It’s hard to describe Snarky Puppy, and that’s part of its beauty.
A quasi-collective of about 25 members in rotation, Snarky Puppy plays contemporary jazz, fusion, funk, R&B, rock and world music, always mixing a few of the genres. It’s indicative that the band won three Grammy awards in different categories: two for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album and one for Best R&B Performance.
One thing is definite: Snarky Puppy is endlessly creative, and the source of that creativity comes from the diversity of its members.
“We are Snarky Puppy from… all over the place,” the band’s leader and bassist Michael League said introducing the nine-member line-up before the audience of the Leopolis Jazz Festival on June 26 in Lviv, a Ukrainian city in the west, close to Poland.
League formed the band in 2003 with white friends from all over the U.S. studying jazz at the University of North Texas. For three years, the band played “nerdy” jazz before joining the Dallas gospel and R&B community.
That’s when their music transformed into something funkier and groovier, more direct in communicating with the audience. The band had taken on Shaun Martin and Bobby Sparks II, African-American musicians who played the keyboards on stage in Lviv.
Their music kept changing under the influence of people with different roots, backgrounds and nationalities. The band has members living in Canada and the U.K., Leagues says. Percussionists Louis Cato and Marcelo Woloski who performed in Lviv are immigrants to the U.S. from South America.
Recognizing the influence of immigrants on its music, Snarky Puppy called their 13th studio album “Immigrance.” They presented songs from the album at the Leopolis Jazz Fest.
“The name is an observation of the songs: they’re all coming from a stylistic place – whether its Morocco or Turkey, the U.S. or wherever – there’s a long history of musical immigration that has taken place in order for these styles to exist and for us to use them in our own composition,” League told the Kyiv Post right before going on stage.
A name that seems to elevate “immigrant” to “eminence” rings loud in the times of U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.
The band didn’t necessarily want to make a political record from the get-go, League says, and he came up with the name only after mixing. But the way the album celebrates multiculturalism and human connection make it a natural antidote to Trump’s rhetoric.
“For us as a multicultural band, it’s easy to have this perspective: the idea that an immigrant is a bad person who’s coming to do harm and to degrade communities is just not true in the U.S., statistically speaking,” League says.
Michael League, the founder and bandleader of Snarky Puppy, talks with the Kyiv Post before the band’s show at the Leopolis Jazz Fest on June 26, 2019 in Lviv. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
But you won’t hear that direct message in the songs themselves – Snarky Puppy is fully instrumental and does not have lyrics.
“What’s beautiful about instrumental music – is that it’s very open to being interpreted the way that the listener wants to. There is no specific message, but there is a feeling. Everything is kind of abstract,” League says.
Snarky Puppy improvises within the songs all the time, League says, but he doesn’t think of it as a jam band, or jazz band for that matter.
“I definitely don’t like the words jam band or fusion, but I understand why people call us those things. But I just call it instrumental because some of what you hear has nothing to do with fusion or rock,” League says.
And like the roots of the band members, League says their music “goes all over the place.”
