Gregory Uhlmann is a much-lauded guitarist discovering now, in his mid-30s, that his most vital music need not involve the guitar. As a kid in Chicago, Uhlmann was a pianist who picked up bass only to play rock with his brother. He soon moved to guitar himself. He loved the blues and hair metal and, under the aegis of a Tower Records near his Lincoln Park home, gradually unearthed jazz, too. When Uhlmann was a high-school student, Jeff Parker was a gracious mentor who taught him Monk tunes, before they both headed west. In the Los Angeles improvisational scene that has steadily taken shape around Parker, Uhlmann has grown beyond his primary instrument while also growing with it. Yes, he has long toured and recorded as a guitarist with Perfume Genius and made a string of his own records as a promising singer-songwriter. But he’s also put himself into situations—particularly the instrumental quintet SML, in which already-warped improvisations become endless fodder for the editing desk—where the role of any instrument is elastic and mutable, meant to be interrogated and reconsidered. In a band where a guitar and a saxophone can use one another as camouflage, what good is absolute allegiance to six strings, anyway?
Extra Stars is Uhlmann’s most inquisitive and assured record yet, a 14-track playground where he uses every instrument at his disposal to pursue an obsession with curious sounds and the memories and emotions they can quickly conjure. Uhlmann doesn’t set the guitar aside completely; it holds the center of two standouts here, a lazy-afternoon duet with the saxophone and hums of Alabaster DePlume and a beautiful guitar reverie so bittersweet it should come with a Kleenex. But it’s just one tool of many Uhlmann uses to frame and then color a string of seemingly disconnected scenes that, taken together, form a compelling portrait of a day, a week, maybe even a life. The mirth and wonder of “Voice Exchange,” the slow exhalation of “Like Tea,” the stony glow of “Imprint”: Uhlmann make glorious little scores for the moments he enjoys and endures, deploying the guitar, a recorder, a web of synthesizers, or whatever other tool seems to convey that instant best.
With the exception of DePlume’s cameo during “Lucia,” Uhlmann plays everything on the first half of Extra Stars, less as a flex than as a direct way of directly conveying feelings. Opener “Pocket Snail” is a late-night walk along dimly lit streets, headphones on; the synths that curl over the plodding beat first seem dangerous and lurid but slowly grow hopeful, as if Uhlmann has stayed up long enough to glimpse the first rays of dawn. Where the 85 seconds of “Burnt Toast” incorporate a pizzicato waltz and silly guitar curio to hint at a quick laugh, “View Above,” in which Dntel-like glitches give way to a phosphorescent drone, suggests true happiness, a wash of joy that makes all the hassle worth it. Uhlmann folds all of this experience into “Days,” seven stunning minutes of guitar notes that hang as low as thunderclouds and a synthesizer melody that outlines a dimming sunset. Is this sadness, the stillness of contentment, or something in between? Extra Stars runs like a journal of moods, and “Days” is Uhlmann’s admission that none of them are pure.
All of Uhlmann’s SML bandmates join for the second half. That’s Uhlmann and Jeremiah Chiu playing a dizzying game of ping-pong with modular synths and a sample of Tasha Viets-Vanlear’s voice on “Vocal Exchange.” Booker Stardrum contributes percussion to “Back Scratch,” a dazzling piano piece that pulls the Conlon Nancarrow concept of writing music too complicated for any one human to play into the modern new age ether. And that’s Josh Johnson and Anna Butterss on “Bristlecone,” with Johnson’s saxophone tone modified until it suggests a potpourri of groans, drones, and squeaks. Butterss’ bassline works like the ropes that keep a hot air balloon tethered to earth. But what’s most remarkable is how Uhlmann transforms these appearances into new tools for sculpting sounds and, in turn, conveying feelings. “Back Scratch” is an ecstatic high, “View Below” a brief map of a brain overwhelmed by ideas. With or without collaborators, these songs are distillations of Uhlmann’s experiences and his concomitant reactions to them.
Uhlmann’s best work has often asked questions of identity and its fluidity. On “Leo,” the remarkable last track from 2023’s Again and Again, he told the story of boys becoming men, wondering when the line of transition had been crossed and what was left behind when it had. “What you feel is real,” Miya Folick and Olivia Kaplan repeated at the end, as if trying to establish some working link between who we were and are. And on last year’s Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes, the borders between guitar, saxophone, and bass often disappeared, the individual identity of each player subsumed by the more mesmerizing whole. Extra Stars is Uhlmann’s most stirring exploration of identity yet, because he so thoroughly slides among instruments, modes, and moods, avoiding easy definitions of who he is or what he does. He is a guitarist who puts down his guitar whenever life—and what he wants to wordlessly say about it—calls for something else.
