Dark and Deep (Green Monkey) LP

Dark and Deep is Jeff Parkhurst’s solo debut, 12 years in the making. Jeff is first and foremost a highly skilled drummer, but here he makes his first public foray as a singer, a multi-instrumentalist and most importantly, a songwriter, with nine quite varied songs that somehow congeal into an exceptional whole. It is an artistic vision, solitary yet supported, cultivated over time. How did this happen? In 2022 long-time Olympia musician Jeff approached producer Tom Dyer about pulling together a group of songs that he had been chipping away at for years, all in various states of completion, recorded in many places under a variety of circumstances. They began consolidating the bones of these songs and twisting them into something completely new. Jeff took tracks that he had recorded on a solo piano 10 years before and added new drums that absolutely grooved. He pulled up the late beat poet Charles Adler to get the festivities free-wheelin’ and then added space-jazz guitarist Joe Mailhot over the magnificent groovation of Oly jazz bass master Steve Luceno to take it to another level. Jeff descended through the seventeen layers of Dante’s Hell with John Ridgway’s cheerless accordion to look for some kind of acceptable peace. He took an ancient iPad to a school portable building to record singer Betsy Perkins in the perfect environment and then brought it all back home to twist into shape in the studio. Dyer even adds a little guitar grind to the smashing “GTO”. Some songs are sharply autobiographical tales from Jeff’s life, “Woods Are Dark and Deep” is famously and beautifully Robert Frost, fifty years after his death.