Jeff Parker shuffles into the Charleston. Armed with a winter coat, boots, and a beanie, he’s lugging his guitar case. Although he lives 2,000 miles away in Los Angeles, Parker recognizes the bartender and offers to add him to the guest list for his Sunday night show at the Empty Bottle. He’s not new here.
Parker is back in Chicago for an appearance at Pitchfork’s Midwinter festival, where he’ll join his bandmates in Tortoise playing their landmark 1998 post-rock record TNT in full. Adapting a 21-year-old album, which was recorded in individual pieces, to a live setting is no small task. Yet watching the band weave an intricate choreography of trading instruments and dueling drums throughout the set, you’d never know this was their first time playing some of these songs live.
Behind Parker’s warm, unassuming manner is a prolific creative force that’s helped earn him the titles of jazz veteran, beat producer, bandleader, and sideman. In 2016 alone, he released The Catastrophist LP with Tortoise; two albums of his own, The New Breed and Slight Freedom; and contributed to several other releases.
“This is the kind of interview I like to do,” Parker tells me while sipping a Krombacher. Chet Baker is playing and we have the corner bar to ourselves as we discuss the differences between Chicago and L.A., Tortoise’s creative process, and the need to surprise yourself.
You can read the full interview on October. Check out a few of my favorite moments below.
I imagine the music scene in L.A. must be quite a bit different than in Chicago. How has the move impacted you creatively?
I always say Chicago has the healthiest creative music scene in the world. Out in L.A., there’s no shortage of amazing musicians but everything there is commercially based. Even the creative musicians out there might make their living doing something more commercial. They might be in well-known touring bands and just make weird music for fun. In Chicago, it’s more ingrained in the local music fabric.
Out there, I make more commercial work sometimes to try and make money. I’d say the music I make there has less of an avant-garde aesthetic, just because of where I make it and the musicians I interact with every day. It’s good. It takes me out of my comfort zone that I settled into when I lived in Chicago for so long.
I dig it. It’s a good energy out there in L.A .right now. It kind of reminds me of when I first moved here. L.A. is an entertainment industry town so there’s that facade of commercial stuff, but there’s a lot of creative people moving there. It feels like there’s a lot of potential for stuff to really happen there that’s off the grid.
So, it’s a magnet for all these creative people who have to pay the bills, but after that they can get together and get weird.
Right. I had a love/hate thing with Chicago when I lived here. I’m not from here. I moved here after college. I appreciate it a lot more now that I left. It’s the best city for architecture and design and stuff here is still pretty cheap. It’s really cosmopolitan and diverse. You can get any kind of music for sure. The restaurants here are crazy. It’s a great city.
I always say Chicago has the healthiest creative music scene in the world.
How does it feel to be performing TNT after all these years?
It’s been awesome. We’ve played some of the songs from it since it was out, but there were a lot of them we couldn’t play. We weren’t enough people to even try and pull them off. But for this show, Jim Elkington is playing with us and we also added cornet, trombone, viola, bassoon, and cello. So we’re trying to play with the actual instruments on the record, like we have a marimba instead of doing it digitally with the MIDI-controlled one we tour with. It’s fun to play a lot of those songs.
What songs are the most challenging to relearn or adapt for the live setting?
“TNT” we could never play convincingly. There were six of us when we made TNT and then Dave Pajo left, so it was hard to play the stuff with only five of us. We tried to play “TNT,” but on the record there are two drummers playing and we could never fill it out. Technically it’s really simple which makes it hard to play because it’s all about dynamics, making it go somewhere and staggering the entrances.
The other one we never really played was “Everglade.” It’s a classic Tortoise sound with two bass guitars and mallets. I think it was because Dave wrote it and we stopped playing a lot of the stuff that he introduced to the band after he left. It feels good to play that one because I’ve always loved it.
We try not to be totally literal about it. We don’t want to feel like we’re paying tribute to our own band especially since we’re still active.
If you had to pair TNT with a beer what would you tell someone to drink with it?
Old Style.
Why is that?
It’s pretty Chicago. We’re a Chicago band. I’d tell them to get a six pack.
Jessica Mlinaric founded Urban Explorer in 2010 to inspire curious travelers by highlighting history, culture, and hidden gems in Chicago and beyond. She is the author of ‘Secret Chicago’ and ‘Chicago Scavenger.’ Jessica has visited 20+ countries and 30+ U.S. states. She has more than 16 years of experience as a marketing strategist and works as a freelance writer and photographer.
