The guitarist Jeff Parker has had a singular trajectory: member of the post-rock band Tortoise since the mid-’90s, participant in Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (which helped spread free jazz and improvisational music in the ’60s), and more recently the purveyor of a loose, melodic sound between jazz, hip-hop, and ambient music. Part of what makes The Way Out of Easy great is the way it pours that looseness into familiar stylistic molds—the wistful ballad (“Late Autumn”), the reggae crusher (“Chrome Dome”), and so on—that give the listener an easy inroad no matter how digressive the music gets. Like great ambient, you can focus on it or throw it on during dinner; like great jazz, it nurtures both individual expression (listen to Anna Buttress’ beautiful soloing on “Easy Way Out”) and collective purpose. Too porous for the mainstream but too mellow to be called avant-garde, The Way Out of Easy is its own quiet, subtly absorbing lane.