Tortoise – “Jetty” from TNT (1998 Thrill Jockey)
It feels like a fool’s errand, trying to write about Tortoise. I’ve been sitting on this one for weeks, stymied perhaps by the lack of lyrics/vocals. At least if there’s some sort of narrative arc happening alongside or even with the music, that provides another way in. But no such luck here.
And the thing is that I’ve written about Tortoise on one or two occasions in the past.
So I don’t really know what to say. I maintain that Tortoise is perhaps the best live show I’ve seen overall. As such I can’t recommend enough that you rush out to see them live (though, looking now in March 2024, they don’t have any dates listed), or, barring that, you blow off the rest of the day and watch a bunch of live videos. You will be rewarded handsomely, I promise.
Perhaps another recommendation: don’t hide your light under a bushel. If you’re into some weirdo stuff, let the world know about it. For instance, six or seven years ago my friend Brooke was in my classroom subbing for me or proctoring an exam or something, and saw my Tortoise TNT poster. We were already lunch buddies, but it turns out we both love Tortoise, and that album especially, and it’s nice, all these years later, to think of Brooke whenever I think of this record.
So, not a lot of words this time around. Go watch some videos.
Oh, one more thing: I love that this song has multiple iterations — it appears as itself on TNT, as we’ve discussed. But it also appears as the closing track on Tortoise guitar phenom Jeff Parker’s 2021 solo album ForFolks, as “La Jetée.” Importantly, Parker also plays in Isoptope 217, who released the song as “La Jeteé” on 1997’s The Unstable Molecule. Isotope 217 contains other members of Tortoise as well (Dan Bitney and John Herndon). But what’s this? The Chicago Underground Trio closed out their 1999 debut Possible Cube with “La Jetée,” with a writing credit to Parker, who doesn’t play on this record but is in the Chicago Underground Quartet and Isotope 217 with Rob Mazurek. That’s a lot to untangle, and so you may want to do some Wiki research in between Tortoise videos, but a handful of things come into focus for me:
one: Chicago is and has always been a music town. All of the artists listed above, all owe a debt to (and many are directly involved with) Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, a scene centered around a love of improvisation and The Green Mill.
two: “La Jetee” is the actual name of the song, written by one Jeff Parker (who also wrote my favorite Tortoise song, “I Set My Face to the Hillside”). It looks like it can weather a variety of diacritical mark placements, and it further looks like it first appeared on that Isotope 217 record, a year before Tortoise’s 1998 masterpiece TNT.
three: there are lots of songs (I counted: 42) called “La Jetee” (with variable accents) on Apple Music. I’m certain that most of them don’t have anything to do with Tortoise. I’m mostly certain that this is also true of the version by El Huervo/Niklas Åkerblad from 2021’s Flammarion. Mostly. Not all the way. And while this all might seem like a cautionary tale against internet distraction, let me tell you about how I’m grateful for it, because otherwise I might not have discovered Munich’s Oakhands, whose “La Jetee” seems to have no non-titular connections to today’s feature. I feel similarly about The Linus Pauling Quartet, whose version is also a wholly different song but stylistically maybe more on the Tortoise side of the dial than the Oakhands side. In any case, I think if a person really wanted to figure out how to sound like Tortoise, a dedicated study of these few dozen tracks would get them pretty close, and that’s a fun coincidence. Also I feel like I should listen to more French music.
Anyway, I guess I found plenty to write about. And while the internet never bought me anything in life, but I wouldn’t be made if the half dozen or so of you out there pooled your money and paid for me to get a tattoo of the early clip art band logo:
The Shuffler 