With their first two LPs, SML – Anna Butterss (bass), Jeremiah Chiu (synthesizers), Josh Johnson (saxophone), Booker Stardrum (percussion), and Gregory Uhlmann (guitar) – recorded various performances in various cities, then bolted to the studio à la Makaya McCraven, adding overdubs, making modifications, and applying effects. On both albums, the group’s synergy was notable, though their subtle integrations were occasionally eclipsed by production-related enhancements.
Their new album Spontaneous Music Live – two tracks, roughly 24 minutes each – was also recorded live, though this time the band bypassed the studio after-touches. The result is a project that more precisely captures the group’s affinity for well-paced developments and team-playing, a process driven by restraint as much as adventurousness.
Avant-garde jazz, going back to Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Advance and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, has always pointed to life principles in addition to expanding sonic norms. While revising the jazz playbook, Coleman, Taylor, et al also strove to address the metaphysical, relational, and psychological implications of unity vs. disunity, order vs. anarchy, and individuality vs. collectivism. In this way, SML are contemporary torchbearers of the free-jazz inquiry, their music experimenting with structure and dynamics while also serving as a blueprint for the way in which a whole and its parts can function democratically yet integratedly.
“The Drums” begins with a spry and brisk percussion part, a mix of the rhythmic and ambient. Horn accents come and go. The intentional yet unrehearsed placement of notes and runs is striking. Coalescence and dissolution, cohesion and fragmentation, thesis and antithesis – the track, like a life, like history, like the universe itself, progressing as a result of design and randomness.
Midway, the horns grow louder and insistent. If the track felt initially like a relatively controlled conversation, this segment feels more like a heated town-hall discussion. Fragments of melody are battered by beats, the piece segueing into a complex lope – horns, bass, and synth sounds locking into a borderline cacophonic rhythm. No one musician takes the lead or steps into the limelight. After building steadily, the piece reaches a semi-crescendo, tapering into a spacious coda built around sustained synth sounds and subtle horn runs.
Compared to “The Drums”, “Roundabouts” is more playful. And languorous. Synthy accents contrast with held horn notes and melodic flurries. The pacing is, again, impeccable, each musician subtly leading, following, shadowing. A murmuration – propelled by instinct, intuition, collective intelligence – comes to mind. Gradually, the horns and drums grow more pressing, background becomes foreground becomes background, accent becomes motif becomes accent. Despite each musician’s drift toward the centrifugal, the piece’s overall cohesion is never lost. In fact, the reconciliation of centrifugality and cohesion is Spontaneous Music Live’s definitive characteristic.
While drawing from free jazz’s emancipatory vibe, SML are more holistically oriented than, for example, the Sun Ra Arkestra or Coltrane’s late-60’s free-era ensemble (or the Bitches Brew-inspired Black Midi and Squid). SML function as an exemplarily symbiotic and irreducible unit. Their emphasis is on the project’s gestalt, to the point that each musician, though contributing in critical ways, remains ultimately anonymous. What SML have to teach us about life and relationships, about self and community, is perhaps as compelling as the music they play.
