Snarky Puppy: The Underdogs Bite Back!

It was an unpromising grey day, rain spitting in the air, when Snarky Puppy first played the Love Supreme festival’s main stage in 2014. It was only two years after a UK debut which had occurred almost by happenstance but forged an instant following, and they were already a focus of jazz excitement: a strange, unwieldy beast from Brooklyn, exhuming fusion you could dance to for a mainstream audience.

Remorseless road warriors since 2003, they were among the first to have crowds singing along to their riffs, and treating progressive instrumental music like rock’n’roll. A homemade phenomenon, spreading the word with YouTube videos and gigs, this big band felt like a community of its own as they manned their own merch stalls and connected to newly confirmed fans after each exhausting show. Along with e.s.t., they stormed rock redoubts few jazz acts had braved since the 1980s, headlining a sold-out 5,000 capacity Brixton Academy in 2017. They pioneered jazz’s re-emergence in a more youthful, healthy, danceable shape, expanding and preparing infrastructure including Love Supreme itself for Robert Glasper, GoGo Penguin and even London’s largely self-sufficient new jazz generation. They helped jazz get from there to here and get its groove back.

Snarky Puppy return to Love Supreme this year as triple-Grammy winners, in many ways at their peak. And yet, they aren’t accepted. Forging their own path from obscure Texas beginnings in 2003, they owed little to established jazz circles. That world’s politics may, though, be less important than genuine musical doubts. While their previous discography was aptly recorded live, alongside the guest-heavy Family Dinner albums, new LP Immigrance, like its predecessor, Culcha Vulcha (2016), shows admirable new studio ambition. It has virtues, but at its worst can sound pebble-smooth, sanding the edge from rich ideas. A 1 ½-star Downbeat review, decrying production equivalent to “spraying... healthy... crops with pesticide”, brutally stated the prosecution case.

Michael League, Snarky Puppy’s bassist and leader for 15 mostly hard, obscure years, has just moved from New York to Barcelona, revelling in Spain’s “social attitudes” and “rhythm of life”, and putting an ocean between him and Gotham jazz judgements when we talk via Skype. Asked if Snarky Puppy still feel like outsiders, he answers, as he always does, with painstaking thoughtfulness. Beneath which, he also sounds slightly pissed off.

“We were [treated as outsiders], for a very long time,” he recalls. “And then I think there was this couple-year period where it flipped 100 per cent, and people were like, this is jazz, and there was a lot of attention. And then I feel like it’s gone to this other place, where now that we’re established and successful, it’s cool to take shots at us. Which is... fine. To be honest, I don’t really care. After you’ve done your thing for 10 years without anyone noticing you, that makes you focus on other things! We put a lot of care and energy and thought and love into our records. But the live thing is the real litmus test of, is what we’re doing cool? And with those new songs from Immigrance, they felt right, they felt good. That’s really all I care about. When you have that approach, a bad review in Downbeat doesn’t mean so much. Or a shitty comment on YouTube. And actually I left all social media at the start of the year. So I don’t read reviews, or comments. I just don’t want to be affected by those things.”

League, anyway, sees his band’s relative restraint in recent times as evidence of maturity, and its members’ growing experience as solo bandleaders and producers. Though 20 Puppies play on Immigrance, League’s maximalist tendencies are muted. “When you’re younger, you want to play all the notes,” he considers. “We’ve gotten way more into constructing a well thought out groove and sitting in it, focusing more on sounds than bombast, and playing tastefully rather than recklessly. It’s funny to see how some people will cling on to this one point in your career, which you think of as immature or overly keen, as the golden moment. As time goes on, the band knows more and more what it is, and how we want to evolve.”

(Photo: Stella K)

Immigrance’s title clearly sets the band against the racist clouds now covering the world. The Moog solos on ‘Bigly Strictness’ jostle with Moroccan percussion, and Turkish instrumentation haunts the mournful lament, ‘Even Us’. As much as an instrumental album can, it all seems to declare that Snarky Puppy are proudly globalist and pro-refugee.

“I don’t think it’s conscious,” says League. “It’s not like saying: ‘We’re going to put an oud on this track to show our solidarity with refugees.’ We have people from three different religions in our band, and many different races. They would all tell you that, yes, they are sympathetic to the refugee crisis. That they agree racism and xenophobia and bigotry and anti-Semitism are ugly things. But it’s easier to be that way when you’re a musician, because you travel the world and see that people are the same, and you’re not in your little bubble watching Fox News, where all you get fed is things to make you afraid, and you have no way of actually seeing the truth, because you don’t leave your town.”

(Photo: Michael League by Tim Dickeson)

Snarky Puppy led a night of protest music at Carnegie Hall in January 2018 with friends and regular collaborators David Crosby and Laura Mvula, but their beliefs go much deeper. Their own, annual GroundUP festival in Miami brought together Crosby, Lalah Hathaway and Moroccans Innov Gnawa in February. They have collaborated with musicians playing Islamic spiritual, Gnawa music, and League spent six weeks among Istanbul’s “professional dissenters”, finding musical common ground beneath their government’s edicts. Snarky Puppy’s next album will be recorded live around the world, with local musicians. The fusion that matters most for them is between people. The battering our shared humanity is taking from populist thugs is a personal, not abstract, pain.

“I watched the results of our presidential election with a female Greek immigrant – short of being Muslim, or black, basically everything that our President is working against,” League remembers. “She’s an incredible musician, Magda Giannikou. Watching her see how her new home was going to work against her was tough. If you’re not having a negative emotional reaction to the daily events of our executive branch, you either are not friends with anyone outside of your demographic,” he laughs, “or you just don’t have human empathy.”

“I lived in New York for 10 years,” League continues, “and well over half of my friends there are immigrants. The election was a big moment. I personally sponsor over a dozen immigrant musicians for their visas. In Snarky Puppy, I guess we only have four non-Americans – but that’s four members of my band who are in danger of losing their status. The world’s in an ugly, terrible place, and without sounding like some kind of ignorant, naive hippie, it would not be in that condition if people exercised a little bit of human understanding. To recognise that, yes, maybe my life is not the way I would like it to be right now, but shutting a person out based on their passport and their skin-colour or religion is not an acceptable solution to that first problem. Know what I mean?” League involuntarily shudders, his visceral connection to the issue clear.

 If he smarts a little at criticism of his ambitious, inclusive band, memories of their beginnings may be to blame. The live juggernaut due back at Love Supreme was once far more humble, overcoming stolen equipment, insane inter-state night-drives, and sleep snatched in vans. Though the rewards they’ve now earned seemed impossibly distant, League never considered giving up.

“There were very, very hard times that lasted a very long time,” he laughs. “Had I thought in terms of overall success, we probably never would have made it. Looking at it in small steps is what saved the band. Like, we sold seven tickets tonight. But that one song sounds a lot better. You don’t become consumed by the idea of: ‘Is this viable, is this going to be successful, are we going to make it?’ You just become concerned with taking care of the artistic details. The consequence of that attitude is success. It’s not the goal.”

Snarky Puppy were formed in 2003 in Denton, where League attended the University of North Texas. This obscure Texan town, dauntingly distant from the music industry’s centres, was a source of romantic fascination for me back then, as it spawned individual, ornery Americana bands such as Lift to Experience, Baptist Generals, Midlake and Centro-Matic. League recalls the more prosaic, useful reality. “It’s an innocent place,” he says fondly. “Ridiculously low-key. No pressure, no pretentiousness. It was a perfect breeding ground for us. I almost feel bad for people who went to school at Berklee or New York. I felt enough pressure in Denton, but freshmen or sophomores in New York are already forming their reputation around the world’s greatest jazz musicians. I would have been terrified to have Chris Potter hear me play when I was 19! We didn’t have to worry about that in North Texas. It was an incubator. You get your shit together, and then you move. And people only know you for the musician that you are starting then.”

(Photo: Stella K)

League arrived in Denton from an itinerant, army family, regularly being uprooted to another base: good grounding, perhaps, for his future tour schedule. “It was absolutely perfect preparation for the life I live now,” he agrees. “You learn how to make friends quickly, you learn how to say goodbye quickly. You learn how to adapt and relate to new places, new cultures, new social environments. And you learn how to follow rules. Being in a military family, you can’t survive if you don’t have a respect for rules and efficiency, and a work ethic. I like to think that all of those things have contributed to the success of the band. That we’re able to focus and bear down and get things done.”

This is a connection between the military and musical you don’t often hear (despite the many jazz musicians who began in military bands). Was League disciplined even as a boy – following orders naturally, to achieve his goals?

“It was there from the beginning, definitely,” he says. “And from the beginning Snarky Puppy was a very conscious, structured experience. I think that’s just me, from the way that I grew up. I can also be a total mess, in a lot of ways. But normally just when I’m dealing with my own things. When other people’s shit is at stake, I tend to be responsible and focused.” 

The other crucial phase in Snarky Puppy’s development was League’s post-college playing in Dallas’s black American churches, where much of the band came together. He already had some experience of the music they found there.

“I played in a black church when I was growing up in Virginia,” he remembers. “But I didn’t dive into the culture of gospel music. I mean I grew up listening to black music, every American does. So when I went back to playing at black churches after college, it felt familiar because I did that for two, three years in high school. Maybe more. I was actually in a gospel band, it’s funny – called New Element. But when I went back to it, I had a much different knowledge of the music and where it was coming from as a 22, 23-year-old guy, than I did when I was 15. I really went deep, when I had that second chance. And I just basically only played gigs in that scene for maybe four years.”

For League, those four years playing hip hop and R&B, as well as gospel, schooled Snarky Puppy’s more suburban members in jazz’s core values of soul and spirit. His more recent immersion in Gnawa’s African-Islamic mysteries, rooted in slavery, healing trances and “unseen powers”, similarly counters those who say his band are just slick. For League, there are mysteries in Snarky Puppy’s music, too.

“We’ve definitely had moments onstage when we felt like we were going into a new space as a band,” he believes. “Moments I can remember where, wow, we’ve never done this before – let’s stay floating on this. We write songs about it later. That’s how it grows. Each guy in the band has subtly different perspectives on what they feel is happening when we connect, or who and what we’re serving. We just have to agree on what is genuine, in the moment. And at that, the band is very skilled.”

Immigrance is out now on GroundUP and will tour the UK this November.

This article originally appeared in the July 2019 issue of Jazzwise magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today