Two Nights, Same Garden
My friends invited me to two shows at this year’s Jazz em Agosto at the Gulbenkian — the 42nd edition, back in the open-air amphitheatre the way it should be. I wouldn’t have paired these two myself; five nights apart, and they turned out to be about as opposite as a festival can get within one lineup.
Bonbon Flamme on August 4th: a French quartet built around cellist Valentin Ceccaldi, with Fulco Ottervanger on piano, Étienne Ziemniak on drums, and Portuguese guitarist Luís Lopes rounding it out. They played material from Calaveras y Boom Boom Chupitos — a record born out of a trip to Mexico — and it showed. Vibrant, almost theatrical color, a cello doing things that felt more like a voice shouting than an instrument bowing, the whole thing loose and warm and a little chaotic in the best way. It’s chamber music that forgot it was supposed to behave.
SML closed the whole festival on August 9th: Anna Butterss on electric bass, Jeremiah Chiu on synths and sampling, Josh Johnson on sax and electronics, Booker Stardrum on drums, Gregory Uhlmann on guitar. Where Bonbon Flamme was color and gesture, SML was patience and pulse — long, dubby, hypnotic grooves that build so slowly you don’t notice you’ve been standing still for twenty minutes until the beat finally locks and your whole body responds to it. Krautrock discipline wearing a jazz quintet’s clothes.
Same festival, same garden, same wooden benches under the same trees. Completely different nervous systems.
Why SML Kept Following Me Home
Here’s the thing that’s been rattling around since: SML isn’t a random booking next to Bonbon Flamme. It’s Anna Butterss and Josh Johnson — the exact two musicians who, between them, are quietly holding up Honora and Happy Today, two albums that, for different reasons, I only started listening to after these two concerts. SML grew out of the same Highland Park scene as Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet — literally the same room, ETA, before it closed — and their sound (hypnotic post-jazz shot through with dub and krautrock) is the same DNA as Happy Today, just dialed toward electronics instead of a live-room groove.
Hearing it live, outdoors, at full volume, did something the records alone hadn’t: it made the connective tissue physical. I wasn’t just reading credits and noticing overlapping names anymore. I was standing in a garden in Lisbon watching the actual muscle behind both of those albums build a twenty-minute groove out of almost nothing, in real time, the same way Butterss has described learning to do at ETA.
Full mind map on how this connects back to Honora and Happy Today is in the research notes — reproduced below.
Mind Map: Jazz em Agosto → Happy Today → Honora
Central Connection: The ETA Scene (Highland Park, LA)
ETA (Highland Park club, closed Dec 2023)
Monday-night residency, ~40-capacity room
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+---------------------------+---------------------------+
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JEFF PARKER ETA IVTET SML
(Parker, Butterss, (Butterss, Chiu, Johnson,
Johnson, Bellerose) Stardrum, Uhlmann)
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"Happy Today" (2026) "Small Medium Large" (2024)
live @ Lodge Room "How You Been" (2026)
International Anthem/Nonesuch International Anthem
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+---------------------------+---------------------------+
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SHARED PLAYERS:
Anna Butterss (bass)
Josh Johnson (sax/electronics)
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v
FLEA — "Honora" (2026)
Josh Johnson produces + plays sax
Anna Butterss plays upright bass
Jeff Parker plays guitar
Nonesuch RecordsThe Live Bridge: Jazz em Agosto 2026 (Gulbenkian, Lisbon)
Aug 4 — BONBON FLAMME Aug 9 — SML (festival closer)
French cello quartet LA quintet, ETA lineage
Valentin Ceccaldi, Ottervanger, Butterss / Chiu / Johnson /
Ziemniak, Luís Lopes (PT) Stardrum / Uhlmann
Inspired by a trip to Mexico Hypnotic post-jazz + dub + krautrock
Vibrant, theatrical, chaotic Patient, pulse-built, slow-lock groove
\ /
\ /
+--------------- CONTRAST ------------+
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Same amphitheatre, same festival,
five days apart, opposite nervous systemsWhy the Live Show Recontextualizes the Records
Before Jazz em Agosto: Honora and Happy Today were connected on paper — two names (Butterss, Johnson) turning up in both credits lists, a nice bit of connect-the-dots trivia.
After SML at the Gulbenkian: that connection stopped being trivia and became a body memory. Watching Butterss and Johnson build a groove from near-silence to full lock over twenty minutes, live, outdoors — the exact “static space, then one person shifts and the thing moves together” method Jeff Parker describes on Happy Today — makes it obvious that this isn’t three musicians who happened to be booked on the same sessions. It’s one working method (the ETA residency ethic: patience, deep listening, distrust of anything rehearsed-sounding) showing up in three different rooms: a Highland Park bar, a Lisbon amphitheatre, and Flea’s rock-star-goes-jazz debut.
Bonbon Flamme’s role: it’s the control group. Vibrant, colorful, almost theatrical — the opposite instinct from the ETA/SML school of patient minimalism. Hearing both in the same week sharpens what’s actually distinctive about the Butterss/Johnson/Parker approach: it isn’t “jazz” as a broad category, it’s a specific, hypnotic, krautrock-adjacent discipline. Bonbon Flamme proves the discipline is a choice, not just a genre default — because the alternative, heard five nights later on the same stage, sounds nothing like it.
Genre Thread Worth Following
SML’s own description — “hypnotic post-jazz, infused with dub, krautrock, psychedelia” — lands directly in familiar territory: motorik repetition, hypnotic groove-as-destination rather than groove-as-backdrop. That’s the same instinct that makes Can or Stereolab compelling, just played by a jazz quintet instead of a rock band. Happy Today’s two side-long tracks and Honora’s more song-based structure both inherit some of that patience — Flea’s “A Plea” and “Frailed” especially — but SML live is where the krautrock lineage is most audible, because there’s no vocal or “song” scaffolding to hide it inside.
Open Threads
- Does SML’s How You Been (2026) share any personnel or mixing credits with Happy Today beyond Butterss/Johnson?
- Worth tracking whether Jeremiah Chiu or Gregory Uhlmann turn up on a future Flea or RHCP-adjacent project — the ETA/International Anthem bench keeps recurring.
- Bonbon Flamme’s Luís Lopes is Portuguese — worth a separate note on his other projects, given the Lusophone thread running through the rest of the listening library.
Anchor records: Flea, Honora (Nonesuch, 2026) · Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, Happy Today (International Anthem/Nonesuch, 2026) Anchor shows: Bonbon Flamme (Aug 4, 2026) and SML (Aug 9, 2026), Jazz em Agosto, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon Shared personnel: Anna Butterss (bass), Josh Johnson (sax/electronics) — present across both records and the SML performance