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Much to the delight of dead-eyed, toothy-grinned CEOs, AI is steadily coiling around the music industry’s throat. It’s ubiquitous: Hip-hop producers are turning computer-concocted samples into viral sensations, record labels are licensing their catalogs to companies like Klay and Udio, and data-center slop is topping the country charts. It’s so woven into our reality, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a troupe of brewery chooglers cover a Velvet Sundown song sometime soon. But AI doesn’t actually generate anything worthwhile; it simply regurgitates whatever it’s been fed as palatable vibe signifiers—uncanny algorithmic gloop presented as human to a population that’s barely paying attention.
Its grotesque simplicity is laid bare when compared to a group like Los Angeles future-jazz quintet SML, a group of skilled improvisers who actually do what the vaunted technology promises: By synthesizing all manner of history, theory, and experience, they create complex, brand-new, brain-teasing compositions from the suggestion of a note or a rhythm. There’s electricity in this music—literally coursing through guitar pedals, samplers, Eurorack modules, and the DAWs used in post-production, but also between the five musicians themselves. Instead of a network of code, there are actual beating hearts beneath the electronic sheen, a mind-meld that can’t be replicated, no matter how often the software gets updated.
Remarkably, SML have never set foot in a recording studio. In fact, bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and synthesist Jeremiah Chiu are rarely in the same room together. Each has found a career as a sought-after sideman, developing a signature approach and building a name that record nerds scour liner notes for. They’re all stars dotting the constellations of L.A.’s experimental music universe: Butterss and Johnson are in Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, Uhlmann and Johnson have a trio with bassist Sam Wilkes, Stardrum has played with Chris Cohen and Weyes Blood, and Chiu has cut several records with Marta Sofia Honer and is one-third of Jeff Parker’s Expansion Trio. Despite the frequent overlap, the band SML really only exists on stage. Their two albums, 2024’s Small Medium Large and the new How You Been, consist of recordings taken from the handful of gigs SML have played in a handful of cities, but they feel like deep-career dispatches from an ensemble fully aligned in sound and vision.
The formula for the first record—capture live performances, apply a few nips and tucks, and add an overdub here and there—remains intact on How You Been, though greatly expanded. The source material for Small Medium Large came from four nights at ETA, Highland Park’s venerated, now-shuttered scene incubator, as the players shifted through different permutations before settling as a five-piece. Here, SML draw on six shows in four cities, with the stems of each dispersed to various members to manipulate and return to the others for approval or addenda. The shape of their improvisations is clear: Stardrum favors circular Afrobeat patterns; Butters and Uhlmann find metric toeholds and lock in; Johnson loops long legato tones and occasionally explodes into a solo; and Chiu spins a thick webbing of bleeping textures. But once disassembled and reworked, sounds get smeared beyond recognition, and grooves get crushed into jagged new shapes. It’s a jazz masterclass taught in the Düsseldorf School, an amalgamation of Miles Davis’s On the Corner and Herbie Hancock’s Sextant for the Ableton generation.
“Chicago Three,” a drifting highlight a third of the way through, exemplifies their methodology. Butterss plays a simple waltzing bassline, nudging against Chiu’s pointillist keyboard line and Stardrum’s motorik ride cymbal. There’s a chord droning in the background, which could just as soon be coming from Chiu’s synth rig as either Uhlmann’s or Johnson’s pedal board. Layers of Johnson’s sax, kissed with slight delay and spread through the stereo field, pile upon each other, threatening to overtake the shaker or hi-hat or gated noise that keeps time. Three minutes in, nearly every element drops out save for what sound like piano and violin, but no one brings those instruments on stage, so it’s dizzying, hard to know what’s being modulated through what effect.
The post-production tricks on How You Been are much more extensive than on the first record, moving away from jazz and into something further afield. The opening seconds of “Gutteral Utterance” sound like warped VHS footage of a building collapsing, and spiky clusters of tape distortion gather around Butterss’ chorused bass for the rest of the song. “Moving Walkway,” the album’s dreamiest cut, is a stoned, mid-tempo krautrock zoner. Butterss and Stardrum zero in on a gooey pulse while scraps of Chiu’s keyboards and Johnson’s sax swarm and scatter like debris caught in a cyclone. Shimmering waves of synth lap against the skeletal remains of a drumbeat and bassline on “Brood Board SHROOM,” everything bobbing gently in a sea of reverb.
Even though nearly every sound is picked over and manipulated, SML’s keen sense of spontaneity remains. “Daves,” one of the few tracks on How You Been that feels mostly untouched, is a rollicking hip-shaker that could unspool at any moment. Uhlmann and Johnson engage in call and response, both playing single-note stabs and trading roles between the downbeat and the upbeat. Johnson drags just slightly behind the tempo, winking at Uhlmann’s metronomic precision. Two minutes into “Taking Out the Trash,” both Johnson and Stardrum let loose, Johnson skronking through a blistering, distorted solo, and Stardrum attempting to play as many accents as possible before the one comes around again. These moments are thrilling; even before the edits and effects, the group’s telepathic interplay is potent in its own right.
The two most jarring bits of the record aren’t musical at all, but instances of human voices. As “Daves” dissolves in its final seconds, someone whistles deep in the right channel, and an audience appears, hooting and hollering in approval. At the top of “Mouth Words,” Chiu gently asks the person running the house to dim the lights a little bit more. These interruptions come at the halfway and end points of the record, respectively, breaking the trance of what has come before. For all the technical wizardry and virtuosic playing on display, these unadorned glimpses of humanity might be even more important. They’re reminders that these pieces were generated in real time by real people sitting on stage, listening and reacting simultaneously, for a crowd also listening and responding. These are the energy exchanges that can’t be programmed or predicted, that feel intrinsically alive.
