Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - Happy Today

Recorded and mixed at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025, Happy Today is the sound of Parker and the rest of the IVtet—drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—engaged in their signature, minimalist, form-bending improvisational syntax across two sprawling, LP side-length pieces. 

Recorded and mixed in situ at Lodge Room by engineer Bryce Gonzales with a custom-made analog mixer and Nagra stereo tape recorder, Happy Today captures a bright moment during dark times. As Parker shares: “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family. Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.”

The past two years have been productive and busy as ever for Parker, who has long been a prominent player within a wide-range of music communities, jazz and beyond. In 2025 alone, he released new music and toured with his long-standing experimental rock band Tortoise, and brought the ETA IVtet in for an NPR Tiny Desk performance. Additionally, Parker and two other members of the IVet—Butterss and Johnson—are featured on Flea's solo debut album released March 27 on Nonesuch Records. The album, Honora, was also produced by Johnson.

Happy Today is ETA IVtet’s first recording made outside of the now-shuttered, widely-beloved Los Angeles micro-club ETA. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, ETA was where the band’s collective sound coalesced over the course of a storied seven-year Monday night residency that yielded two critically-acclaimed records—2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy.

With Happy Today, that sound—honed in such an intimate setting—is scaled up for a much larger audience and space at Lodge Room. But the essential formula remains the same, and has the same hypnotic, deeply-tuned listening effect. The almost alchemical musical communication creates a feeling of connection not only between the band members but also between the band and their audience—an ongoing trust exercise that invites listeners to become part of the exchange, and experience the joy of deep listening.