SML is the quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann.
Their second album, How You Been, finds the supergroup of prolific composer/producers pushing ever further into the hyperrealist, collectivist approach to music creation nascently explored on their debut Small Medium Large, which was lauded as “awe-inspiring” by Glide, “exuberant” by the Los Angeles Times, and “an exciting milestone” by Pitchfork.
At inception the band inspired disparate but distinctive artist comparisons like Essential Logic, Oval, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, and electric Miles Davis, as well as assorted genre touchpoints like Afrobeat, kosmiche, proto-techno and new-jazz.
With How You Been their work manages to both collapse and explode such derivatives, displaying a new, high resolution version of SML, fully-flowered into a new strain of sound, bound to incite its own copycats in due time.
“SML might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter.” – Pitchfork
It’s important to note that SML’s sound wasn’t created in a vacuum.
The band is part of an extensive community of creative musicians who collaborate in a multitude of ways.
Los Angeles in the 2020s is a musical Petri dish in the same way that Cologne & Dusseldorf were for the birth of Krautrock; Canterbury for progressive rock in late-60s; NYC for No Wave & the Downtown sound in the late 70s and 80s; Chicago for genreless, Tortoise-adjacent sounds in the 90s.
The musicians of SML represent the core of a new school within the Los Angeles jazz and improvised music scene that seems to breed infinitely overlapping combinations, including Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, the Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes trio, Anna Butterss’s own band, and various other projects encompassing every single member of the SML, respectively.
