As Snarky Puppy left the stage after its 100-minute set Wednesday at San Antonio’s Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, one key question hung in the air: How the hell do you describe that?
The easy answer is “jazz fusion.” But a little excavation revealed deeper layers to what the band was doing — and has been doing for years. A jam-band groove pervades the full-group sections, even though the soloists featured on a rolling basis broke the collective improvisation model favored by figureheads of that scene, including Phish and the Grateful Dead.
Anchored by bassist and main composer Michael League, Snarky Puppy was assembled as a collective in 2004, while the bandleader was attending the University of North Texas.
League claims he was so “bad” as a musician he couldn’t get into any of the school’s legendary jazz ensembles. But what he put on display at the Tobin would make any listener question that assessment.
Snarky Puppy has at times included up to 19 players, though last night’s ensemble was “slimmed down” to a downright reasonable 11, including multiple keyboards, guitar, drums, percussion, a full horn section, and, of course, League on bass.
The crowd was diverse and attentive, attracting anyone from older folks likely around for fusion’s heyday to hipster types drawn by the heartfelt authenticity of League and company.
The show began with horn-driven sequence reminiscent of a film noir soundtrack that highlighted League’s compositional skills. Crescendos rose, reeling the crowd in for the ride — a showbiz trick that kept the dense playing accessible.
Some of the guitar lines invoked Pink Floyd stringman David Gilmour’s mid-’70s playing, while the buildups — rooted in hard-hitting drums and percussion — were tribal in nature and aided by Nagasaki-born percussion madman Keita Ogawa.
That attention to pacing separates Snarky Puppy from genre progenitors like Return to Forever, who seemingly just play their intricate compositions rather than concentrating on the pacing of a live experience.
One possible answer for how to process Snarky Puppy’s live experience comes from looking at the San Francisco scene of the late ‘60s. At the time, trumpeter Miles Davis was making forays into electric jazz, conjuring up truly alien sounds with his band. That group played a quartet of shows with the Dead in April 1970, with Davis having released Bitches Brew the summer before.
At times, Snarky Puppy’s light show invoked those of those of the Fillmore or the Bill Graham Civic Center of old, so a mashup of Davis’s skittery groove and the Dead’s group mind is apropos. “Gemini,” composed by keyboardist Justin Stanton, was particularly rooted in the electric-Miles vibe.
Something that at the Tobin Center show that placed Snarky Puppy in stark contrast to the jam-band world was the way a spotlight would shine on one member of the band, who got an extended feature solo. That’s something of an anathema to the Dead or its modern successors.
On Thursday, the most successful solo player was keyboardist Shaun Martin, who was described as an emcee during League’s late show introductions to the players. Indeed, he engaged the crowd in a way that put his personality and enthusiasm front and center.
Even so, all of the featured players were masters of their instruments, particularly multi-instrumentalist Chris Bullock, who excelled on both sax and flute.
By the time the band encored with “Shofukan” with it’s Eastern-sounding melodies, the crowd was sold. League noted during one of his brief remarks that it had taken Snarky Puppy 17 years to get to San Antonio. Let’s hope they come back sooner.
Getting back to the question of how best to describe Snarky Puppy’s sound, let’s just call it “damn good music” and move along, eh?
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This article appears in Feb 9-22, 2022.