Finding Infinity in SML’s Cyborg Jazz
In the L.A. band’s music, the human and the machine are often indistinguishable.
Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.
At a sold-out show in Brooklyn last month, the crowd was so dense and the stage so low that you couldn’t see the members of SML unless you were right up front. This felt appropriate. The players in the electro-jazz-funk quintet are all decidedly unshowy, opting for simplicity and repetition over elaborate solos, serving the groove above all else. Like a great DJ, they don’t need to be on display to connect with their audience. There were several moments when I couldn’t tell whether what I was hearing was a synth or a heavily modulated guitar, a repeated riff that someone was actually playing or a sample that had been captured and looped on the fly. That night, it was easy to imagine SML breaking through to an audience beyond devoted jazz heads.
The band has become a favorite in a growing scene that melds live-in-the-room jazz with digital sampling and other contemporary production techniques. Much of it happens in L.A. or Chicago—all but one of SML’s members live in the former and have roots in the latter—and is associated with the Windy City label International Anthem, which released the group’s debut album, Small Medium Large, last year. The LP was recorded live and then edited in the players’ various home studios after the fact: looped, processed, cut-and-pasted. Where a labelmate like drummer-composer Makaya McCraven favors instrumental arrangements that are recognizably jazzy, even as their grooves channel boom-bap as much as swing, SML sounds sleekly futuristic.
The band’s hybrid sensibility has just as much to do with their former home as their current one. The filtering of jazz musicianship through electronic effects and studio editing feels distinctly Chicago, in the tradition of post-rock originators Tortoise. The way it sometimes comes out sounding like head-nodding contemporary bass music owes a debt to L.A. institutions like Brainfeeder Records and the long-running Low End Theory series of club nights. The band finds inspiration in everything from paradigm-shifting 1970s records by Miles Davis to German avant-rock bands like Can and Faust to the sample flips and creaky syncopations of J Dilla.
