The Sculpted Grooves of SML @ JHL
SML turned the Joe Henderson Lab into a pressure chamber. Fifty-three minutes. No breaks. No mercy. Just sound moving at the speed of instinct.
The Lab is a half-glass cube at Franklin and Fell. Two-sides of glass, floor to ceiling. San Francisco pressed its face to the window. Brake lights smeared red across the glass. Headlights burned cold and white. People slowed down outside, confused. They could feel something thudding through the pane, but couldn’t name it. Inside, the air felt engineered—tight, metallic, alert.
SML—Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann—walked in without theatrics. Anna Butterss sat out this run. What followed was one unbroken slab of music. No setlist. No tune announcements. Just a long-form decision made in real time. Blink, and you’d miss a turn. Hesitate, and you’d get crushed.
Chiu’s modular rig stood stage left like a chrome altar. Patch cables everywhere. Knobs waiting to be turned into consequences. The low frequencies hit first. Thick. Physical. The kind of bass that makes your ribs vibrate, and your thoughts reorganize. Then he’d pivot—twist, reroute, reprogram—and the room filled with high-end shimmer. Steel and glass. Industrial lullaby. He wasn’t decorating the space. He was rewiring it.
Booker Stardrum. Photo Steve Roby
Booker Stardrum answered with blunt force precision. No wasted motion. Snare and toms muffled with towels. Kick drum locked into Chiu’s pulse as if they shared a bloodstream. He played with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. Every strike landed on purpose. His kit—augmented, wired, monitored—felt like a control panel. Human muscle meeting circuitry. Sweat against voltage.
Josh Johnson refused the hero arc. No grandstanding solos. He threaded his sax through the machinery, sometimes clean, sometimes processed into a metallic cry that blended with the synths until you couldn’t tell what was breath and what was wire. He played the margins. The edges. The negative space. Gregory Uhlmann did the same on guitar. Texture over flash. Pedals humming, loops stacking, tones grinding like gears in a factory that never closes. He built bridges between drum hits and oscillator surges, keeping the whole thing from flying apart.
Midway through, Chiu pulled out his phone. Held it to a mic. Backwards speech poured out—garbled, ghostly, wrong. He moved the phone side to side, bending the pitch in real time. Doppler chaos. It felt like tuning into a pirate radio transmission from another decade. The crowd didn’t flinch. They leaned in. Heads nodding. Bodies swaying. A room full of people surrendering to something they couldn’t hum on the way home.
Josh Johnson. Photo: Steve Roby
There’s lineage here. Chicago’s experimental backbone in Johnson, Chiu, and Uhlmann. West Coast oxygen in the way the grooves stretch and mutate. You could hear echoes of warehouse nights and small clubs that ran on risk instead of budgets. The music carried the discipline of players who have logged serious miles together. Improvisation, yes—but with the internal architecture of a steel bridge.
Before the downbeat, Chiu mentioned how much the band likes rooms like this—intimate, close, no place to hide. Four sold-out shows over two nights confirmed the public’s appetite. This wasn’t curiosity. It was commitment. The audience stayed locked in for the full 53 minutes, watching four musicians negotiate in a language with no subtitles. No safety net. Just listening. Adjusting. Advancing.
Gregory Uhlmann and Booker Stardrum. Photo: Steve Roby
When it ended, it ended. No dramatic flourish. No encore bait. They arrived at a collective stopping point and cut the engine. Chiu shrugged, almost amused. “That’s where it finished.” Lights up.
Here’s the thing: this kind of music demands something from you. Attention. Patience. A willingness to be unsettled. SML gave all of it back with interest. They proved that improvisation isn’t chaos. It’s discipline under fire. It’s four people building something massive without a blueprint and trusting it will stand.
And it did.
Program Notes
Artist: SML
Date: Thursday, February 26, 2026
Showtime: 7 p.m.
Venue: Joe Henderson Lab (SFJAZZ Center)
Personnel
Jeremiah Chiu: (synthesizers/live sampling)
Josh Johnson: saxophone, electronics
Booker Stardrum: drums, percussion
Gregory Uhlmann: guitar
Website: https://www.sml.band
