Gregory Uhlmann (of SML) on Chicago Underground Quartet – S/T

New West Coast outfit SML put out one of my favorite jazz LPs of the year, a far reaching release more rooted towards the German Progressives than the fusion set. The band’s songs are rhythmically locked and looped — hypnotic, but tantalizingly experimental at their core. I reached out to the band for a pick in the ongoing Hidden Gems series and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann dove into his love for Chicago Underground Quartet’s 2001 self-titled outing. Check out Uhlmann’s exploration of the record below.

“I believe it was my friend Dan Pierson who first showed it to me,” recalls Gregory. “It came into my life pretty early on. We went to a jazz camp together when I was 14 years old and first getting into jazz — a brief 6 months after my hair metal phase. Chicago was a great place to grow up and this record encapsulates the jazz scene that was most exciting to me in the city. Within my little circle of music nerd friends many of the songs on the record became standards, of a sort, and we’d play them when we got together to make music. Jeff Parker became a personal hero and eventually a teacher to me and I would try to go see him play as much as I could.”

“For me,” notes Uhlmann, “it has the best of Chicago post rock sensibilities while still very much being a jazz record. This record is really about the compositions and the group interplay more than any individual musician. It feels like a real band. It also just has such a wide range of types of songs and all of them are great. Not to mention it has some of my favorite guitar riffs of all time. It seems to not have made it far beyond the audience of Chicago, so it’s usually my go to recommendation for this era of music making in Chicago.

When asked if the record’s influence seeped into his own music, Uhlmann admits, “profoundly and pretty directly. Especially with the new SML record. The ethos of the band is linked by way of the kind of interplay that is on this record, the combination of electronics with acoustic instruments, and the way that the group has been set up so it could expand and contract. Thus, the name (small, medium, large) in the case of SML. Chicago Underground has records as a duo, trio, quartet, and orchestra. Also, not to mention Jeff Parker started the series at ETA (with 2 SML members, Anna Butterss and Josh Johnson) that our record was recorded at. It’s an album I come back to time and time again for inspiration.”

With Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, Robert Mazurek all being such prolific names, it’s sometimes hard to remember what a lightning bolt of talent Chicago Underground Quartet was, though the album is as vital today is it was in ’01. The band even reformed in 2020 for a follow-up on Astral Spirits, swapping out Noel Kuppersmith for Josh Johnson (also of SML) who added a new dimension of organ and synth to the mix. The band’s debut is a bit harder to put hands on in the physical space these days, though there are a few copies in the Discogs ether and you can grab it digitally from Thrill Jockey. It pairs well with the new album Small Medium Large from SML, a record that’s already holding down a monopoly on the speakers over here.