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In Memoriam: Cassandra Wilson, 1955–2026
Cassandra Wilson, a singer, songwriter and producer who was one of the most acclaimed and successful jazz vocalists of…
SML, from left, Booker Stardrum, Josh Johnson, Jeremiah Chiu, Anna Butterss and Greg Uhlmann.
(Photo: Ariel Fisher)In 2016, guitarist Jeff Parker began a weekly gig on Monday nights at ETA, a newly opened cocktail bar in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood. His regular band included alto saxophonist Josh Johnson and bassist Anna Butterss, who like Parker had both migrated west from the Midwest, albeit at different times and for different reasons. Guitarist Greg Uhlmann, a fellow Chicagoan and disciple of Parker’s before moving to L.A. for graduate studies at California Institute of the Arts, was also a frequent visitor and performer at ETA, as that venue started to host more shows that helped bring into focus a burgeoning scene of experimental, instrumental music.
“He’s one of my favorite guitarists,” says Uhlmann of Parker. “To see someone that’s already done so much keep reinventing himself and pushing … that’s like a goal for all of us.” ETA shuttered its doors in 2023, but the spirit of Parker’s residency remains in the community of musicians that coalesced around that space.
One of the best examples of that can be heard in the band Johnson, Butterss and Uhlmann formed with two other frequenters of that now defunct club: keyboardist and synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and drummer and percussionist Booker Stardrum. They named their band SML, for Small, Medium, Large — but that acronym has been playfully hijacked by some in their steadily growing fanbase. Chiu, however, found the most appropriate reappropriation: Spontaneous Music Live, also the name of SML’s third and latest album on the Chicago-based label International Anthem.
Their eponymous debut album was one of the surprise hits of 2024, on that year’s best-of lists by Tone Glow, Bandcamp Daily, Hearing Things and others. By the time they released their follow-up How You Been (2025), SML had amassed a loyal cult following and critical acclaim. And they are playing more and more shows, appearing at this year’s Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, and performing as the featured group at the Aquarium Drunkard 21st Anniversary concerts at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles. This summer and fall they were preparing to play the North Sea and Newport jazz fests and other shows throughout Europe.
The band is somehow able to pull all that together despite their busy individual careers. At the time of this interview, Butterss and Johnson were in France playing in drummer Nate Smith’s quartet. Stardrum was in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he grew up and relocated back to from L.A. during the pandemic, thriving inside and out of that unique and historic artistic community after working with artists like Amirtha Kidambi, Wendy Eisenberg and Nels Cline. Uhlmann remains active in Los Angeles and abroad, doing projects with artists like trumpeter Will Miller (Resavoir), bassist Sam Wilkes (Louis Cole) and fellow guitarist Meg Duffy (War on Drugs, Hand Habits, Perfume Genius). Chiu, whose career has traversed more along an experimental and indie rock path with artists like Celia Hollander, Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa, acknowledges some challenges trying to get everyone together to play these days. “We’re never all on the same flight,” he says. “Everyone’s operating in different ways, but we have to also find this collective way to operate.”
Collectively, they all found themselves at ETA on a few fateful nights in October 2022. “Ryan Julio, one of the co owners of ETA, offered Greg a couple of nights to do whatever he wanted to do,” explains Butterss, “and Greg, for the first night, asked Josh and Jeremiah. They did a trio [small], and then the second night, it was me, Greg, Jeremiah and Booker [medium]. No Josh. Although, I think we were all in the audience for both nights.” It was the first time the five of them had all hung out together, and the first time Butterss had ever met Chiu or Stardrum.
Six months later, the five of them [large] reconvened at ETA to play two more nights for the first time as a quintet, and the recordings from all four shows became both the origination of the band known as SML as well as their debut album. In addition to confirmation that these five musicians worked really well together, they were unprepared for the favorable public response to their record. “Yeah, I don’t think any of us expected it,” admits Johnson. “We put out the first album, and then it was like, ‘Oh right, we’re a band. What does it look like to play more shows?’ And we’ve all just been pleasantly surprised at the love that the music has gotten.”
Much of that love stems from the delight audiences seem to feel as they witness SML’s unique process of making completely improvised music that evolves and matures in real time, perhaps starting from a singular loop by either Chiu, Johnson or Uhlmann (or sometimes two or all three of them, synced to a common digital clock), or a bass riff or beat by Butterss or Stardrum, inexorably matriculating to a focused yet exuberant detonation of sound and color, all five contributing to the joyful spread across the sonic spectrum. It’s the simultaneous freedom and experimentation and undeniable groove that draws comparisons to krautrock or Miles Davis-era fusion. Yet that’s not necessarily how the band sees themselves. “I feel much more like my influences with this band are everyone in the band,” says Uhlmann. “It’s just so energizing to play with all of them, there’s almost no room for other reference points in my mind while we’re playing. It makes it really easy to be in the moment and make music and be inspired.”
Stardrum adds, “I think something that we do that is not necessarily revolutionary or novel but in the world of completely improvised music is sort of specific, is that we are interested in this kind of repetitive, minimalist, groove-based improvisation. I’ve played a lot of free improvisation where it feels like people are jumping quickly from ideas. … We’re putting together the ingredients of the structure of, like a song or a piece of music, and I think we also like to sit in zones, let something simmer for a while, and be patient.” Many of those structures tend to be built around their bassist, who is wont to strategically shift the tonal center at crucial turning points. “I’m wont, and I do,” confesses Butterss.
This approach also reflects each of the band members’ individual experiences of music across genre and style as they have each matured as musicians. “I don’t think I even owned an electric bass,” says Butterss as they recall their early days as a straightahead jazz bassist who moved to Los Angeles fresh out of school at Indiana University. They point to “playing with people like Greg and Jeff and seeing them play in other projects and things that were outside of the jazz room that kind of initially piqued my interest.” The transition proved to be fruitful for Butterss, as they ended up working for high-profile pop artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, Madison Cunningham and Jason Isbell.
SML certainly utilizes more timbral texture than the average jazz band. “There’s a lot of gear on stage,” says Johnson, who moved to Los Angeles in 2012 to be in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz [now the Herbie Hancock Institute] and has had his own crossover moments with Leon Bridges and Meshell Ndegeocello. He’s played a lot of keyboard in addition to saxophone, and he has also learned to seamlessly incorporate harmonizers and loops and other electronic effects into his performance repertoire. “There’s a lot of people interested in the overlap between different communities and different styles and stuff like that,” he says. “And it feels like there’s a lot of cross-pollination, maybe even more than I felt when I first arrived in L.A.”
“That seems right to me,” affirms Butterss. “Because a lot of people who play jazz are also touring in a band and also doing this cross-pollination as Josh was talking about, it’s kind of become built into the economy of being an artist in L.A., and it’s affected the music in a way that I personally think is really cool and freeing. The caveat I’ll add on to that is that I can’t disentangle my experience of living and playing music in L.A. from my experience of moving there when I was 23 and now being 35. … It’s been interesting to have that kind of trajectory through a changing city as well.”
The band itself has gone through a rapid maturation process over the three years or so in its existence. Unlike their previous two albums, which were selected excerpts from their live shows that were (lightly) enhanced in post-editing, Spontaneous Music Live is exactly what the title implies: two long extemporaneous pieces recorded live at Zebulon in Los Angeles, no edits, nothing added or subtracted.
And so, in some ways the progression of this band could be seen as an evolution of a creative music scene that might have originated from one place in Los Angeles but has moved and been mirrored by communities of musicians in other places. Chiu muses, “You kind of see this flourishing of all these musicians making amazing stuff — not only in LA, but in New York, in Europe, and all these different cities, and it feels like we’re interacting more now than I’ve seen in my own experience.” DB
Wilson’s ability to connect to audiences helped her to win two Grammy awards and multiple other accolades. She was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2022.
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