SML

If you attended Big Ears 2026, you need no introduction to SML, the bicoastal quintet that turns fully improvised music into a dance party so textured and multilayered that you may have found yourself rapt and standing still, just to listen more closely. For three nights, SML turned the lobby of Knoxville’s old Greyhound station into a sweaty, glorious mess, bringing in guests like Jeff Parker and Mikel Patrick Avery for seamless sets in the round, lit with a backdrop of real-time psychedelic visuals. The sets were ecstatic and engrossing, streams of synthesizer, saxophone, and guitar rising through the rhythm section and then disappearing, like puffs of neon smoke. It became the talk of the festival, the Greyhound station an unexpected destination: “Did you see SML last night? Meet you there tonight.” They return to Big Ears 2027 for a reprise.

If you missed Big Ears 2026, a quick primer: SML emerged only five years ago after a series of serendipitous bookings at ETA, the erstwhile Los Angeles bar that Parker turned into an improvisational hot spot after he moved to town. The chemistry between the five players—Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann—was apparent to everyone in the room. They used tapes from subsequent gigs as the fodder for two albums made from edits and manipulations, 2024’s Small Medium Large and 2025’s How You Been, efforts full of structural surprises and sonic wormholes. And in 2026, a few months after that Greyhound bacchanalia, SML pulled back the curtain completely, releasing two chunks of a three-night LA stand as Spontaneous Music Live. The rhythms of “The Drums” are so sophisticated it seems like you have stumbled into a reverse uncanny valley, the humans having replaced the machines. And “Roundabouts” reaches delirious psychedelic heights, Johnson’s saxophone and Uhlmann’s guitar spiraling skyward together. Big Ears is delighted to welcome last year’s house band back to Knoxville.