Guitarist/bandleader Jeff Parker has released the Happy Today album-length concert film. It was captured by director Charlie Weinmann at the 2025 performance at Los Angeles’s Lodge Room that became Happy Today, the acclaimed third album from Parker’s long-running ETA IVtet. Happy Today was released on May 15 via International Anthem / Nonesuch; you can get it and hear it here. You can watch the film here:

Weinmann’s live film offers a rare opportunity to see Parker and the elusive ETA IVtet in action. Across the 44 minutes of Happy Today, the ETA IVtet—drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, and Parker— engage in their signature, minimalist, form-bending improvisational syntax, encircled by audience at Lodge Room as they perform in the round.

In a recent Pitchfork profile on Parker, with the headline “How Jeff Parker Changed the Sound of Jazz,” Grayson Haver Currin wrote of Happy Today: “With the rhythmic elasticity of a beat tape and the tonal splendor of almost everything he has ever done, it is a 44-minute synthesis of Parker’s last six decades.” Read the full feature here.

In August, Parker and the ETA IVtet will do a run of shows that includes a three-night stand at Lodge Room in Los Angeles; details and tickets here.

The past two years have been busy as ever for Parker, who has long been a prominent player within a wide-range of music communities, in jazz and beyond. In 2025, he released new music and toured with his long-standing experimental rock band Tortoise and brought the ETA IVtet in for an NPR Tiny Desk performance. Additionally, Parker and two other members of the IVet—Butterss and Johnson—are featured on Flea's solo debut album, which was released March 27 on Nonesuch Records. The album, Honora, also was produced by Johnson.

Happy Today is ETA IVtet’s first recording made outside of the now-shuttered, widely-beloved Los Angeles micro-club ETA. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, ETA was where the band’s collective sound coalesced over the course of a storied seven-year Monday night residency that yielded two critically-acclaimed records—2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy.

Recorded and mixed in situ at Lodge Room by engineer Bryce Gonzales with a custom-made analog mixer and Nagra stereo tape recorder, Happy Today captures a bright moment during dark times. As Parker shares: “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family. Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.”

With Happy Today, that sound—honed in such an intimate setting—is scaled up for a much larger audience and space at Lodge Room. But the essential formula remains the same, and has the same hypnotic, deeply-tuned listening effect. The almost alchemical musical communication creates a feeling of connection not only between the band members but also between the band and their audience—an ongoing trust exercise that invites listeners to become part of the exchange, and experience the joy of deep listening.