Hi everyone, Heatthony Wavetano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new SML album, Spontaneous Music Live.

This is a new live album from California band SML. I believe their AKA is Small Medium Large. They are a 5-piece who have dropped a few full-length albums so far – one last year, actually. How Ya Been is the title of that one, and in my view it's kind of a perfect encapsulation of the band itself, all of these short bursts of new jazz and jazz-rock improvisation. A fun listen for sure, but the direct lineage of their inspirations is sometimes maybe a little hard to chart.

There are flashes and moments where the band's performances remind me of some of those big instrumental indie titans from back in the day, like Holy Fuck as well as Battles. But then there are elements of their sound that remind me of some of the bigger and cooler jazz fusion groups of the modern era, some of which dabbled more in electronics, along the lines of Portico Quartet. I think of The Bad Plus a little bit, too.

What also comes to mind is all of these various post-minimal and krautrock groups who have built impassioned followings off of very repetitive and collective jam sessions that emphasize groove and tension. Think Horse Lords, who recently dropped a new LP, or even a good Can live performance caught to tape. Chances are it's all of the above and more that's inspiring SML's music.

And as a collective who goes into many of their recordings with little to no plans whatsoever, especially on this new live album, it feels like a lot of their music is mostly them in real time exploring and figuring out what kind of sonic or musical overlap they can create together.

Because while the first two SML albums contain some pretty fun and colorful moments, the Spontaneous Music Live experience is much more boundaryless by comparison as this record is over 40 minutes long and contains just two tracks, both of which are over 20 minutes each and are pretty much these long strands of collective improvisation where there's really little to no drive to bring it all to a peak or incorporate any kind of super duper clear melodic theme, or push all of this momentum toward some kind of finale or a-ha! moment.

What each of the two songs on this record is more concerned with is kind of pulling off this impeccable balancing act where all five members – between bass, keys, drums, guitar, and sax – are all trying to figure out in real time, as a unit, how to move forward and progress into the next movement of the piece they're making, while also honoring the progress they've made up until that point and the groove and whatever musical ideas they're trying to keep alive in that moment, in the present. I kind of liken it to building and stoking a fire if in order to keep it alive you had to constantly be feeding it new things, new material, new ideas.

You could jump to any random timecode on either of these tracks and hear the band coming together with significantly different layers of grooves and sax licks and bass lines. But how they progress to each of these points in real time as you experience these pieces is so slow and so gradual and so incremental, maybe another point of comparison is like watching a bunch of amoebas or cells separate and sort of multiply under a microscope.

Because again, there's never a point in any of these progressions where the band kind of collectively decides after a hard change to do something completely different. All these evolutions, all these shifts are just happening so slowly and so carefully, and they really do make all of these changes happen as a collective.

There is rarely a moment where it feels like any one instrument – even the traditional lead instruments – in the pack here are kind of directing the change for everybody else to follow. Everybody is kind of like slowly and carefully listening to what each member of the band is doing and making these shifts happen just very carefully.

I guess another point of comparison I could make is to that of watching a sunset. It's this big, grandiose, beautiful thing to witness, but the changes that it kind of lays out in front of you are just very, very slow and very, very nuanced. So again, throughout these pieces, there's like no super duper dramatic peaks. There's no crazy, over-the-top solos kind of dominating the whole sound of the mix. Everybody's trying to find their own little space and pocket in this groove and in this jam session, and are finding their little incremental ways to contribute to the conversation and keep the chatter going.

And there are moments where it sounds very beautiful and sounds very human and sounds very organic. And, especially on the song "The Drums," conversely, there are moments that sound actually quite robotic and mechanical in a way, very electronic and kind of calling back to classic jazz fusion releases like Herbie Hancock's Sextant, where he was really focusing on bringing more electronics and synths into the mix. And again, the band is creating these sounds without sampling themselves or using a drum machine or anything like that. It feels so rigid and calculated while being made up in real time. But yeah, I feel like the magic of these songs and their various interesting moments just have to be listened to and experienced.

I can kind of explain what I think these songs are doing, conceptually: how tightly and colorfully the bass and guitars and drums are wound together; how cool it is to be carefully listening to what the band is doing at any given time and picking up these new ideas and subtle changes as they are popping up and hearing them slowly grow and blossom and progress into what is ultimately going to be the next phase of the piece; and having it all executed perfectly without the band having decided prior that this is exactly what we're gonna do at, you know, 18 minutes in, and so on and so forth.

It's a very enthralling experience just as is, though I will say maybe a planned peak or two, or a finale, or a proper finish on these two tracks here would have been nice. Still, I've been having a lot of fun listening to these two tracks and going back to them and having different observations of these lengthy jams each time I hear them, which is why I'm feeling a light to decent 8 on this album.

Anthony Fantano. SML. Forever.