SML’s ‘Spontaneous Music Live’ Captures the Group Without a Studio Safety Net

Across two previous LPs, SML—Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann—built their sound by recording performances, then retreating to the studio for overdubs and edits. The approach yielded music where integration sometimes felt like a production achievement more than a direct capture. Spontaneous Music Live drops that safety net. Two pieces, each around 24 minutes, taken straight from live settings with no after-the-fact polishing.

The shift matters. Free jazz has long worked as a laboratory for how a group of individuals can cohere without a fixed hierarchy, and SML lean into that tradition. “The Drums” opens on a brisk, ambient-leaning percussion part, with horns entering and retreating like participants in a conversation that no one is moderating. Midway, the volume rises—not into chaos, but into a heated town-hall exchange where melody fragments collide with tumbling beats, and no single player claims the foreground. It winds down into a spacious coda of sustained synths and spare horn lines.

“Roundabouts” is more languorous, almost playful. Synth accents hover while the horns alternate between held notes and melodic flurries. The band moves together like a murmuration—each musician shifting roles, leading then following, but never breaking the larger pattern. Even as the playing tugs toward centrifugal impulses, cohesion holds.

What emerges is less about soloing and more about listening. By removing the option to fix things later, SML let the recording become a document of process. The restraint and patience here aren’t stylistic choices so much as functional parts of a democratic musical unit. The album doesn’t announce itself loudly, but it rewards the kind of attention that values how things unfold over what gets added on top.