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Feb 07, 2022 Web Exclusive By Mariel Fechik

Jeff Parker is a difficult musician to pin down. The Los Angeles-based guitarist, composer, and producer moves fluidly between genres and musical communities, collaborating with jazz musicians, hip-hop acts, and indie rock bands alike, including being the guitarist for Chicago post-rock mainstays Tortoise. His latest album, Forfolks, is a transfixing solo guitar record that finds Parker turning inward, creating a collection of songs that border on musical meditation.

One of Parker’s frequent collaborators, drummer and beat scientist Makaya McCraven, recently stated that the term “jazz” is “wholly insufficient” to describe scope of Black music, since it communes in some way with every genre that it touches. That ethos finds its way into Forfolks, which owes as much to folk and early blues as it does to jazz. The tone of Parker’s guitar is both immediate and otherworldly, the meditative sparsity calling to mind Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting “Dark Was the Night” or Nick Drake’s droning, melancholic folk melodies.

Forfolks consists of all originals with two exceptions: the jazz standard “My Ideal” and Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty.” Both covers are enfolded into the universe of Forfolks and treated with the same muted mystique of Parker’s originals. Despite the entire record being solo guitar, Parker nevertheless creates a sense of rhythm and motion—for example, on the almost 11-minute long “Excess Success,” Parker’s pedaled fingerpicking under the angular melody almost mimics swung eighths on a ride cymbal. On songs such as “Four Folks” and “Suffolk,” Parker utilizes hypnotic loops and sustained chords, granting them a feeling of suspension. There is an intimacy to the way that Forfolks was recorded, as though Parker is in the room with you; the ambient studio noise becomes almost like a second instrument.

In the album’s liner notes, musician Matthew Lux says, “[Parker] is an unusually selfless improviser, oftentimes laying out and highlighting the contributions of his band mates.” This can be clearly heard in Parker’s collaborations with other musicians, like his contributions to Makaya McCraven’s new LP, Deciphering the Message. Parker’s sound is instantly recognizable but never overbearing. In the solo medium, this selflessness is transmuted into a contemplative conversation with himself, where one idea never outweighs another. Forfolks is a galaxy in eight tracks—these songs orbit each other wordlessly, leaving near-tangible tracks of light in their wake. (www.jeffparkersounds.com)

Author rating: 8.5/10