Lars Gotrich | May 7, 2025 Music can transport you, even or especially when the destination's unknown. For 22 minutes, this is what Jeff Parker's Tiny Desk with the ETA IVtet can offer: a space for your mind to meditate on what the music speaks, set to a gossamer groove.
Even though Parker is in the group's name, equality runs the show: a quiet drone sets the tone, then the music is completely improvised. Stillness, followed by reflection and response. Josh Johnson, an alto saxophonist with a quiet-yet-commanding sense of effects, builds little worlds out of loops and fluttering melody. Jay Bellerose, a drummer who's worked with the likes of Allen Toussaint and Suzanne Vega, is painterly in his brush and stick work, but bursts with a sun-beamed drum fill when the moment calls. Anna Butterss performed next to Jenny Lewis for her Tiny Desk in early 2020; here, the bassist both provides a grounding presence and the basis for liftoff. Parker — an immediately recognizable, yet malleable guitarist known for his time in Tortoise, the Chicago Underground and a CV far too long to list here — plays with repetition until melodic figures reveal themselves. Informed by the members' backgrounds in jazz, ambient, funk, rock, electronic and minimalist music, the band's mystical approach to improvisation never bends to one sound at a time.
Andie Huether, our audio technical director for this concert, dug into NPR's equipment archives and set out a Nagra IV tape recorder on the Desk as a nod to engineer Bryce Gonzales, who developed a live mixing and recording rig with a similar unit for the band's sets at the now-closed ETA club in Los Angeles. "In the days before portable digital recorders," Huether explains, "NPR reporters and engineers would take machines like this one into the field to capture reporting and bring (or ship) the resultant tapes back to HQ to be edited and incorporated into our broadcasts." We didn't record this Tiny Desk analog, but the spirit remains: a conversation captured in small space, one worth watching — and hearing — over and over again.
SET LIST "Hearing 3.26.25"
MUSICIANS Jeff Parker: guitar Josh Johnson: alto saxophone Anna Butterss: bass Jay Bellerose: drums
TINY DESK TEAM Producer: Lars Gotrich Director/Editor: Maia Stern Audio Technical Director: Andie Huether Host/Series Producer: Bobby Carter Videographers: Maia Stern, Joshua Bryant, Kara Frame Audio Engineer: Josh Newell Production Assistants: Ashley Pointer, Dora Levite Photographer: Grace Raver Tiny Desk Copy Editor: Hazel Cills Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed Series Creators: Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
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