Snarky Puppy: the latest supergroup ripping up the genre rulebook

Snarky Puppy are a jazz group. But looking at their YouTube hits, their string of best-selling albums and their shelf-load of industry awards, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Somewhere in the past five years, this funky musical collective from Texas tunnelled under the walls of the jazz ghetto and made good their escape.

"That's a beautiful image, man," says Michael League, the band's founder and bass player. "I imagine myself covered in sewage, like that scene in Raising Arizona, you know?"

So is it accurate? “Yeah, maybe we did tunnel out of the jazz ghetto, but I really do believe the jazz ghetto is a self-imposed thing. You hear a lot of bitching about how it’s so hard to make money and “why does nobody come to our gigs?”, but how are you going to break out of that oppressive system when you’re creating music that’s only understood by other jazz musicians? If you want to get beyond the wall, you have to create music that reaches beyond the wall.”

League is in his car on a hands-free set, cruising down a highway somewhere in Texas, the state where it all began about 10 years ago. Back then, he was a bass student at the University of North Texas, and Snarky Puppy was a loose collective of fellow students. By the time they won their Grammy last year, Snarky Puppy were one of the hottest instrumental ensembles in music.

Church music

“When we first started touring, I would rent a 15-passenger van and attach a trailer to it. We’d put all our shit in the trailer and just drive around, playing for a couple of hundred bucks a night. A lot of the time, we didn’t even have a place to stay. We’d meet people at the gig and they’d put us up, so we’d tour with not only instruments but sleeping bags and pillows.”

Most American jazz musicians gravitate to the big urban centres on the east coast, but for League and co, north Texas – and particularly the church music scene – was their proving ground, and the loose, collective vibe of Texas church bands has left its mark on the Pups’ music.

“At that time I was playing in a lot of churches but they were all-white churches. Then I got called to play at this black church, and the band was [Texas trumpeter] Roy Hargrove’s band. It was a totally different game.

“In the college world, there is a lot of reading; it’s an academic environment, it’s not an organic environment. Playing music in a church is about as organic as it gets. There are no charts. If the preacher gets inspired, they’ll play a song and they don’t know – or care – if you know it. If you don’t know it, you have to learn it right there. That for me was a really big reality check.”

Soon, most of League’s musical friends had joined him in church and the sound of the band began to move in an altogether different direction. “You can hear a very distinct shift in the approach of Snarky Puppy’s music marked directly from when this started happening.

"Our first two records, we were in college or just out of college, it was still kind of a more cerebral kind of jazz-school vibe. With the third record [2008's Bring Us the Bright] I think there's a significant change in melodic style, things getting funkier and more open, and you know, with Tell Your Friends [2010], the sound starts to crystallise."

By the time the band recorded Ground Up in 2012 in front of a live audience at the ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, it was clear that Snarky Puppy's music was reaching out. The YouTube clips from that recording session have racked up millions of views and their status as an underground sensation was confirmed last year when the band won a Grammy, not in any jazz category but for best R&B performance, for their collaboration with vocalist Lalah Hathaway. It was heady stuff, but the Grammy nomination presented the underground Pups with a dilemma: how should they turn up at the red carpet?

Red carpet

“We couldn’t decide whether to rent a limo like every other artist or to pull up to the red carpet in a 15-passenger van with a trailer attached to it. You know, 10 guys jumping out on to the red carpet in tuxedos out of some shitty beat-up white van. I wanted to do the van, but Sput [Searight], our drummer, said, ‘No man, this might be the only time we go, and we want to be there in style,’ so I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ But if we ever reach a point where people know who we are, then maybe we’ll do the van.”

Nowadays Snarky Puppy tour the world. They are one of the hardest-working acts in music, playing more than 200 shows a year, from Tokyo to São Paulo to Dublin. And everywhere they go, word spreads about this jazz group who don’t play with furrowed brows, don’t indulge in long, impenetrable solos, and who play music that you can actually dance to. Tongues are still wagging about the band’s storming performance at the Sugar Club last year, and this time around, they’re moving across town to Vicar Street.

League is more than a little enthusiastic for an Irish crowd.

“They have this simultaneous understanding and awareness and perceptiveness and attentiveness, combined with this completely reckless energy, which is a really weird combination. I think it’s my favourite place to play in the world, to be honest, and I’m happy to see that printed anywhere in the world.”

Mission accomplished.

• Snarky Puppy play Vicar Street on September 29th. choicecuts.com

THE NEW BREED: MEET THE PUPS

Snarky Puppy usually have 10 or 12 musicians on stage. There’s no knowing in advance who will show up on any given night, but here are some of the regulars:

• Michael League (bass): Born in California in 1984. League is a fourth-generation military brat who grew up everywhere. His brother Paddy is a Harvard ethnomusicologist and champion bodhrán player.
• Shaun Martin (keyboards): A recent convert to the church of Snarky Puppy. When he's not touring with the Pups, he answers calls from Chaka Khan, Snoop Dogg and Erykah Badu.
• Robert "Sput" Searight (drums): Dallas native Sput went to the famous Booker T Washington High School for the Performing Arts alongside Norah Jones and trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Has a Grammy of his own and plays with everyone from Justin Timberlake to Celine Dion.
• Bill Laurence (keyboards): London-based pianist who lectures at the Institute of Contemporary Music, and recently released his second solo album, Swift. Has also played with Morcheeba, Bobby McFerrin and Ms Dynamite.
• Mark Lettieri (guitar): The Pups' "stunt guitarist", who has a penchant for Van Halen. Still lives in Texas, when he's not playing with 50 Cent, Eminem and Erykah Badu.
• Bob Reynolds (saxophone): New Jersey-born, Berklee-educated, LA-based saxophonist who has played with Richard Bona, Tom Harrell and Brian Blade.