It’s been 10 years since Snarky Puppy first collaborated with the Netherlands-based jazz and pop orchestra Metropole Orkest on Sylva, leading to the first of the Texan fusion collective’s five Grammys so far.
Band leader Michael League relocated to Barcelona a few years ago in an attempt to escape the grind of US politics. New album Somni – largely written by League in an Airbnb in rural Japan over the course of a month – implicitly comes to terms with the fact there’s little to no hope of escaping The Trump Show.
The simple title comes from the Catalan word for sleep; and if League isn’t getting much in the way of shut-eye, then his loss is the world’s gain. Recorded live before an audience in Amsterdam over three nights, this may well be the group’s most dynamic offering to date, and given the scale – including four drummers – it’s mind-boggling at times to consider how everything fits together.
Inevitably there’s plenty of virtuosity, perhaps best exemplified by opener Waves Upon Waves, which augments steadily before taking off with Zach Broch’s electric fiddle, clearing the floor for other instrumentalists to take turns proverbially getting on down.
Recurrent is a piano-led foray into off-kilter dissonance that’s much more fun than that sounds, and closer It Stays With You flows along on a tide of Latin percussion, swooping strings and stentorian brass.
Nevertheless, where Sylva was arguably more splashy, utilising the self-proclaimed “groove” orchestra to full effect, Somni is more nuanced. The subtlety comes in both the writing and the way in which the orchestral instruments are dispatched under the esteemed tutelage of Jules Buckley.
There’s a painterly light and shade on tracks such as Chimera, a chiaroscuro creation that rolls and distorts and becomes like an extraordinary weather event. That brooding muscularity is in contrast to the straight-ahead bombast of 2023’s Empire Central, a celebration of Texas’ often undersung contribution to the jazz world with songs coming from throughout the band.
Somni is a tighter ship by virtue of the fact these tracks largely originated with League. That’s how it was in the beginning when, still in his freshman year at college, he started assembling the big band of his dreams.
Snarky Puppy might once have been underdogs but these days they are undoubtedly uppermost of the puppermost.
Somni is on sale now via Groundup.
