SML (Night 1)

In only four years, SML has emerged as one of the great American jazz-ish acts, an ensemble accidentally borne out of a fertile Los Angeles scene that seems to know nothing of stylistic limitations. Guitarist Greg Uhlmann booked two nights at the late, great Highland Park space ETA, inviting four other instrumentalists who had never shared a stage all at once. There was Anna Butterss, the versatile Australian bassist who had played with Jeff Parker and Jason Isbell. There was Jeremiah Chiu, the inquisitive synthesizer player who seemed to sense everything as input for his machines. There was Josh Johnson, a saxophone session ace who had learned to use loops and effects on his horn like a series of magic tricks. And there was Booker Stardrum, a drummer who, like Butterss, seemed capable of shapeshifting in so many different contexts. Those shows were recorded. The chemistry was apparent, and SML was born.

On its lauded 2024 debut, Small Medium Large, the quintet took those tapes into a series of home studios and blurred the boundaries between live takes and studio manipulation, between machines and humans. With impossibly tricky rhythms, where players move against and with each other in dazzling patterns, the record raised questions about where jazz ends and electronica begins, about how Miles Davis and Conny Plank share space in ideas of modern creation. They do this live, too, with Chiu processing signals in real time and the band pushing against the idea of the shared rhythmic “one” like a curse. “We talked a little bit about the music one night, and it just ended up getting in our way,” Butterss once told Hearing Things. “I was thinking about what we talked about versus being in the moment, which is the space I really want to be in.” At Big Ears, where SML will be in residency, this great quintet will have many chances to find such spaces.