Anna Butterss has played bass on some of the best jazz albums of the past few years—“Small Medium Large” by SML, “Lados B” by Daniel Villarreal, “Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy” by Jeff Parker and the ETA Quartet, “Universal Beings” by Makaya McCraven—and now they’re releasing their second solo album and debut on International Anthem, “Mighty Vertebrate.” Butterss, much like their colleagues in SML—Jeremiah Chiu, Booker Stardrum, Josh Johnson, and Greg Uhlmann—has a ton of talent as both a composer and instrumentalist and knows how to marshal that talent in service of complex, fascinating, and entertaining music.
In 2022, Butterss released their first solo album, the great “Activities,” on Colorfield Records. Johnson and Ben Lumsdaine played on that album, as they do on “Mighty Vertebrate.” “Activities,” like a lot of Colorfied Records releases, feels very playful—there’s a lot of experimentation and variety from track to track. To me, “Number One” on that album feels like the seed for a lot of what happens on “Mighty Vertebrate.” A combination of Butterss’s great bass playing, but not only that—their instinct for shaping a song, adding in synth, flute, drum programming—and Johnson’s mercurial playing on “Number One” have evolved, on the new album, to include Uhlmann’s deft guitar work and Lumsdaine’s drums (and guitar and lap steel). “Mighty Vertebrate” feels like that classic statement-from-an-artist album, one that’s deeper and broader and more complex than what’s come before.
It's so cool to hear Butterss’s solo tunes in the context of their work on those above-mentioned albums, especially the SML album. Butterss is such an incredible bass player and some of the grooves on “Small Medium Large” are so bass-driven and propulsive—and you get some of that on “Mighty Vertebrate,” but you also get the same spirit of restless invention that’s all over the SML album. Sampled (?) vocals, lots of synths, wide-open-landscape-with-desert-bluffs jazz, handmade electronics, music theory turned into vignette. It’s so clear, hearing this album, how good Butterss is at getting the details right and adding small touches to a song to make it sound better.
“Shorn,” the second track on the album, shows off some of this. It starts with these little popping programmed drums from Butterss, more percussion, double bass, and Johnson’s sax, which all settles into a groove for the first phase of the song. Then there’s Uhlmann’s delayed guitar chiming in, and the groove kind of doubles down, compounds, gets denser. And then—a big slowdown—flute from Butterss in the middle of the track, sounding so natural and right (also recalling labelmates Resavoir to some extent). It’s unexpected here, you’d almost expect a solo or another gear-shift on the groove, but it makes it a different kind of song, a better and more interesting song. It’s that kind of craft from Butterss that makes Johnson’s solo immediately afterwards hit harder and feel more prominent. Such a cool song.
One of the other things to highlight about this album is the flow of it. There’s a great interview with Josh Johnson on Since I Left You where he talks about how everyone in SML thinks about albums in terms of flow, especially the flow of each separate side of the album. You can totally hear that in the way Butterss has assembled “Mighty Vertebrate,” and particularly in the pairings of songs they put together, the coolest one (to my ears) being the “Ella” and “Lubbock” pairing that closes out side A. These are the tunes that feel like big stretches of red dirt in Oklahoma, or the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon. “Ella” starts with swirling synth sounds, gentle guitar and bass, soft drums, and then sax. It’s all serene, respiring, existing, perfect. And that leads into “Lubbock,” which has a similar feel. Uhlmann’s twanging guitar, some patient percussion (and lap steel) from Lumsdaine, Butterss’s intermittent bass, and Johnson with some delay on his sax, it feels like seeing a dust devil kick up in front of your eyes and then disintegrate a moment later.
“Breadrich” and “Seeing You” is the other big pair, I think—two huge jams that anchor side B. “Breadrich” has probably the sickest bass riff on the album and features insane playing from everyone involved, and then “Seeing You” (my favorite song on the album) is tremendous, a skyscraper of a song. Pure energy, imperious bass and guitar playing, and both Lumsdaine and Johnson going off road (complimentary). Butterss and this crew—it’s all kind of mind-blowing.