Jeff Parker
guitar
About this Artist
Jeff Parker is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer. A longtime member of the influential indie-band Tortoise, Parker is recognized as one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative electric guitarists and composers. With a prolific output characterized by musical ideas of angularity and logic, he works in a wide variety of mediums—from pop, rock, and jazz to new music—using ideas informed by innovations and trends in both popular and experimental forms. He creates works that explore and exploit the contrary relationships between tradition and technology, improvisation and composition, and the familiar and the abstract. His sonic palette may employ techniques from sample-based technologies, analog and digital synthesis, and conventional and extended techniques from over four decades of exploring the intricacies of the electric guitar.
Also a prolific collaborator, Parker has appeared as a side musician live and on recordings with performers including Flea, Andrew Bird, Joshua Redman, Vijay Iyer, Smog (Bill Callahan), Toumani Diabaté, Yo La Tengo, Daniel Lanois, Brian Blade, Makaya McCraven, Joey DeFrancesco, Gerald Clayton, Bennie Maupin, Patrice Rushen, Carmen Lundy, Nels Cline, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Clipping, and noted visual artists Theaster Gates, Charles Gaines, Cauleen Smith, and Harold Mendez. Parker has released several critically acclaimed albums under his own name. His latest, The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem/Nonesuch, 2024), premiered at No. 1 on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Albums chart and landed on numerous year-end “best of” lists.
Parker has been an associate member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1995. He was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2022.