The debut album from the L.A. jazz supergroup SML is a thrilling elegy for a dead nightclub.
Over two packed nights last year, the quintet recorded raw, long-form improvisations at the Highland Park jazz club ETA, a cramped bar and restaurant with tough sight lines that fits around 100 people. It wasn’t a perfect room for jazz, yet incredible jazz kept happening there. “ETA was the kind of place where you really could experiment,” said SML’s bassist Anna Butterss.
“They made it easy for us to come up with this group and not feel any external pressure other than what we wanted to do.” The band’s June LP, “Small Medium Large,” which culled from those performances, couldn’t have happened anywhere else. It never will again.
After seven years, ETA closed in December. That such an exuberant album arrives in the club’s twilight is telling for modern jazz in L.A.
The beloved Little Tokyo venue Blue Whale met the same fate during the pandemic, and like-minded clubs say it’s been challenging to keep consistent audiences since. The city is brimming with jazz musicians releasing stellar albums and taking risks live. But is L.
A. so expensive and disconnected that it’s risking such rooms? “I think about how generative a time it was because of that space,” said SML guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. “It’s almost like going to school, where you meet the friends you have for the rest of your life.
I’m sure there will be more places, but nothing will be quite the sa.
