Mike Rutherford once described being in a band as the ultimate state of compromise. “What you lose in compromise, you gain in collaboration,” he said. The greatest achievement of the Los Angeles quintet SML is making you forget that compromise exists. It isn’t necessary because Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann function as a single unit. In this respect, they may very well be the best band playing in America at this moment. Their previous albums—the kaleidoscopic debut Small Medium Large and 2025’s more carefully curated but no less adventurous How You Been—make the case. Spontaneous Music Live strengthens it further.
Unlike the group’s previous two albums, which were pieced together from numerous live performances, Spontaneous Music Live features two side-long tracks recorded entirely live at their spiritual home, Zebulon Café in Los Angeles, direct to Nagra by Bryce Gonzales. As a result, what stands out to a listener is not particular songs but specific instants, mere seconds that are lifted out of time and space, capable of doing strange, beautiful things to your eardrums.
I once asked Jeremiah Chiu to summarize, in layman’s terms, how SML makes music. “The thing we do the most of,” he answered, “is listen.” More than their previous two albums, Spontaneous Music Live is an expression of this active listening. “Listening” in this context translates directly to “waiting”; as a group, SML wait for each other, searching for a groove or a sound that might work. As their listeners, we wait for them to find it. This would feel directionless if it weren’t so painstakingly precise. Where much jazz improvisation unfolds within an agreed structure, SML works with almost none, choosing something more intuitive and dangerous.
“The Drums,” the record’s opening track, is a great example of this. As the name suggests, it begins with Booker Stardrum’s percussion, which, in the Zebulon performance space, is unbelievably crisp. The clean, high click of his snare rings out beautifully over the lower purring of Josh Johnson’s saxophone. Only three and a half minutes in do we start to know where the track is building to. The joy, of course, is that SML discovers where it’s going at exactly the same time as we do.
SML is at its best in these transitional moments; the players repeat the same sounds each time in a form of sonic hypnosis, mining deep into each note to see what they can dig out. If, in their previous works, this might have felt like an experiment performed in the editing suite, Spontaneous Live Music proves that it is, in fact, one done in the moment. That it creates pieces of such cohesion is a feat in itself. On “The Drums,” it is clear that this achievement is largely due to the rhythm section. Stardrum’s percussion and Anna Butterss’ bass are in exceptional synergy, and the way they keep time is indecipherable and strange—an act not of mere time signatures or bars but something gnarlier and more unhinged.
If some of “The Drums” sounds familiar to those who know SML’s work—Johnson’s saxophone motifs, Greg Uhlmann’s thin, spidery guitar lines—these echoes of familiarity are mere touchstones in a landscape that the group is both painting for the first time and freewheeling across. It is hard to think of another group who could manage being just as audibly influenced by Kraftwerk as it is Miles Davis, Can, Herbie Hancock, and Bach, but all of these are audible on Spontaneous Music Live. On “Roundabouts,” there is a feeling of continuous motion and building momentum that is similar to what you can hear on “The Drums.” Propelled onward by Butterss’ electric bass, which is smart, blistering, warm, and funky all at once, SML’s frontline dance nimbly around each other, wandering into new nooks and crannies before wandering right back out again.
The album’s finest moments are its blank spaces—the points at which the players step onto a canvas that doesn’t yet exist. Here they hesitate, feeling out the next brushstroke before committing to it. They listen to themselves, to each other. Then the picture suddenly comes into focus. Such bravery and unity of purpose are inimitable; they make Spontaneous Music Live a real joy, not just for the sounds it creates, but for the sounds it could have created, the knowledge that the next spark of perfect music is just around the corner.
