Two Songs, No Filler, One Very Bad Year
I came to Jeff Parker’s Happy Today backwards, in three separate steps that only lined up afterward. First, my friends invited me to two shows at Jazz em Agosto at the Gulbenkian — Bonbon Flamme, then, five nights later, SML. Separately, another friend put me onto Flea’s Honora, so I’d been sitting with that record for a while. Then, entirely by chance, I was reading a review of Happy Today and ran into two names I’d already filed away for unrelated reasons: Anna Butterss and Josh Johnson. They’re the rhythm section I’d just watched anchor SML at the festival. They’re also, it turns out, most of the reason Honora sounds the way it does. And here they were again, backing Jeff Parker himself — whose old Monday-night residency at ETA, I learned in the same review, is where SML came from in the first place.
So I went looking for what that specific circle of musicians does when it’s their own name on the cover. That’s Happy Today — the third record from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, and it is, structurally, a strange thing to hold in your hands: two tracks. That’s the whole album. “Like Swimwear” at 23:37 and the title track, “Happy Today,” at 20:49. No hooks, no choruses, nothing you could clip for a trailer. Just two long-form improvisations, recorded live, that between them run longer than most double albums bother to.
And somehow both of them work everywhere. That’s the thing that got me — I’ve had this on in the morning with coffee, late at night doing nothing in particular, in the background while reading. It never once felt wrong for the moment. It’s not “background music” in the dismissive sense; it rewards attention the second you give it. But it also doesn’t demand it. Two tracks, forty-four minutes, and it fits whatever hour you hand it to.
The Room Behind the Record
Here’s what I didn’t know going in, and what changes how the whole thing sounds once you do: this quartet spent seven years doing a Monday night residency at ETA, a tiny, now-shuttered club in Highland Park, LA — the kind of room where a band gets so used to playing together that they stop needing to talk about it. Anna Butterss has said flatly that she learned to improvise in this band. She hadn’t really played free before ETA. That residency is where “Like Swimwear” and “Happy Today” — and the two albums before this one — actually got built, night after night, in front of maybe forty people at a time.
ETA closed in December 2023. This record was made somewhere else: Lodge Room, a bigger room a few blocks from where ETA used to be, recorded live on August 20, 2025 — the first time the group had ever recorded outside their old home.
And 2025, for Jeff Parker personally, was brutal. His family was displaced for eight months by the Eaton fire — one of the catastrophic wildfires that tore through the LA area that January. He’s talked about it plainly: “There was a lot of sadness and despair.” The studio sessions the band had planned around that time reportedly didn’t have the life this live performance does, and what you’re actually hearing on Happy Today is a band choosing to play a real show, for a real room, eight months into a genuinely hard year — and naming the record after what they found when they did it. Parker has called it a “statement of joy” made in direct defiance of that year: the fire, the displacement, and the wider political despair of 2025 sitting right alongside it.
That context doesn’t make the record heavy, which is the part I find most moving about it. It makes it feel earned.
”Like Swimwear” — A Fire Learning to Catch
The album’s first side — I keep wanting to call these “sides,” even though it’s a digital release, because that’s exactly how they behave — opens like something reluctant to exist yet. One review described it as starting “like a flame starting to take hold,” a restrained, fluttering pulse that barely commits to anything for the first several minutes. Parker and Johnson trade what critics have called “abstracted flurries of notes” — small, exploratory phrases, more question than statement, while Butterss and drummer Jay Bellerose keep the floor almost imperceptibly moving underneath.
What I love about “Like Swimwear” is how patient it is about that build. This is a band that, per Parker, isn’t afraid of static space — staying on one idea far longer than a studio record ever would, until one player quietly shifts and the whole unit moves with them, without anyone announcing it. Over twenty-three minutes, that hushed, almost telepathic conversation slowly turns into what one critic called a “muscular and hypnotic musical sweat” — the quartet locking into a genuine groove by the back half, funk-adjacent and cool-browed rather than showy. It’s the sound of a fire actually catching, in real time, after a very long, very careful spell of just kindling.
”Happy Today” — Naming the Thing Anyway
If “Like Swimwear” is the build, the title track is the ember it leaves behind. “Happy Today” runs a little shorter — under twenty-one minutes — and sits in that same restrained, muted-bliss register the whole record lives in: “an air of restraint,” every player in “perfect equilibrium,” contributing to what one reviewer called “an expertly sculpted mosaic of muted bliss and cool-browed funk.”
Knowing the backstory, the title stops being simple. This isn’t a song called “Happy Today” because everything was fine. It’s called that because it wasn’t, and they played it anyway, and for the length of one Wednesday-night set at Lodge Room, eight months after losing their home, it was true. That’s a much more interesting kind of joy than the uncomplicated kind — the sound of people choosing the feeling because they know exactly how conditional it is.
Two Bands, Same Three People
The thing I can’t stop turning over, though, is the coincidence — or not-quite-coincidence — of finding this record and Honora in the same week. Josh Johnson produced Flea’s album and co-anchors this one on sax. Anna Butterss plays upright bass on both. Jeff Parker plays guitar on both. It’s not the same band, exactly — Flea and Deantoni Parks aren’t here, Jay Bellerose is — but it’s close enough that you start to realize this specific pocket of LA jazz musicians, built partly around that ETA residency, is quietly showing up as the connective tissue behind more than one 2026 record I’ve been paying attention to. Flea gets the marquee and the Nonesuch press release. Jeff Parker’s own band is where you actually hear what these players do when nobody’s borrowing them for a guest verse.
Standout Tracks:
- Like Swimwear (23:37 — the slow-catching flame, from fluttering pulse to hypnotic funk groove)
- Happy Today (20:49 — restrained, muted-bliss title track, joy stated as an act of will)
Credits: Jeff Parker — electric guitar, electronics. Josh Johnson — alto saxophone, electronics. Anna Butterss — acoustic bass. Jay Bellerose — drums, percussion. Recorded live at Lodge Room, Highland Park, Los Angeles, August 20, 2025. Mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters.
Notes: Released May 15, 2026 on International Anthem/Nonesuch — the ETA IVtet’s third album and first recorded outside their original Monday-night home at ETA (closed December 2023). Made eight months after Jeff Parker’s family was displaced by the Eaton fire. Shares two-thirds of its rhythm section — Josh Johnson and Anna Butterss — with Flea’s Honora, released two months earlier on the same label.
Why This One Stuck (Postscript)
I wrote most of the above before catching SML close out Jazz em Agosto at the Gulbenkian on August 9th — Butterss and Johnson again, same patient-groove method, this time live in an outdoor amphitheatre in Lisbon. That show is why this record resonates the way it does: it turned “shared personnel” from a fun fact in the credits into something I’d actually watched happen. The static-space-then-lock technique Parker describes above isn’t a studio trick or a nice piece of album-review language anymore — I stood in a garden and watched two-thirds of this band build exactly that arc from near-silence to full groove, in real time, with a different lineup. Happy Today is a record about a band’s private language surviving displacement. Watching that language show up, unrehearsed, in a completely different city and configuration, is what convinced me the record wasn’t describing a one-off night — it’s describing how these specific musicians always work. Full write-up of the two shows (and the connections between them) is in the Jazz em Agosto quick note.