A similar kind of veiling happens on “Lush Life,” in which a dull electrical hum stretches from beginning to end, masking the contours of Parker’s tremolo-soaked guitar with faint dissonance. Parker’s take on the standard is bittersweet, almost resigned; from time to time, the melody reluctantly pokes its head out from beneath the chords, but mostly the song dwells in an all-consuming fog—a perfect evocation of Strayhorn’s hungover and heartbroken narrator, slumped against the bar in some seedy dive.

“Mainz,” on the other hand, gives Parker his chance to shine—at least, within the spare framework he has set up for himself. It’s hardly acrobatic, but the song’s unusual time signature, which switchbacks between 13/8 and 12/8, is as tricky as it is lithe. In his trio’s 2012 recording of the Chad Taylor composition, the band closes out the song by locking into a slow, driving groove, but here he takes a considerably different tack: The song’s final five minutes are just pure, shimmering held tones and softly droning feedback.

It turns out that some of the album’s most striking moments are those, like this one, where the least is happening. In the opening “Slight Freedom,” the principal theme is eventually swallowed up into a luminous bath of tone, and for six more minutes he proceeds to gently stir it, eking quiet mini-melodies out of the swirl. It’s not jazz, it’s not ambient, it’s not noise; it’s something more idiosyncratic and more personal, something only Parker could have come up with. Perhaps this is what “slight freedom” is supposed to mean: Not an anarchic exploding of rules, not the total liberation proposed by free jazz, but a steadier, stealthier path—dissolving boundaries, softening constraints, and wearing away at the edges of things until the ideas run as freely as water.