Finding Infinity in SML’s Cyborg Jazz

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

At a sold-out show in Brooklyn last month, the crowd was so dense and the stage so low that you couldn’t see the members of SML unless you were right up front. This felt appropriate. The players in the electro-jazz-funk quintet are all decidedly unshowy, opting for simplicity and repetition over elaborate solos, serving the groove above all else. Like a great DJ, they don’t need to be on display to connect with their audience. There were several moments when I couldn’t tell whether what I was hearing was a synth or a heavily modulated guitar, a repeated riff that someone was actually playing or a sample that had been captured and looped on the fly. That night, it was easy to imagine SML breaking through to an audience beyond devoted jazz heads.

The band has become a favorite in a growing scene that melds live-in-the-room jazz with digital sampling and other contemporary production techniques. Much of it happens in L.A. or Chicago—all but one of SML’s members live in the former and have roots in the latter—and is associated with the Windy City label International Anthem, which released the group’s debut album, Small Medium Large, last year. The LP was recorded live and then edited in the players’ various home studios after the fact: looped, processed, cut-and-pasted. Where a labelmate like drummer-composer Makaya McCraven favors instrumental arrangements that are recognizably jazzy, even as their grooves channel boom-bap as much as swing, SML sounds sleekly futuristic.

The band’s hybrid sensibility has just as much to do with their former home as their current one. The filtering of jazz musicianship through electronic effects and studio editing feels distinctly Chicago, in the tradition of post-rock originators Tortoise. The way it sometimes comes out sounding like head-nodding contemporary bass music owes a debt to L.A. institutions like Brainfeeder Records and the long-running Low End Theory series of club nights. The band finds inspiration in everything from paradigm-shifting 1970s records by Miles Davis to German avant-rock bands like Can and Faust to the sample flips and creaky syncopations of J Dilla. 

On a track like “Three Over Steel,” it can seem like the group has gotten itself into a groove so deep that the record is skipping. Bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Booker Stardrum tumble forward together as one, the former’s instrument sounding a bit like a fuzzed-out synthesizer and the latter’s like a looped sample of Clyde Stubblefield. Guitarist Gregory Uhlmann marks each two beats of their ostinato with a metallic percussive stab, another joint in the rhythmic architecture. Saxophonist Josh Johnson provides fragments of melody—emphatic, as if he were shouting through the horn—that constitute the track’s main hook.

As for electronics whiz Jeremiah Chiu—he’s an essential part of what SML does, no doubt, but it can be difficult to ascertain what he’s doing at any given moment: playing a synth; programming a drum machine; or snapping up something his bandmates just played, digitally scrambling it, and sending it back into the mix. Perhaps someone hears something they like in the scrambled version and starts responding, tweaking their rhythm to meet it, or answering it with a variation. Then Chiu might scramble the response, too, and someone else responds to that, in a cycle that could bubble on indefinitely. 

These overlapping layers of human improvisation and electronic manipulation are key to SML’s approach. “There are times where you’re trying to make the machine more human, and there are times when you’re trying to make the human elements more mechanical, and the relationship between those elements is always shifting,” Johnson tells me on a video call with the whole band. On the clattering “Industry” or the streamlined “History of Communication,” it’s sometimes difficult to tell what the so-called real instruments are even doing, so thorough is their synthesis with the machine. They wouldn’t sound out of place in a foggy basement club. “The word ‘dance’ has been thrown around, and I relate to that a lot,” says Butterss. “It’s about getting into a static atmosphere of feeling and then growing from that. It’s minimalist.”

I should mention that I’ve known Stardrum for a few years as a regular performer and customer at a bar-venue where I used to work in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he now lives. SML started at another bar where the players and patrons were often the same people: ETA, a nightspot in L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood that also incubated Tortoise member Jeff Parker’s current jazz quartet. I ask SML’s members to tell me about what made the place so special, and they describe something genuinely unusual: If you had a gig at ETA, it didn’t matter what time you went on, or how long you played for, or how loudly, or who you brought along as a collaborator—a degree of control over the presentation of one’s work unheard of even at other musician-friendly venues. “Right from the start, it was a level of musical freedom and encouragement to experiment that I don’t think I’d had before,” Butterss says. “Not to say there weren’t some difficulties in balancing that with the financial aspect of running a bar in a really expensive city.” ETA closed at the end of 2023.

Johnson and Butterss are also in Parker’s band, whose years-long Monday-night residency helped to turn ETA from an unassuming cocktail bar to a destination for adventurous improvised music. Other future SML members were regular attendees, brought together by the scene around the venue and their shared histories in Chicago’s porous jazz, indie rock, and avant-garde scenes. Stardrum and Chiu became friends through a lockdown-era Zoom creative circle for experimental musicians. Uhlmann and Johnson went to jazz camp together as teenagers. Butterss remembers meeting Uhlmann for the first time when he came over to their and Johnson’s apartment to jam, and crying after he left: “I was like, He’s never going to want to play with me again, he’s too good.”

They turned out to be wrong about that. SML played its first two gigs before it even had a name, after Uhlmann booked a couple of nights at ETA, and, in keeping with the venue’s anything-goes spirit, assembled a group that had never so much as rehearsed together before they got up to freely improvise. (Technically, it was two slightly different groups: Part of the meaning behind the band name is that they sometimes play in configurations of various sizes other than the full quintet lineup.) Both of those first two shows were recorded, and both ended up represented in some form on Small Medium Large. Scottie McNiece, co-founder of International Anthem, was there, and encouraged the members of what was then just an ad hoc meeting of acquaintances to think of themselves as a real band. “We waffled for a long time, like, Are we going to get together again and record? Do we present this as five individuals, or is there effectiveness of doing it as a band name?” Chiu recalls. “It kept going back and forth until it happened.”

In the world of experimental improvised music, there are countless ensembles that get together for only one or a few nights, often billed as a list of individuals. That tradition probably evolved from a desire for unpretentious straightforwardness, but it can also convey a certain academic self-regard, its if-you-know-you-know understatement contributing to a sense that this is music made primarily for a scene of insiders. Part of SML’s appeal may lie in their deliberate self-presentation as a band, albeit one with a flexible lineup. Their playfully austere name and abstractly cartoonish album art suggest that you don’t need a jazz degree of your own to understand what they’re doing. They make it easier to feel like a fan and not just a sophisticated appreciator. Imagine how Tortoise’s legacy might differ if they were called Bitney-Herndon-McCombs-McEntire-Pajo-Parker instead.

The members of SML don’t talk much amongst themselves about how they want to sound, preferring instead to rely on musical communication and the intuitive combination of their various styles to guide them. Though listeners may now have favorite songs from the album that they show up to a concert hoping to hear, the band remains committed to improvising from scratch. And they’ve still never really rehearsed. “It means all interaction and learning about the other people needs to be done through the music,” Butterss says. “We talked a little bit about the music one night, and it just ended up getting in our way. I was like, I actually don’t like this. I was thinking about what we talked about versus being in the moment, which is the space I really want to be in.”

One signature of SML’s distinct vocabulary, worked out almost entirely on stage, is their approach to rhythm, at once rigid and wide open. Chiu’s contributions often involve a sequenced pulse from a synthesizer, which keeps the other players locked in to the strict tempos of electronic music. But unlike most electronic music—and most Western music generally—SML’s improvisations aren’t always governed by any particular time signature. In other words, though they’re all playing to the same beat, they sometimes organize it in different ways: Butterss’ bass line might repeat every three beats, for instance, while Stardrum’s drum pattern repeats every four. With each new repetition, the alignment of the two parts shifts a little, until they eventually meet up again—and then immediately start to diverge once more, and so on. 

This sense of a potentially endless cycle, shifting slightly with each iteration, provides a satisfying mirror to the relationship between live instrumentation and electronic manipulation in their music. To hear it all in action, take a close listen to the final stretch of “Industry”: a distorted shard of synth drifts crosswise across pointillistic guitar, in and out, in and out, as the synth gradually transforms into a saxophone, or the sax reveals itself as the source behind the sound all along. 

Chiu is particularly gleeful in his disruption of regular time signatures. Sometimes, he says, he will “blindly program” an oddly shaped rhythmic sequence and start playing it without understanding in advance exactly how it will relate to the rest of the music. The effect can be thrilling for a listener, and challenging for his bandmates: “It forces Anna and Booker to be like, Where is the one?” he says, referring to the first and most prominent beat in every measure, the center of emphasis that governs everything else. But by now, SML are at home in their spontaneity, and their particular synthesis of electronics and improvisation. “I gave up on finding the one ages ago,” Butterss tells Chiu. “It’s all one.”

Below, you'll find a playlist of highlights from SML and the constellation of solo projects and other collaborations the members have been a part of in recent years, curated by Andy, for paying subscribers only. If you have yet to sign up, please consider it—your support allows us to go in-depth on fascinating new artists and much more.