Parker grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and came to Chicago in the early 1990s, where he plugged into a scene that was doing genuinely interesting things. The city had this cross-pollination happening between jazz musicians and the post-rock world — bands like Tortoise were pulling in players who could improvise, and Parker fit perfectly. He became a core member of that group for years, which gave him a platform but also meant a lot of listeners knew him as a rock guitarist before they knew him as a jazz one.

His jazz credentials are real though. He's worked extensively with the Chicago scene's heavyweights, playing with people like Ken Vandermark and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians crowd. He knows his way around bebop, he can play inside or outside depending on what the moment needs, and he has a tone that's warm without being soft. He doesn't showboat. If anything, he sometimes plays so far under the radar that you have to lean in to catch what he's doing — and when you do, it rewards the attention.

The New Breed (2016) is where a lot of people really caught on to what Parker was building as a solo artist. He made the record largely by himself in his home studio, layering guitar over loops and samples, letting things breathe and simmer. It has the feeling of late-night music — not melancholy exactly, but reflective, with grooves that lock in and stay there. The hip-hop influence is real and it comes honestly; Parker is genuinely invested in that music, not just borrowing its textures for credibility. The follow-up, Forfolks (2021), stripped things back to solo guitar, which took some nerve given how much of his reputation rested on layered production.

Forfolks (2021) is a different kind of record entirely — just Parker alone with his guitar, playing standards and originals without much ornamentation. It's quiet and focused and it shows how much he's internalized from the fingerpicking tradition alongside everything else. Some listeners found it spare to the point of austere, but it works precisely because he doesn't oversell a single note. There's no padding, no showing off. It sits in a tradition that runs from Jim Hall through Bill Frisell without sounding derivative of either.

What Parker represents is a generation of players who didn't feel the need to choose between jazz and everything else they loved growing up. He moves between contexts — chamber-ish solo records, sample-heavy studio experiments, free improvisation, rock bands — without making any of it feel like a contradiction. He's not trying to merge genres as a concept; he just plays whatever the music asks for, and he's been doing it long enough that it sounds completely natural.