With five Grammy Awards spanning Best Contemporary Instrumental Album and Best R&B Performance, 13 albums, eight JazzTimes and Downbeat awards, hundreds of masterclasses at educational institutions around the world, and a staggering 2,000 performances after more than a decade of touring ...
... Snarky Puppy and its 19 rotating band members isn’t exactly a jazz band nor a fusion band, but one thing is clear: the defining characteristic of Snarky Puppy’s music is the joy of performing together in the perpetual push to grow creatively.
With all they’ve accomplished over the last decade and a half, it would seem as though Snarky Puppy is ready to slow down a bit and enjoy the ride. But on the heels of their most recent Grammy Award-winning album, Live At The Royal Albert Hall, the band is doing anything but.
In fact, Snarky Puppy is as driven and focused in its 18th year as it has ever been. The success that the group has achieved has opened doors to new creative possibilities: their own record label, collaborations with a diverse array of artists, playing opportunities in underserved regions, their own annual music festival, and ambitious recording projects unlike anything they’ve undertaken before. But it wasn’t always this way for the Texas-born, Brooklyn-based ensemble.
Snarky Puppy was formed in 2004 in Denton, Texas, where founder Michael League was attending the University of North Texas. He created the group (made up of 10 university students) as an outlet for his compositions with the humble goal of weekly rehearsals in a tiny garage apartment a few blocks from the town square. The first Snarky Puppy show took place in the basement of a small pizza shop (J&J’s Pizza on the Square), and the band started playing for free around town. After making the album The Only Constant in a local studio, the band booked its first “tour” of tiny bars and college basement parties between their home in Texas and League’s mother’s house in northern Virginia. This trip, done in a passenger van and trailer with a shoestring budget and sleeping bags in lieu of hotel rooms, was the beginning of a very arduous decade of touring and recording in all but complete obscurity.
Gaining fans one by one through their travels, the band shifted tactics and decided to make a live, in-studio album with some added components: a live audience and video cameras. Outfitting both the band and public (made up entirely of close friends) in headphones, the 2010 album Tell Your Friends (on Philadelphia indy label Ropeadope Records) gave Snarky Puppy its first significant increase in listener interest, and reach to international listeners for the first time, using that momentum to launch its first European tour. The three years that followed saw non-stop traveling with between 150 and 200 shows per year in an attempt to develop its slow-growing momentum into something sustainable. League and many other band members moved to Brooklyn, working as sidemen in groups and around town (as well as wedding bands and anything else that would pay the bills) when not on the road with Snarky Puppy. They recorded their fifth album, groundUP, and launched an imprint of the same name as a sub label of Ropeadope records, signing independent artists from various countries and genres.
With the release of the collaborative Family Dinner - Volume One in 2013, the band got its first real break. Lalah Hathaway’s performance of the song Something earned her and Snarky Puppy their first Grammy Award (for Best R&B Performance). They continued touring rigorously, releasing the Euro-centric We Like It Here in 2014, the Grammy Award-winning Sylva alongside the Metropole Orkest (conducted by Jules Buckley) in 2015, and both Family Dinner - Volume Two (featuring artists like David Crosby, Jacob Collier, Salif Keita, and Laura Mvula) and the Grammy Award-winning studio album Culcha Vulcha in 2016.
The following year, Snarky Puppy launched the first annual GroundUP Music Festival, an intimate gathering of 1,500 music listeners and 25 to 30 groups from all over the world and across the musical spectrum in Miami Beach, Florida. Past performers include Esperanza Spalding, Lionel Loueke, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones Trio, Tank & The Bangas, Concha Buika, Eliades Ochoa (of the Buena Vista Social Club), Susana Baca, and The Wood Brothers, among many more.
Staying away from its well-established live-in-studio-album approach, 2019 saw the release of Snarky Puppy’s 13th album, the analogue slow-burn Immigrance (which reached #2 on the Billboard Jazz charts), another Downbeat award for “Best Jazz Group,” and a 182-show touring year over four continents. Their concert in London’s legendary Royal Albert Hall was recorded live and officially released in spring of 2020 and went on to win the band their fourth Grammy award. They remain wholeheartedly committed to music education and advocacy, having given more workshops and masterclasses in 2019 than in any year previous.