*Announcing* SML - Spontaneous Music Live /// LP/Cassette/Digi album out June 26th 2026
(Spontaneous Music Live album cover photo by Sam Lee)
SML Announces Spontaneous Music Live
Forty-eight Minutes Of Fully Unedited Live Improvisation
Out On LP/Cassette/Digi June 26
“SML has become a dazzling studio jazz band that’s never actually been in a studio...” - New York Times
“To hear the jubilant response of those witnessing their instrumental alchemy only reinforces what kind of spectacle they’re capable of creating.” - Treble
“Everything they do is in lockstep with each other, even when it sounds like every member is doing something impossibly different.” - Paste
Today, the Los Angeles based quintet SML (bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann) announce a new live album titled Spontaneous Music Live, to be released on LP, cassette, and digitally via International Anthem June 26, 2026.
The forty-eight minute live album comprises two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded live at Los Angeles venue Zebulon during the band’s December 2025 residency just weeks after the release of the band's critically-acclaimed second album How You Been. Spontaneous Music Live was recorded and mixed live in stereo to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales (the engineer who is known for his transportive documents of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet, including the recently-released Happy Today). The album’s 24+ minute B-side piece “Roundabouts” is available as a lead “single” on all digital music platforms today.
Listen to “Roundabouts” and preorder Spontaneous Music Live here.
In a glowing New York Times feature published last November, writer Grayson Haver Currin profiled the rise of SML as a band “vital to a surge of enterprising jazz emerging from Los Angeles.” At the time, even aside from the work with SML, each member of the band was mid-stride in their own respective hot streak, and in the mere 6 months that have elapsed since, there’s been even more to report. Stardrum released his WeJazz debut, Close Up on the Outside, in February. Uhlmann released his solo debut for International Anthem, Extra Stars, in March. Johnson and Butterss are key contributors to both Flea’s debut solo album Honora, released by Nonesuch in March, and the new Jeff Parker ETA IVtet album Happy Today (released by International Anthem / Nonesuch on May 15). As a band, SML did six performances to full-capacity crowds over three nights as artists-in-residence at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee this March. So the timing feels perfect to take a deeper look at the essence of what SML does in pure, uncut form.
Between How You Been and SML’s 2024 debut Small Medium large (both of which were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced), the band has developed a reputation for records that are heavily fused, polished, and punchy. The medium is on full post-modern display on those LPs, and the band’s post-production knife can be responsible for much of the perspective — the tastiest morsels collected, arranged, and rearranged just so.
But the source material from both those albums were live recordings. Long-form, unwieldy, ebbing and flowing. On top of that, every performance the band has ever done has been fully improvised in that spirit. So in the sphere of live performance the band’s esteem has grown down a different path — one of linear, hypnotic, expansion. It’s a perceived split persona shared by some of SML’s most inspiring conceptual bedfellows: compare the extended madness of Can’s Live in Paris 1973 to the relative tight form of Future Days from the same year; the speed-funk chaos of Miles Davis’ Dark Magus to the heavily deconstructed On The Corner or Big Fun.
Spontaneous Music Live removes the curatorial perspective and pulls the curtain back on that search-pluck-reconstruct editing process. What we’re left with is the psychedelic realism of the band in situ, in their home town, collectively improvising, fully in-the-moment, mining for that moment of discovery. We hear, in macro, each nugget of sound which could be the basis for a future SML album track, spattered amongst the collective chaos-and-control like stars in the night sky.
Spontaneous Music Live is out June 26th,
Today’s announcement comes as SML prepare to headline two nights at Los Angeles’s Teragram Ballroom on June 26 and 27, as part of Aquarium Drunkard’s 21st Anniversary celebration. About SML, Aquarium Drunkard founder Justin Gage says: “For the last 21 years, Aquarium Drunkard has gravitated toward artists who treat music as a living environment rather than a fixed product, and SML embodies that spirit completely. Their sound feels uniquely Los Angeles to me: exploratory, rhythmic, spacious, deeply collaborative — the kind of music that changes the atmosphere of a room on contact.”
Tickets and more information for theTeragram Ballroom shows here.
ALL UPCOMING SML LIVE DATES
June 26 - Los Angeles, CA - Teragram Ballroom - tickets
June 27 - Los Angeles, CA - Teragram Ballroom - tickets
July 12 - Rotterdam NL - North Sea Jazz - tickets
July 15 - Molde Municipality NO - Moldejazz - tickets
July 17 - Kirjurinluoto, Pori FI - Pori Jazz Festival - tickets
August 2 - Newport, RI - Newport Jazz Festival - tickets
August 9 - Lisboa PT - Festival Jazz em Agosto - tickets
November 6 - Columbus, OH - Wexner Center - tickets
November 14 - Groningen NL - Oosterpoort (Rockit Festival) - tickets
November 15 - Rotterdam NL - LantarenVenster - tickets
November 21 - Den Bosch NL - November Music Festival - tickets
DELUXE VINYL PACKAGE
Spontaneous Music Live comes on 140 gram classic black vinyl inside a heavyweight jacket with a poly-lined inner-sleeve. Lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST, pressed at Pallas in Germany.
Also available on limited edition cassette.
(photo by Ariel Fisher)
About
SML is a quintet composed of luminaries from Los Angeles’s thriving jazz, improvised, and indie music scenes: bassist Anna Butterss (Jeff Parker, Jason Isbell, Phoebe Bridgers, Makaya McCraven), synthesist Jeremiah Chiu (Ariel Kalma, Marta Sofia Honer), saxophonist Josh Johnson (Meshell Ndegeocello, Flea, Leon Bridges, Carlos Niño), percussionist Booker Stardrum (Wendy Eisenberg, Horse Lords, Nels Cline) and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann (Sam Wilkes, Meg Duffy, Perfume Genius).
Their debut album Small Medium Large was recorded at the band’s first gigs at Highland Park venue ETA in late 2022 and early 2023, post-produced in the following year, and released in Summer 2024 to wide critical acclaim, landing on ‘Best of 2024’ lists by Tone Glow, Passion of the Weiss, Bandcamp Daily, Hearing Things, and others. Following the release of Small Medium Large, the band quickly expanded beyond Los Angeles, performing at various festivals and venues and sharpening their sound. Recordings from these shows were then used as the basis for their sophomore album How You Been. This second release showcases a road-tested band pushing razor sharp confidence in the form of trance-inducing rhythm focused improvisation, but it also delves even deeper into the possibilities of post-production.
Upon its late-2025 release, How You Been was thoroughly praised by critics and fans alike, landing on numerous best of the year lists and even catching the attention of the New York Times, who published an in-depth feature on the band. The live shows that followed the album release had a similarly wide appeal, and support from well-credentialed outlets like NPR’s World Cafe have bolstered the fervent energy which has seen SML’s name recognition grow so quickly.
In March of 2026 SML held a residency at the Big Ears Festival, where the band played 6 sets over 3 nights to hundreds of fans, many of whom attended every show. The full, unedited SML experience is clearly of interest. In that spirit, Spontaneous Music Live — an album of two unedited sidelong improvisations recorded at Zebulon in LA — will be released in summer 2026, offering the first official recorded glimpse into the psychedelic realism and linear, hypnotic expansion of SML’s live sound.
