The story of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble came to an end on 13 September 1994, when a heart attack forced John Stevens to stop. The SME – as we shall refer to it from here on – was, above all, Stevens himself, surrounded over the course of three decades by a multitude of musicians who gave rise to an ever-changing swarm of line-ups. Some were stripped down to the bare minimum, even to a duo; others grew to almost twenty members. Whatever the configuration, they played relentlessly, recorded whenever the opportunity arose and produced a considerable number of albums, many of which were later brought back into circulation with painstaking care and enviable thoroughness by Martin Davidson through his Emanem label. Those releases were enriched by hours of previously unheard material, recovered from treasure chests disguised as drawers. Then, in December 2023, Davidson too passed away, and the restoration work […]
