Just like puppies are unpredictable, so are Snarky Puppy shows.
Not only does the set list vary each night, but who shows up to play is flexible as well.
The jazz ensemble from Texas, which hits its 20th anniversary next year, has a roster of about 25 rotating musicians and generally shows up onstage with a little less than half of them. Amazingly enough, the musicians, who are busy with an infinite number of side gigs — some bigger than Snarky Puppy — actually switch out in the middle of the tour.
"It's just a matter of everybody knowing the material really well and being able to step in," bassist and founder Michael League says in a phone interview. "The level of individual responsibility is very, very, very high. When we switch up, it's someone who's played hundreds of gigs with us. So there's chemistry there. It's not like we're just throwing in people for the first time. That would not go well."
In the early years of Snarky Puppy, before all the Grammys, the rotation was a bit of a headache.
"We have a great team of people now who know how to navigate and know how to run the machine," League says. "But in the early days, it was just me, and that was tough — really, really, really tough — but it got easier as time went on and we made it through the hardest patch, and now it's a pretty well-oiled machine at this point."
The ensemble, which whips up a heady mix of jazz, R&B, funk and rock, is touring behind its 15th album, "Empire Central," which was released in September and won the Grammy this year for best contemporary instrumental album. It is a half-studio album — new music recorded before a live studio audience over the course of a week at Deep Ellum Art Company in Dallas. It's a method the band first used for the 2009 album "Tell Your Friends."
"We wanted to return to this format that we made popular over a decade ago of recording live in a studio with an audience," League says. "I thought that it was time to go back and do that since the band had grown so much since the last time we had done it, and since I think this format best represents who we are as a group and best communicates the music.
"As soon as you have an audience that you're playing for, it changes the way that you play. I think you focus more on communication rather than doing everything perfectly, rather than extreme precision. And I think that that actually serves the music much more so. It feels like a living thing. The band has always treated the stage as its natural habitat."
Named for a street in Dallas, "Empire Central" is an homage to the city where the band formed in 2004 while League was a jazz student at the University of North Texas struggling to find a gig. The titles include "RL's" (referring to R.L.'s Blues Palace), "Belmont" (named for the street where he lived), "Fuel City" (the Texas gas station chain) and "Mean Green" (the North Texas mascot). Further, the compositions were inspired by the rich crop of Texas musicians.
"There's been a disproportionate number of Texans who have been responsible for the creation and evolution of the jazz scene over the last 20 years," League declares. "Names like Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Jason Moran, Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Norah Jones. And then people who aren't necessarily jazz-jazz, like Erykah Badu and Kirk Franklin, who incorporate lots of elements of jazz into the music. Also, Roy Hargrove, probably the most important figure of Texas jazz in the last 30 years. All these artists, and many more, have done so much to evolve the music and keep it fresh. I think most people don't know that they're from Texas, so it was big for us to try to shine some light on that.
"But beyond the jazz scene," he adds, "so many incredible artists have come out of that state, going back over 100 years, to people like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charlie Christian — the first true genius of the electric guitar. And then people like Roy Orbison, Don Henley, Sly [Stone], Janis Joplin, Beyoncé, Usher. They're all Texans, it's kind of crazy."
On a somber note, "Empire Central" marks the last recorded performance of Bernard Wright, the funk keyboardist from New York who was a Snarky Puppy member from 2007 to 2010 and played with everyone from Miles Davis to Cameo to Pieces of a Dream. The 58-year-old Wright, who plays on the song "Take It," died after being hit by a car in Dallas in May 2022, two months after the sessions.
"Bernard was kind of like our North Star in a lot of senses, our Yoda, our mentor, and having him play with us this one last time was incredible," League says. "What he brought to the session can't really be measured. And it was tragic what happened to him. I'm just glad that we were able to document him in a way that did him justice, finally, before he passed, because he's probably the least documented musician of that level of influence of our generation. I mean, he's a generation up, but you know what I mean. In this day and age, he just was kind of invisible for people who didn't know him."
When Snarky Puppy rolls into town, fans can expect to hear a big chunk of the 16-track Grammy winner.
"The set list changes every night, but we've tried to play 80 to 90% new music and then throw in a couple old things just for the fun of it," League says. "We have a new kind of production in terms of what's happening on stage. We've got cameras on everyone's fingers and stuff like that to create a more intimate experience so that the audience feels like they're on stage with us."
Reflecting on where Snarky Puppy is, musically, as it approaches its 20th anniversary, League says, "I think the music has gotten a lot more concise. I think we've trimmed the fat significantly. I think the music used to be a lot more cerebral and I think now it's a lot more visceral. I think it's a lot more emotional and it communicates better from the stage to the audience.
"And I think we've managed to do it without compromising the depth or the intention of what we're trying to do. It's not like we simplified it because we think people can't understand it. It's not that at all. The band actually has had the desire to create music that we feel more. And I think it's just about directness, just creating songs with a message that's, like, very clearly communicated versus kind of getting lost in the sea of over intellectualism, which happens a lot in the jazz world."
