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.
