Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes

Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes are Los Angeles-based musicians who met as students at USC Thornton School of Music and have since built one of the more distinctive collaborative discographies in contemporary American jazz. Gendel, a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist from Visalia, California, plays saxophone through a thicket of electronics and synthesis; Wilkes, a bassist raised in Connecticut, trained under Patrice Rushen and Leon "Ndugu" Chancler before becoming a fixture in the city's experimental music scene. Their debut album *Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar* — taped live outside a Los Angeles restaurant and released in 2018 — earned cult status, with the track "BOA" later surfacing in the 2021 Netflix film *Malcolm & Marie*. Four collaborative albums deep, including the April 2026 release *UNRELATED*, the pair make slow-cooked electro-jazz that dissolves structure without quite abandoning it, the two instruments dissolving into each other in ways that resist easy classification.