Michael League must have patience and efficiency to burn. His band, Snarky Puppy, varies between nine and 12 members, and the larger the group, the greater the demands on those qualities from its leader. That would apply even if the band just played clubs, but League, also the bassist and composer, has taken Snarky Puppy from Texan bars to world tours, kept it happy and creative across two decades, and masterminded Grammy Award-winning albums.
“I think anyone in any position of leadership lives a very different experience than people who are not,” he observes via Zoom from a hotel in Rome. “There’s a lot of skills you have to develop in order to survive. I would definitely say that the last 20 years have helped me to become a more patient, laid-back, accepting person.”
Another part of the art of leadership is fostering an environment in which the players feel they can freely express themselves. “That,” says League, “is what the band is to me: the combination of everybody’s input and everybody’s individual sounds.”
The breadth of music – incorporating rock, jazz, funk and Middle-Eastern elements, spiced with virtuosity and rhythmic intricacy – reflects League’s listening habits when growing up. He cites the Teflon-slick Steely Dan, jazz bassist Dave Holland and funk pioneers Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters as seminal influences, while also nominating less-expected sources, such as XTC’s excitable pop and Led Zeppelin’s heft. “With XTC, it’s like you never hear a chorus the same twice,” he says. “They always add an extra backing vocal or an extra layer, and I think Snarky Puppy is the same. Zeppelin, for sure: the riff mentality is definitely inside certain Snarky Puppy songs.”
As is common in rock but rarer in jazz, League teaches his compositions by ear rather than sheet music. While this takes considerably longer, the payoffs are that the music is never forgotten and the players are more agile in performing it. This agility, and what he calls the band’s “shape-shifting” ability, is critical to the music’s success.
“The most generous thing you can do for an audience is be excited about what you’re playing,” he says. “In the case of Snarky Puppy, no one’s excited unless they’re surprised. We have to create the surprise on stage in order to have a good time and in order for the audience to have a good time.”
Like many high-calibre improvisers (including Miles Davis), League looks upon performance glitches, whether human or technical, as intriguing challenges, forcing players out of their comfort zones. “It’s the only time that you can guarantee that someone isn’t on autopilot,” he says, “because it’s impossible. Anytime that that’s happened, the band has been at its best, I feel. We’ve had electricity go out at our gigs, and the band has gone into the crowd with drums and horns and played. I mean there’s been just countless situations in which we had to improvise both musically and logistically. And I think that that brings out a kind of X factor in the band.
“I do believe that art is problem-solving, at the end of the day. Some people have the ability to solve very complex problems very quickly, and I think that everyone in Snarky Puppy fits that description. I love tennis, and you see that in the greatest tennis players, that until the end, their brain is a hundred per cent on fire and making connections and figuring things out. And I think Snarky Puppy has so much experience failing, so much experience with disaster, that a skill that we’ve developed at a very high level is how to adapt to unexpected challenges.”
Even without adversity, sustaining the music at the highest level requires constant nurture. To stay inspired, League says he continues “listening to new things, and studying – taking lessons and learning new rhythms, and nourishing that part of me. On a collective level, I think it comes down to just trying to keep everyone in the band happy and positive and feeling taken care of. A lot of that is trying to get other things going on during the day [on tour] that have nothing to do with music, so that when we come on stage, it’s like it’s not the only thing that we’re doing that day, so we can engage with it in a more natural way.”
The members’ assorted side projects invigorate the music, too. “It’s important that everybody has their own little plot of land and that they also all get to experience being a band leader,” League says.
And thereby learn to have a little sympathy for him?
“One can only hope,” he smiles.
Snarky Puppy: March 29-30, Bluesfest.