SML have spent two albums teaching listeners to love a beautiful illusion. Their new release pulls it apart.
The Los Angeles quintet — bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Booker Stardrum and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann — announce Spontaneous Music Live, out on LP, cassette and digitally on June 26th via International Anthem. Lead piece Roundabouts, the album’s 24-minute B-side, is on streaming platforms today.
When we reviewed their 2024 debut Small Medium Large, Thomas Blake described “exploratory kosmische jazz” built from live shows that had been “recorded, dismantled and reassembled.” Last year’s How You Been saw the band “perfect the collaging technique they introduced on their debut” — tracks stitched from improvised fragments, then edited and post-produced into something punchy and polished. Both records, in other words, were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced with the “best morsels collected, arranged and rearranged just so.”
Spontaneous Music Live removes the editor’s hand entirely. Recorded across the band’s December 2025 residency at LA venue Zebulon, weeks after How You Been arrived, its forty-eight minutes comprise two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, captured and mixed live to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales, the engineer behind Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet live documents. What you hear is the band in the room, mining for the moment of discovery in real time.
That tension between the edited and the live runs deep here. Our reviews kept reaching for the same touchstones — Blake heard the ghost of Miles Davis at his most experimental on the debut, and on How You Been a band “paying subtle homage to Miles Davis and Can.” It’s a fitting lineage. SML carry the same split persona those acts did: the tight, deconstructed studio statement set against the long, hypnotic live expansion.
The roots help explain the instinct. SML formed in the orbit of Jeff Parker’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, the long-form improvised set Parker cut at the now-defunct LA venue ETA, with Butterss and Johnson in the band. When ETA closed in 2023, the pair joined Chiu, Stardrum and Uhlmann, and the live shows they played were the seed for everything since.
Every member has been mid-stride. Stardrum released his WeJazz debut Close Up on the Outside in February; Uhlmann put out his International Anthem solo album Extra Stars in March, which Blake called “deceptively light and expertly layered,” praising him as “a human wrecking ball in reverse, swinging from studio to studio, band to band.” Johnson and Butterss both feature on Flea’s solo album Honora and on the new Jeff Parker ETA IVtet album Happy Today. In March the band played six full-capacity shows over three nights as artists-in-residence at Big Ears in Knoxville, and a New York Times feature last November placed them at the centre of an LA jazz surge.
So the timing is right to hear SML uncut. On the studio albums the post-production was part of the art — the perspective, the shaping, the punch. Spontaneous Music Live hands that perspective back to the listener. Each fragment that might one day be reworked into an album track sits where it landed, scattered through the collective push and pull. As Blake wrote of How You Been, this is “improvised music at its most engaging, its most immediate” — only here there’s nowhere for it to hide, and it sounds great.
Spontaneous Music Live is out June 26th on International Anthem.
Pre-Order: https://international-anthem.lnk.to/SpontaneousMusicLive
SML prepare to headline two nights at Los Angeles’s Teragram Ballroom on June 26 and 27, as part of Aquarium Drunkard’s 21st Anniversary celebration.