While I hadn’t heard Jeff Parker’s name before coming across this album, I had definitely heard him play before as a member of the Chicago post-rock group Tortoise. It was only after looking up his full discography that I realized how prolific he is as a guitarist. Here Comes Ezra comes from his 2016 album The New Breed, which was put out by Chicago label International Anthem.

After studying music at the Berklee College of Music, he moved to Chicago and got involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musician, which has been supporting avant-garde jazz and other improvised music since the mid-1960s. The AACM was closely aligned with art collectives on Chicago’s south side in the mid-1960s and continues to promote and support experimental and improvisational music from black artists. It’s interesting that the AACM would come about around the same time that the first American studio for experimental classical music was being put together just a few hours south of the city at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The AACM is all the more impressive because of its grassroots origins, and it continues to support experimental music by black artists in Chicago and elsewhere to this day.

In addition to his solo releases, Parker has scored a number of films which you can see here. You can purchase his albums on his site as well. Tortoise most recent album The Catastrophe has been in pretty heavy rotation for me as of late, and they recently put out a book of pictures from their tour.