The Alchemy of Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

by Tanvi Krishnamurthy

Jeff Parker’s 2022 Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy is his most recent album as bandleader. It is a smooth double LP featuring a series of long-form free improvisation performances recorded at ETA, a Highland Park neighborhood cocktail bar owned by Ryan Julio, Mateo Glassman, and James Bygrave, and founded in 2016.

The literary reference was what first intrigued me about the album, besides my appreciation for Jeff Parker’s music. A behemoth of a novel with a reputation that follows it around no matter whether people have read the book or not, an allusion to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a tantamount implication, whatever that implication may be. The bar where Parker recorded the album obtained its name when its owners rifled through a copy of Infinite Jest and settled on ETA as its namesake—not just for the Foster Wallace reference, but also for the transportation double entendre in connection with another bar they own, the Greyhound (which is technically named after a drink, not the bus).

Ryan Julio met Jeff Parker when percussionist Matt Mayhall introduced the two after seeing Julio wear a Tortoise t-shirt while bartending at ETA—a clear sign that perhaps wearing your favorite band’s t-shirt can lead you to play an instrumental role in the production of one of its members' albums. Parker had originally been looking for a place to DJ, but with Julio and his business partners’ invitation, Parker began performing jazz sets at the bar. Julio described to me a so-called “Mount Rushmore of ETA” made of Mayhall, producer and bassist Paul Bryan, and, of course, Jeff Parker, who each took a day of the week that they would consistently perform at ETA. The beauty of the performances of ETA flowered from the connections Julio formed with these three. Julio, who de facto functioned like a booking agent for the bar, found new artists to perform their own sets or join pre-existing weekly performances through the numerous connections that each musician had to the next. He didn’t require any sort of screening or sound check for these musicians: if one of them knew the other, that was proof enough of their caliber. It was musical social network theory in action, one that fostered a reliable, tight-knit, and undeniably talented community of LA-based musicians who shared a passion for the specific intimacy of performance at ETA. Julio noted that, as the popularity of these performance nights at ETA grew, he had tour managers and touring artists reaching out to him to schedule gigs, which he always declined. He made it clear that the ethos of these performance nights at ETA was centered around the natural extension of the community of musicians within Highland Park’s experimental and avant-garde jazz scene.

Julio notes that Parker, specifically, took a while to solidify what his performances on Monday nights at ETA would look like. Eventually, he landed on a seamless quartet of Jay Bellerose on drums, Anna Butterss on bass, and Josh Johnson on saxophone—a group which, Julio explained, took some time to come together, as Parker sought a band he could feel comfortable with both on and off stage. For 4-5 years, this quartet played nearly every Monday at ETA, with someone filling in where needed over the many weeks. Given that Parker’s quartet—and most of the performers at ETA— were working musicians, members would often have to be absent for some weeks in order to take on session gigs across the country or go on tour as a part of a backing band to make some money. But they’d always find their way back to this cramped stage, performing at this bar simply because it was creatively fulfilling, week after week.

Hearing from Julio about how this album came to be, he remarked on how another core element of the culture of ETA came from Bryce Gonzalez. Very similar to how Julio met the other “founding fathers” of performance nights at ETA, Gonzalez was simply another one of those quirky regulars at ETA that Julio got to know more and more as he bartended, and who just so happened to be a skilled audio engineer and producer. As he decided to test out his new rig on the performances, Julio notes that “he went from being the guy in the corner with a shot of Fernet to the guy in a closer corner taping everything on reel-toreels.” Weekly for 3-4 years, Parker, Bellerose, Butterss, and Johnson had their Monday night performances which Julio charged $5 per person to attend and Gonzalez recorded on reel-to-reels through a complicated fourchannel bespoke mixer set-up.

The quartet mostly stuck to standards for Monday night performances for some time, but after Gonzalez had condensed his four years' worth of recordings and had Parker listen back to them, Parker had a change of heart in the vision for their performances. This was when the quartet’s performances experienced a slow transition to free improvisations, laying the foundation for the final sounds on Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy. Julio notes that this transitional period of three weeks or so, when the band switched up their sound, alienated much of the original audience, who were accustomed to the familiarity and comfort of these jazz standards. But by the fourth week, Parker’s quartet had doubled the size of their crowd, finding its niche in dedicated musicians and music fans who had a real passion for longform improvisational jazz. Julio notes that regular audience members (some of whom would turn into ETA performers) included Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes, International Anthem founder Scottie McNiece, and Northern Spy Records owner Adam Downey, to name a few. The set-up of ETA meant that most people could barely get a glimpse of the performers on stage, but that didn’t matter. The sonic sorcery of the performance was enough fulfillment on its own. Oftentimes, the completely packed house would respond directly to the music being played on stage by dropping to pin-drop silence when required, even to the point where bartenders would stop shaking cocktails and the refrigerator would have to be turned off to quell its hum.

Julio’s words on the formation of this album confirmed to me what I already heard within its contents. This music is the amalgamation of years and years of love and passion, whether that be for free improvisation, tongue-incheek literary references, complicated audio technology, or the reliability of knowing exactly where you will be on a Monday night in Highland Park. It is brimming with a sort of intimate affection that, while felt by anyone who listens to it, is perhaps specifically reserved for this small Highland Park neighborhood bar and the regulars, who weaved a thriving artistic and musical community through its doors, made all the more bittersweet with the bar’s closing in December of 2023. “These guys are regulars first,” is what Julio told me about every single person he named in explaining the creation of Parker’s most recent album, and that goes for the entirety of the performances as ETA, too.

Even though ETA had to shut its doors, the legacy of this bar is still alive and well, through Parker’s album and otherwise. Members of Parker’s quartet still play together where and when they can, and more of the wealth of recordings captured by Gonzalez may see the light of day still. One such series of recordings is set to release in July under a quintet called SML on their forthcoming EP, Small, Medium, Large, featuring Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy players Butterss and Johnson on bass and saxophone, with Jeremiah Chu on synthesizers, Gregory Uhlmann on guitar, and Booker Stardum on percussion.

From talking with Julio, my understanding of Jeff Parker’s most recent album necessarily expanded. My appreciation is now not only focused on the skill of these honed artists, but the myriad of intentional and unintentional occurrences that needed to fall into place for the alchemy of their performance to come together, be recorded, and finally be released. The album is an embodiment, codification, and representation of a community of musicians and artists who found a space to generate some of the most intimate yet engaging performances one could find in Los Angeles through a naturally extending and evolving system of relationships. It is people finding connections within and through one another, and creating something beautiful from it.

This article was written based on an interview conducted with Ryan Julio, bar-owner of ETA.

This piece is a companion to Tanvi Krishnamurthy's June 30th, 2024 Sunday Profile of Jeff Parker.