A jazz drummer once told me that the real reason jazz suffered in the late ‘60s was due to the loss of the jazz club, that vital nexus of Black neighborhoods. Inner city riots shuttered these venues and the culture was never quite the same. While not on par with the classic clubs of yore, Los Angeles’ ETA in Highland Park served as an experimental lab for recently-relocated Chicagoan Jeff Parker, letting the guitarist to do whatever he pleased on Monday nights with an informal group: saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and studio/session cat Jay Bellerose on drums. What started out a night for woodshedding jazz standards soon mutated into something stranger as the group’s mycelium tendrils reached further and further out. You can hear these seeds sprouting on 2022’s Mondays At The Enfield Tennis Academy, but its follow-up, The Way Out of Easy, shows the ETA IVtet in full bloom. Four spontaneous improvisations sprawl across four sides, each track a trip in itself, a leisurely horse gait across a flat landscape into the depths of the group’s subconscious. With Butterss and Bellerose providing a steady yet unhurried sense of momentum, you can hear fragments of bebop, dub, hip-hop, post-rock, modal jazz, funk, krautrock, and minimalism drift by. But the array of electronics that Johnson and Parker run their instruments through morph the familiar into something dreamlike and new. An easy way to get pleasantly lost.