Listening to an old Jeff Parker album just now, ‘old,’ now that’s a sort of a nonsense word in the digital music era, the release date was 2005, it was hard not to think of his two careers. As a member of Tortoise and as a band leader.  A favourite record of 2016, among a few dozen to play bits of again just for kicks at this look-back time of year that more recent record of the American’s was The New Breed a new peak from the Chicago guitarist. Tortoise have been gigging too – other post-rock bands are available. Unlike a million progressive jazz guitarists Parker does not sound or try to sound like Bill Frisell although he is manipulating that space first cut into jazz via a power cable decades back by Charlie Christian that Frisell beyond bebop often ends up in to harness all sorts of slacker jazz, rock, improv and experimental ideas and flick an almighty switch for the mélange to surge and linger. Parker manages, and listen, above, to the old for want of a better word back catalogue stuff, modern mainstream acoustic jazz (eg soaked in Kenny Burrell or even early-Brother Jack vintage George Benson in this instance without Parker ever being literal in his stylising) to winkle out and manipulate these hidden spaces by worrying away at them as if he was doing harmonic acrostics. And he does that on the understated ‘Here Comes Ezra’ on the new 2016 album, just above, the whole thing stapled together by a regular off-the-shelf beat before the sax of Josh Johnson takes it out, the ideas unfolding one by one. There’s lots of teased in overdubbing just enough to thicken the textures and use of keys to supplement the harmonic edge that the guitar on its own can’t always provide. Parker also plays by turn a Korg MS20, Wurlitzer electric piano, Mellotron, and uses loops, samplers MIDI and drum programming but it’s mastered down and yet not as sparse as an ECM record although, still to be fair, much more David Torn matte than Matt Pierson satin in terms of studio sonics and in the case of The New Breed locates a world away even if only a decade and a bit on from The Relatives in terms of his conceptual thinking. Jazz fans, myself included often forget when they think of iconic players such as Parker that they actually can turn on and turn off the tap of sub-generic styles within jazz without even thinking about it beyond say an intention to do a free jazz album like Ornette, or a mainstream thing, say. Whether the starting point is the same as the ending point is anyone's guess but that doesn't matter because it is creativity, the whole point of making music, end of, and communicating via emotion however abstract. There’s a sense of exploration on a deftly unravelling track such as ‘Visions’ on the new album that unloads a kind of plangent tug and drag into the musical narrative. When Parker builds up a guitar solo with uneasy vocalising stitched in behind it as on the absorbing ‘Jrifted’ you’re sucked in, and you’re gonna come away overall with a sense of discovery and admiration at the skill of hearing someone create something completely fresh that is uncontrived and natural say over at ‘On How Fun Is It To Year Whip’ on which drummer Jamire Williams, who you may have heard with that fine keyboardist Kris Bowers, makes his presence felt, coming into his own as he curls a groove out of nothing. Ironies abound, there isn’t a jazz cliché in sight even on closer ‘Cliche,’ notwithstanding. Say it ain’t necessarily so, by musical paraphrase. SG