Guitarist Jeff Parker is perhaps best known for his founding role in much-feted art rockers Tortoise, and while he's a long-serving member of his native Chicago's ever-shifting improv jazz scene this is his first album created in his new home of Los Angeles. The city's rich hip hop and broken beat heritage has clearly had an effect on Parker's much broader sound palette, the likes of FlyLo, J Dilla, Thundercat and DJ Shadow all spring to mind, with scratchy vintage samples mashed into organically bubbling loops, while his use of woozy Wurlitzer, plinking piano and melancholic mellotron all add to the feeling of richly layered trip-hop jazz. It's a big step on from his stripped back previous albums The Relatives and Like-Coping, with his gently spiralling guitar work still centre-stage but now surrounded by a sumptuously sympathetic soundbed on his most accessible LP to date. The lackadaisical grooves might once have been rooted in recycled samples but here are given a deep lazy lustre by the live rhythm section of bassist Paul Bryan and drummers Jamire Williams and Jay Bellerose. Serious props must also go to Josh Johnson's unwaveringly sweet inventions on flute and particularly alto sax as well as Parker's daughter vocalist Ruby who signs off this hazily hypnotic set with the bittersweet ‘Cliché’, which already feels like a well-worn classic and is in fact far from clichéd. It's an album that smolders like the setting sun on one of those hot late-summer days.