A phrase from the late experimental jazz guru Sun Ra helps shape almost everything that Jeff Parker does as a musician.
“Sun Ra said … ‘If you deal with what you know, you’re dealing with what’s finite. And if you deal with what you don’t know, it’s infinite. ” says Parker, who will perform at Iowa City’s Hancher Auditorium Saturday with his band The New Breed, recalling advice passed on to him by one of his mentors.
“Most things that I do are kind of experiments, you know. I don’t really know what’s going to happen…. You’re trying to get away from what you know, so that you can keep learning, and keep expanding.”
That quality of always striving for new paths defines the career of Parker, 57, who has been helping to push the envelop of musical sound for decades. He started in the early 1990s with Tortoise, a Chicago band that is credited with bringing a focus on musicianship to alternative rock.
Long before sampling and loops became so prominent in all forms of music, Parker and Tortoise were leading the way in manipulating existing records and sounds to hear them “in a different context.”
“That’s something that people take for granted now, but you know, it wasn’t always like that,” he said.
Jeff Parker, performing at Hancher Saturday night, appears on more than 200 albums throughout his career.
Artists he’s accompanied cover an amazing range, from soul-pop groundbreaker MeShell Ndegeocello, to the late jazz saxophonist hero Fred Anderson. He’s featured on more than 200 albums overall, including about four that he’s done solo.
His work is all driven by his love of “the mystery in jazz,” Parker says, something he recalls first discovering at age 6 when he experienced his dad, a professor, playing congas with a group of his students.
“You didn’t know what was going to happen. It was exciting,” he remembers. “I definitely knew that I wanted to play music after that. I could tell that the musicians, what they were doing was spontaneous and rhythmically intricate.”
A self-described introvert off the stage, Parker says he actually enjoys writing music more than performing it. But he also has great respect for the vulnerability needed to perform, and regards performing as a “gift.”
“I like people to be able to relate to it,” he says of his music. “It’s my way of giving something to us.”
His greatest influences and inspirations are some names you’d expect: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, and John Scofield, to name a few. He also holds great respect for hip-hop producers, DJ Premier, who partnered with jazz rapper Guru in the duo Gang Starr and has produced artists as diverse as J Cole and Mac Miller, and the late J Dilla, who produced Q Tip, Raphael Saddiq, and Erykah Badu.
One surprising influence he mentions: Neil Young, whom Parker says he deeply respects as a writer.
For all of his leadership in experimentation, Parker also has a streak of tradition – including involving his family in his work. His 22-year-old Daughter Ruby, one of his two children, sings on some of his most recent albums.
His band, The New Breed, is actually named after a clothing store his late father also ran. And one of his albums, “Suite for Max Brown,” is about his mother.
The Washington Post describes Parker in a 2022 review as as “an electric guitarist with an ability to shift fluidly between sweet melodies, rich harmonies, coarse fuzz, and note-dense shredding.”
And Aquarian Drunkard, which highlighted Parker in its end-of-year review in 2022, heralds his “flowing, spontaneous” style.
You can catch Jeff Parker and The New Breed in two shows Saturday night, at 7 and 9 p.m., at Iowa City’s Hancher Auditorium. Order tickets here.
