Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes

It seemed a fine bit of predestination that guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, saxophonist Josh Johnson, and bassist Sam Wilkes would become a trio. Uhlmann and Johnson knew one another as actual adolescents in Chicago’s fertile jazz scene, even studying there under Tortoise great Jeff Parker before he split for Los Angeles. Wilkes, meanwhile, was an East Coast kid who headed west to study music in L.A., rapidly dropping into a scene at the experimental edges of indie rock. After they, too, arrived in California, Johnson and Uhlmann stumbled into a supergroup, SML; when Wilkes and Uhlmann began doing some session work together, they recognized kindred spirits and improvisational scenes that needed to be connected. Why not, the three reckoned, get together at experimental L.A. hub ETA to see what happened?

What happened was a synchronous camaraderie between three instrumentalists interested in what else their tools might still do, in how the saxophone, guitar, and bass might move and blend in ways that made them indistinguishable. They are, to be sure, high-caliber technicians: On their 2025 debut, Johnson’s saxophone flutters through their “The Fool on the Hill” rendition like wind in tall grass. Wilkes’ bass during “Hoe Down” is a barrage of harmonic funk, Uhlmann’s loping melody for “Fields” an opalescent shimmer. But when the edges of their instruments blur and merge with the help of electronics and extended techniques, as on the aptly named “Unsure,” they challenge the idea of a jazz band itself, drifting into a space between ECM and Kompakt, the New Age and sans-drum Weather Report—a musical fantasy that feels like destiny.