SML is five ridiculously talented musicians: Anna Butterss, Josh Johnson, Jeremiah Chiu, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann. “Small Medium Large” is their debut album—long-form improvisations the band recorded live over a couple of two-night dates in 2022 and 2023 that they then cut up, edited, and reassembled together. It sounds incredible. Like a mix of older fusion jazz and avant-garde rock, an alluring combination of high-energy jams and more pensive experimentation. You’ve got five top-tier players who are all great composers on their own playing together with abandon—it’s not exactly surprising that the results are good, but you never know with things like this. “Small Medium Large” totally delivers. It’s as good as you’d think it’d be if you’re familiar with the individual musicians, and it even exceeds those expectations—this album gives them all a chance to step out and be creative in ways that they don’t always do in other contexts.
You get them all doing what they do best, of course. Throughout the album, you hear them hit their spots, so to speak—Chiu’s otherworldy synth sounds; Johnson’s expressive and imaginative sax playing; Butterss’s super-active basslines; Uhlmann’s playful, thoughtful guitar; and Stardrum’s fluid and adaptive drumming. But besides being incredible feature players, all five also know how to do a little business in the background to add to the song—all through the album, you can hear each of them adding little bits of texture, a necessary noise here and there, to round out the sound of a song. That’s what makes this album so great.
“Industry” shows off SML at full throttle: a pulse of airy percussion, kick drum, a friendly bit of synth, and then all-out aggression from the bass and guitar, which enter the track at 100 mph. About a minute in comes Johnson’s sax, poking around, finding some room to operate, eventually tangling with Uhlmann’s guitar. Uhlmann, Chiu, and Johnson work throughout the middle part of the track, with all three twisting to assert themselves. The track winds down into bass, Stardrum’s clusters of cymbal hits, and Chiu and Uhlmann sounding like they’re running out of power, their instruments intermittently buzzing and crackling until the track ends.
You can hear one of SML’s other main modes “Window Sill Song,” a calmer, more deliberative track, which starts with a real (or synthesized) marimba pulse, to which Johnson adds long, fluttering phrases on the sax, and in the background, a muted rhythmic strum on the bass or guitar. Shakers, sounding like a field full of insects, rise and disappear, and the track returns to the marimba-esque pulse (which then carries into the next song, “Switchboard Operations”).
“Small Medium Large” also has a very curated flow—the band shows such tight control of the way the energy revs up and recedes from track to track. Just listening to those first three tracks on the album—“Rubber Tree Dance,” “Industry,” and “Herbie for Commercials”—lets you know you’re in good hands; “Rubber Tree Dance” is a sort of contemplative jam; “Industry” is all kinetic energy; and then “Herbie for Commercials” is the small experiment, the momentary detour. This band and this album feel like something so special and so rare—the kind of thing you look back on and feel astonished that it ever happened.
SML is playing a couple live shows at Zebulon in L.A. on July 8 and 9. Go check them out if you can.