Sam Wilkes wasn’t happy with “The Fool on the Hill.” The bassist had played the song—one of his favorites—at a gig dedicated to Beatles covers. It didn’t go well. Wilkes decided to try again, this time recruiting longtime friends Gregory Uhlmann and Josh Johnson to his cause. The three had never played together as a group, but they booked a concert at L.A. jazz club ETA and trusted fate and chemistry. They started the show with McCartney’s song: Uhlmann’s guitar picking out a path forward, Wilkes’ bass finding its languid way alongside, and Johnson’s sax providing the famous melody. The familiarity of the tune gave them a gentle push, but after two minutes, they were borne along by their own momentum, serenely drifting.
The three musicians had good reason to think they would jell. Uhlmann and Johnson found one another as teenagers in Chicago before forming SML; Wilkes and Uhlmann collaborated on an album by Miya Folick; Johnson and Wilkes were session musicians in the Louis Cole Big Band. This type of cross-pollination defines the L.A. jazz scene that has formed around Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, whose long-running weekly residency at ETA spurred a resurgence in small-group improvisation across the city. Parker’s influence with this trio runs even deeper; he was a music teacher to both Uhlmann and Johnson in their early days (a fact they didn’t realize until years later). In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Uhlmann, Johnson, and Wilkes would come together—by the time they set foot on the ETA stage, they had seen one another play enough to anticipate each other’s every movement.
Given their pedigree and the location of their album’s recording—two concerts at ETA, one session at Uhlmann’s house—comparisons with Parker’s lauded ETA IVtet are unavoidable. If Parker’s group deals in surefooted 20-minute excursions, Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes venture out on quick scouting missions, testing the terrain in two- and three-minute jaunts. They incorporate what they call “landing zones,” pre-written material contributed by each member, as safe havens from which to launch again. The biggest difference is the lack of percussion, but on tracks like “Marvis,” from Johnson’s solo album Unusual Object, the trio is so adept at crafting complex polyrhythms with staccato picking, short sax bursts, and muted bass thumping that it’s difficult to miss. These busy sections alternate with ambient cooldowns, sometimes within the same song—the frenetic interplay of “Hoe Down” slows to a stutter, then stops, to be replaced by an enchanting if disjointed static lull.
The group’s secret weapon is the musicians’ array of effects, each player sending their signals through enough pedals to mask their identity completely. On “Fumarole,” Uhlmann’s guitar remains recognizable; Wilkes’ bass and Johnson’s sax have seemingly been replaced by synths more suited to downtempo electronica. Johnson’s transformation on “Shwa” is the most remarkable. His sax flits and hovers like a dragonfly, evoking tightly controlled feedback more than a woodwind instrument. Post-production blurs the boundaries further: The melding of improvised live sessions with studio editing isn’t new for the group’s members, and they deploy their experience here to dizzying effect. On some tracks, like “Rewinded,” which reverses the “Shwa” tape to create a foundation for Johnson’s patient one-note solo, the trick is easy to spot. Elsewhere, it’s better to let the illusion work its magic, as with the subtle cut-and-paste in “Frica” that makes live syncopation tantalizingly difficult to discern from floating phrases added later.
“The Fool on the Hill” is the last song on Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes, though it was the first they performed together. That it perfectly concludes the album, some of which was recorded nearly two years later, is a testament to the trio’s immediate rapport: They’ve started where most bands dream of ending up. These vignettes only hint at where they might go next.
