Festivals in Flux,Roots Report
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Interview with Michael League of Snarky Puppy Usually a band has at least 4 people in it with the classic assortment of bass, drums and guitars along with the occasional keyboards. If you add a horn section, then you’re talking about a band that can have as many as 8 members. Now imagine a band with 40 members. Yes, 40 members. Enter the life of Michael League, the bassist, composer and producer of the Grammy award winning jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy. The group will be performing at the Newport Jazz Festival this weekend at Fort Adams, so Michael and I talked about managing so many members in the band, moving from Denton, TX to Brooklyn in 2004, their latest release Sylva, the numerous collaborations Snarky Puppy has done and what the future holds for jazz. Rob Duguay: So Snarky Puppy isn’t your average band with it being a collective of 40 musicians. How does it play out when you guys go on tour? Does it depend on whoever is available at the time or does everyone follow a certain schedule? Michael League: It kind of depends on who is available. There are certain guys who get asked more regularly because they were part of the more difficult touring years, but in total it’s between 30 and 40 guys that rotate. R.D.: How do you manage it all? You have all of these different personalities so people must have their little quirks. M.L.: Everyone is surprisingly cool about it actually, everyone understands that their all part of a large group of musicians so we’re all kind of a collective in that way and there are no egos. Obviously everyone wants to go to Japan whenever we go to Japan and places like that but people recognize that eventually they’ll be in a position to experience things that other guys in the band are not so there is a lot of understanding that gets exhibited. R.D.: Must be pretty refreshing when everyone involved is for the group as a whole rather than only being in it for themselves. Since starting the band in Denton, TX and now being based in Brooklyn, what was the transition like for you and the band from going to a small city to a big metropolis? M.L.: We moved at different times, each member of the band moved on their own so there were a lot of different kinds of experiences but one thing I’m sure everybody shared during that time was that they were broke and doing everything they could to pay their rent and to stay alive in the city. I think that it’s an important part of most artists’ lives, the period of struggle, turmoil or whatever. Everybody adjusted to it and they found their groove and found a support system and they were able to make it through and become sustainable in New York. R.D.: Long time Brooklyn venues, dive bars and many other places that have been known to give the city its unique character are going away. As an artist living in Brooklyn, is it difficult living there nowadays with so much transition going on? M.L.: I’ve always thought of New York as a city that is constantly changing, it’s part of what makes it what it is. I was reading an article the other day about what Penn Station looked like in 1960 versus what it looks like now. Change is a very constant thing generally in the world but in New York City it happens every day. When you go on tour for 3 months and come back you see new businesses in your neighborhood and old businesses have closed down. I think people always tend to say that it was better before, but that’s kind of what everyone always says about everything. I love being part of a city that’s constantly changing, and to be fair I’ve only been there for a couple weeks in the past year due to traveling so much so every time I go back it’s like a new city for me. It’s sad to see your favorite places go but new great places are popping up all the time. R.D.: This past May Snarky Puppy released Sylva, it’s a collaborative album the band did with the Dutch jazz & pop orchestra The Metropole Orkest. How did two bands from opposite sides of the Atlantic come together to make this happen? M.L.: The managers of The Metropole Orkest saw us recording an album in The Netherlands, an album called We Like It Here. They came to a recording session and liked what they heard so right afterwards they just offered us to do a record together and we agreed and before we knew it we were doing it. R.D.: Both bands must have learned a lot from each other during the recording process. M.L.: I can’t speak for The Metropole Orkest but for us we learned a lot during the process. Before we never played with a symphony orchestra and we never worked under a conductor. Thank God both the orchestra and the conductor are absolutely amazing and flexible and aware of the world in which we live. It didn’t feel like 2 different worlds, it really felt like we understood each other very well so we were very fortunate in that sense. R.D.: For other collaborations, Snarky Puppy has collaborated and performed with the likes of Erykah Badu, Justin Timberlake and Snoop Dogg. That’s quite the trio to have played with, so what was it like working with each artist? M.L.: The band does collaborate with loads of artists as a band but Erykah, Justin, Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy and all of these people are artists that individual members of the band play with. It wasn’t like Snarky Puppy did something with Justin Timberlake, we have 2 or 3 members that play in his band. Snarky Puppy does have an album series called Family Dinner where we collaborate with different artists, different vocalists and different instrumentalists. Out of the 30 or 40 people that we’ve done stuff with, no one’s been difficult. Reputations are an important thing in the music industry so when we hear that someone has a bad reputation we don’t work with them. R.D.: What do you think the future holds for jazz? Whenever you listen to Snarky Puppy you definitely notice a big free jazz influence. Do you think that jazz will ever go back to the mainstream like it used to be back in the day? Or do you think it’s exactly where it belongs with its own devoted following and by itself separated from the rest? M.L.: I think music evolves and I think that in order to stay relevant music has to change with the time and the culture of the generation. I think a lot of jazz musicians are making music that very much suits the time and place that we live in. I think the best examples of that would be Esperanza Spaulding, Robert Glasper and people that have brought modern hip hop, r&b and soul and elements of those musics into jazz. I think we do the same thing, I don’t know if we’re a jazz group or what but we’re all jazz musicians and we are very familiar with the tradition and we incorporate a lot of elements of jazz into our music as well elements from two of three dozen other styles of music and that’s just what we do. Jazz has been kept alive through those kinds of blends and fusions but it’s a big question. Music has always been the easiest defined in retrospect. We can look back to the late 60’s and early 70’s and talk about Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew or whatever and Miles’ really experimental stuff and say it’s in the jazz genre but at that time were people calling it jazz? I don’t know. I think that it’s an American music and its tradition lives in a lot of different artists and different styles of music so in that way it can never really die. For more info on the band and their music, check out Snarky Puppy’s Website: http://snarkypuppy.com Tickets are still available for this weekend’s Newport Jazz Festival: http://newportjazzfest.org Photo Essay: Less Than Jake at Lupo’s a Hot Days — Ska, Rocksteady, and Reggae: A Brief Musical History During a sweltering rehearsal the other night, we decided we were only going to run through some reggae and rocksteady tunes. It was too hot to move, too humid to breathe. We most certainly didn’t want to run through any raucous ska numbers. This reminded me, however, of the story of how ska fell out of fashion in Jamaica during the mid to late ’60s. But let’s start at the beginning. Late ’50s Jamaica saw a mix of musical styles played on the island. Tourists wanted to hear Calypso or its Jamaican equivalent, Mento, while the Jamaicans wanted to hear the sounds they were catching over the radio waves from Florida and the States — soul, jazz and R&B. Hotels and resorts showcased Calypso and Mento, while R&B, jazz and soul were a feature of the many sound systems around Jamaica. A sound system was a generator, a turntable and some speakers loaded in a truck and set up for a street party.