Don’t look now, but your phone is becoming a portal to your favorite outdoor music festival. Disney+ and Hulu announced last month that Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, Lollapalooza, and Austin City Limits Music Festival will stream live across both platforms for the first time, giving audiences around the world access to some of the year’s biggest live music moments in real time.
The news dropped just after Apple Music’s “Club Live” streamed this year’s massive Las Vegas Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) music festival. The broadcast featured multi-hour sets from major artists and was followed by next-day rebroadcasts and select on-demand DJ mixes. The live experience remains the one major item that attendees will pay any price to take part in—looks like streamers want in the action, somehow. Stay hydrated, peeps. This is only the beginning.
But in the meantime, you know the drill, lovers of music and culture. We are Under the Stars, a quasi-weekly column that stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases and upcoming shows. We keep hustling with the changes, thinking outside the margins. Hop in. And thanks for spending some time with us.
JEFF PARKER AND ETA IVTET, HAPPY TODAY (INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH RECORDS)
Space and grace. That’s the gist, or the closest I can get to explaining the magic here.
Jeff Parker, who’s been playing guitar with Tortoise for years, got my attention with a 2020 dedication to his mother, Suite for Max Brown. Using ambient, meditative alt-rock accents, and hip-hop-adjacent production methods, Parker knocked on the door of an innovative future for jazz. He has been walking through it with a cavalcade of other stars ever since, recording these loose, impromptu sessions that have become chapters in a 21st century rendering of jazz.
The band that travels these improvised roads, ETA IVtet, includes drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson. In the past, they would record these sessions at the now-defunct Highland Park in Los Angeles. Happy Today, recorded and performed in the round at LA’s Lodge Room with an attentive audience of 400 or so, continues in this tradition of uncharted territories of groove. (The Lodge Room, by the way, sits on the same street and is just a few hundred feet away from the storefront that used to be ETA.)
Maybe that explains the heavy listening here between the musicians. Or maybe not.
The two credited 20-plus-minute songs, “Like Swimwear” and “Happy Today,” house inner suites, vignettes, and snapshots in this installation of songs that play as microclimates, blending and expressing within each other. These long-form compositional pieces, created in the moment, feature bassist Anna Butterss laying a foundation, adding color, and then rebooting the idea with new bass lines composed on the spot, which packs bump. Johnson wraps lyrical harmony around circular riffs, where his sax, at times, flanges gently off and out.
I can only imagine these 400 aficionados snapping their necks to these small and gentle adjustments that when accrued, take the shape of charts, softly inching about. Parker starts with short, plucked verses, and these wizards trade off with one another. They pause for the gaps, accompany each other, wait their turn to take the lead next. Or, they just bathe in the glory of simpatico musicianship. Parker is painting quiet masterpieces here, and it seems the inspiration isn’t leaving any time soon.
Lucky for us. Pick up Happy Today here.
BLACK GOLD SUN, SELF-TITLED EP
Art is a funny thing. While waiting for inspiration, sometimes the most obvious, heinous things can piss you off so hard you form a friggin’ band to release the burn. That’s how “free jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality” Irreversible Entanglements formed (they met during a Musicians Against Police Brutality concert in 2015, protesting the murder of Akai Gurley by an NYPD officer), and a similar origin story can be spun about the Bay Area punk trio Black Gold Sun.
Band members Anita Carol Lofton, Veronica, and Q Lynn were aggressively motivated by the 2024 election results to form a Black woman punk band. What followed was a spontaneous sidewalk show outside a San Francisco skateboard shop, a second gig at The Ivy Room, and a fast track to Doll Fest 2026. Upon a quick listen to an advance copy of the trio’s upcoming debut album, it’s the fuzzy feedback we needed to cut through all this noise Fox News keeps shoving down our throats. Are you motivated? Good—get over to Golden Ration in Oakland on its June 13 release date to witness Black Gold Sun.
More info here.
SWEEPING PROMISES AT RICKSHAW STOP, SEPTEMBER 18
In 2023, musicians Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug read our post-pandemic minds and delivered the walloping alt-rock thunk of a record, Good Living Is Coming for You. With its single “Eraser,” the duo from Kansas skillfully Frankensteined some kinda punk DIY spirit of past generations and procured a new type of ripper for 21st century disillusionment. We can only hope the new album, on which they are reported to be putting the finishing touches, will combine that same minimalism with pop flourishes.
Grab tickets here.
SPACE GHOST, DANCE PLANET: BE FREE EDITION (TARTELET RECORDS)
Space Ghost, aka Sudi Wachspress, is one of those Bay Area dance music producers whose name on a new record means you’re in. You just buy it. Done deal.
Because here’s what you’re going to get: Modern house, rooted in soul, radiating warmth, positivity, and just a feel-good vibe through and through. Simple words to explain quality arrangements for an artist who understands different temperatures for alternating dance floors.
The current Dance Planet project from 2021, now remastered and loaded with remixes, comes with so many different variations on the originals that you will have a blast going through these 20-plus tracks and seeing what Wachspress and friends have tweaked. For example, the “Dream Weaver (Crystalline Reality Remix),” made with Glenn Astro, operates with this ambient two-step kick and all sorts of micro-abrasions skittering within the timbre.
It’s nuanced enough to fit into several types of settings, but still lands nicely.
Pick it up here.
DIGITAL UNDERGROUND, SEX PACKETS (35TH ANNIVERSARY)
I am still of the mindset that you could slide into any party in the city, pop on Digital Underground’s mission statement of an anthem “Freaks of the Industry,” and in seconds, have everyone reciting those lovely, filthy MC Nasty lyrics over that Donna Summer humidity.
Boy howdy! That song’s album, Sex Packets, scrambled people’s brains globally. Folks on the East Coast, on first listen, kept saying, “What? These cats are from the West Coast?” (Rest in peace to the genius himself, Shock G; he melded comedy and stone-cold jams into a document that is loved eternally in all corners of the world.)
It’s way above and beyond hip-hop, while still being hip-hop in all its glory. It cuts through people’s inhibitions. You come to its party for the stealthy rhymes and undeniable smoothness of “Doowutchyalike” and the meal ticket catch-all accessibility of “The Humpty Dance.” Both tracks are big, juicy hits. Like peak Madonna, MJ, Prince, Bruuuuce type joints. As a matter of fact, most folks still know exactly who you are talking about when you refer to them as just Digital.
But then you get past those classics, wall-to-wall jams keep rolling out this album. The rawness of “Rhymin’ on the Funk,” the flipped Herbie Hancock sample on “Under Water Rimes” (yes, they spelled it “Rimes.”)
The way Fred Wesley and The Horny Horns’ “Four Play” sample keeps poking your auditory system on “Packet Man” makes it a five-star, head-nod situation. And the centerpiece jam… we’re talking about the entire song, intro, comedy, lyrics, and Shock G’s newsman-on-the-street dry wit on “Gutfest ’89”? “My God, I ran that intro over and over. It was hilarious. But eventually, I had to get into that hustled-up funk.
Any time you play the old “What’s the best debut album ever?” game, pluck Sex Packets down for consideration—and don’t leave until it’s agreed upon.
Pick up the anniversary edition here.
