An orchestra-size band: Mark Lettieri, Larnell Lewis, Bob Lanzetti, Nate Werth, Marcelo Woloski, Jay Jennings, Jamison Ross, Michael League, Mike “Maz” Maher, Shaun Martin, Justin Stanton, Bobby Sparks II, Chris Bullock, Bill Laurance, Bob Reynolds, Jason “JT” Thomas, Zach Brock, Chris McQueen, Keita Ogawa (l-r) (photo by Stella K)

On Immigrance, ace fusionists Snarky Puppy dig deep into a smoldering jazz-funk pocket while musing over their recent mental and spiritual travels, the wonders of multicultural alchemy and the xenophobia that currently roils America’s political discourse. Just don’t call their latest offering a protest album.

Michael League can wax philosophical about a wealth of subjects, but ask him about the past decade’s oft-touted jazz revival and whether his band, Snarky Puppy, had a hand in making it happen, and he turns a bit skittish. “People have mentioned us as the group that paved the way for young audiences,” he offers, “but I really don’t think that’s true. What we were doing was a natural extension of what Roy Hargrove was doing. So I would put most of it on him and [Hargrove’s band] the RH Factor. They were the main influence on Snarky Puppy at the start.”

League is only 35, but he’s already an old hand at being a bandleader. The early days of Snarky Puppy unfolded just outside of Dallas, where League founded the group back in 2003. In Snarky Puppy’s first incarnation, they were just a small ensemble of friends from the jazz program at the University of North Texas. Hargrove, the intrepid trumpeter who molded a radical fusion of jazz and hip-hop in his own image, had long relocated from Dallas to New York by then, but he left his mark on the neo-soul and gospel-fueled enclaves of the city’s Deep Ellum neighborhood, a lively proving ground where, on any given Friday, you could catch Erykah Badu or The Polyphonic Spree trying out new material in the steamy haze of a packed nightclub.

One of the stalwarts of that Dallas scene is keyboardist Bernard Wright, a seasoned session vet with a résumé that includes recordings with Miles Davis, Chaka Khan and Marcus Miller. During Snarky Puppy’s formative years, he served as musical guru to the up-and-coming League and his bandmates. By the time he turned 20, League was already an accomplished bassist, laying down intricate fusion-funk grooves at any jam session that would have him. His band simultaneously built up a gospel repertoire, playing up to five church services a week. With Wright’s help, more doors started to open.

“When I met Bernard, that was a big turning point,” League recalls. “He was an original member of the RH Factor and has been the single largest influence on us, on an individual level. He was my mentor for many years and connected me to people like JT [Jason Thomas], Bobby Sparks II, Caleb McCampbell—all these guys are, or have been, members of Snarky Puppy and were all members of RH Factor.”

Right here, League takes a breath and pauses. He could easily launch into a full-scale exegesis on the house that Hargrove built, including the groundbreaking work he did with the Soulquarians collective (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Common, J Dilla, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and more), as well as the multi-faceted legacy he left behind. (Hargrove passed away last year at just 49 years old.) Instead, League gathers his thoughts and comes back to the subject at hand.

“We’re talking about the rebirth of this jazz thing, and I do think a big part of it is Roy,” he says, “but really, there’s never been a moment when that rebirth wasn’t happening. Since the ‘70s, from Bitches Brew on, there’s been Miles, Weather Report, Return to Forever—so many groups that have incorporated modern groove music with jazz, and it’s only recently that it’s become acceptable to the jazz tastemakers.

“I don’t want to sound shitty but, up until seven years ago, when we played the Ottawa Jazz Festival, jazz bookers had been allergic to Snarky Puppy for the entirety of the band’s existence,” he continues. “They just weren’t having it. Now I go to Newport, and the average age is maybe 30 or 40. That’s significant.”

The implication is that jazz purists no longer control the narrative, which is just fine with League. If anything, it’s also an undeniable sign that the current wave of ultra-talented musicians and composers has changed the game completely—just as it did in the past. “How many times did Miles do something in his career that people hated? Not that I’m comparing Snarky Puppy to him, and I want to make that clear, but I’m linking us to artists like Robert Glasper, like Esperanza Spalding, like Hiatus Kaiyote; what they do and what we do as a whole embraces this idea that we’re moving on. We’ve all gotta do new things.”

In that light, Snarky Puppy’s latest album, Immigrance, marks yet another breakthrough for the 19-piece collective. They’ve scored a lot of accolades since they first tipped the scales back in 2006 with their loose-limbed, improv-driven debut, The Only Constant, and, even though the band’s ranks have swelled and contracted over the years, the core group of players has remained remarkably consistent, with League serving as the anchoring presence on bass and in the producer’s chair. Twelve albums and three Grammy Awards later (the first in 2013 for their smoky cover of Brenda Russell’s “Something” with R&B singer Lalah Hathaway), a worldwide cross-cultural network of rabid jazz-funk aficionados has coalesced around the group, transforming their shows into sweat-soaked rituals where nerds, musos, cool kids and old-school aficionados can rub shoulders and nod heads together in symbiotic bliss. The final analysis? Somehow, Snarky Puppy has remade proggy, groove-based instrumental music into a hip commodity all over again.

Immigrance continues in that vein, but now there’s a hitch. As League describes it, the band has committed even harder to a diet of stripped-down, funky rhythms—a darker, moodier approach that made 2016’s Culcha Vulcha (another Grammy winner) such a departure from the unrestrained, fusion-forward sound of the fan-favorites We Like It Here and Bring Us the Bright. Add to that, as the title suggests, an uncharacteristically political undertone—rendered even sharper on cuts like the guitar-heavy “Bigly Strictness”—and you have to wonder: Did League and company set out to make a “statement” album?

“Well, what we’re trying to say is that musicians are always in a state of fluidity,” League explains. “As we learn new things, we’re constantly leaving behind former selves to become new selves. That’s true of all people, not just musicians, especially these days, when there’s so much of a misplaced emphasis on who we are right now in this moment, what our passport says and what our citizenship is. So, rather than thinking of these tunes as protest songs, the overall message of the album is that we’re all from everywhere, in a way. Who we are as people is not so simple as the nationality on our passports. We’re constantly in a state of immigration as individuals.”

The point hits home most overtly on “Xavi,” which League wrote after the band’s inspiring visit last year to the Gnaoua Music Festival in Morocco. They spent a week in the coastal medina of Essaouira collaborating and performing with Hamid El Kasri, a latter-day legend, on the percussive, bass-like guembri. It’s no mean feat to channel the trance-inducing energy of Gnawa rhythms and riffs, but the Snarky players somehow manage to pull it off. Keyboard wizards Bill Laurance, Sparks and Shaun Martin build a pulsating layer of clavinet, Rhodes piano and Minimoog synthesizer, while percussionists Nate Werth and Keita Ogawa throw down on various Moroccan drums, including darbuka and bendir. As uncoventionally slick as the whole piece sounds, it still preserves the raw, hypnotic power of traditional Gnawa music in all its over-the-top splendor.

Instinctive travels also inspired League at the mixing desk, where he’s overseen most of Snarky Puppy’s recorded output since the band’s inception. (In fact, League’s production ear has been in high demand with other artists too, including folk-rock hero David Crosby, pop singer Lucy Woodward and plenty more on the GroundUP label, launched by League in 2011.) He opted for what he calls a more “organic” approach to tracking Immigrance: In general, everyone played together on each cut, going for complete takes with very few overdubs.

If you’ve ever tried to wrangle a five-piece band in a studio, then you have an idea of how difficult it might be to track 19 musicians at once. The toughest hurdle to clear was getting all three of the band’s drummers—Thomas, Larnell Lewis and Jamison Ross—in one room, with each taking a section of each song, following cues from League. Martin had a front-row seat from his vantage point behind the keyboards.

“Just imagine: You walk in, and half the room is nothing but drums,” Martin laughs. “That’s a lot of beating and banging, but Mike allowed everybody their own time to craft their own pattern.” Tracking at Sonic Ranch studios just outside of El Paso, the band had 10 days to bust out a full-length album. League used the compressed schedule to his advantage, giving each musician the creative leeway to express himself in real-time, in one continuous take, rather than attempting to micro-manage overdubs after the fact.

“That’s what’s so dope about this record,” Martin continues. “We’d go back and listen, and you could hear each drummer’s tone and style. They’re all playing at the same time, just in different sections.” The official music video for “Bad Kids to the Back,” one of the album’s livelier groove workouts, offers glimpses of the setup, with all three drummers seated at their respective kits in a large room. Each drum set is flanked by sound-deadening baffles, which help to isolate the sonic color and character of the drummer’s performance. “It’s really cool, but only an out-the-box producer like Mike could conceptualize something like that. That’s why I’ve liked watching how he’s evolved. He found out that sometimes the biggest risk to take is really no risk at all.”

More than anything, it’s the stellar musicianship of the players in Snarky Puppy that affords League the luxury to experiment in the studio. Mark Lettieri joined the electric-guitar section in 2008, when the group expanded to record Bring Us the Bright, an ambitious fusion project that signaled their movement away from jazz-school idealism to a more immersive mix of gospel, funk and R&B influences. When he came onboard, Lettieri’s sound was rooted more in the rock and blues worlds, but he’d already seen the band enough times to know there was plenty of room to add his voice and keep the energy at a high level.

“Strictly from a guitar perspective, there’s a little bit of each player in each tune we do,” he says, referring to the creative connection he shares with guitarists Bob Lanzetti and Chris McQueen. “You can hear the more soundscapey things that maybe Bob or Chris will do, and then if you want to hear the more straight-up funk-rock thing that I do, some of that is in there as well. It’s great because you can hear each player very clearly in the mix, and you can hear what they bring to the music as individuals. And the fact that the three of us have such different sounds makes a really nice blend.”

“Chonks,” the hard-stomping opener on Immigrance, pivots on a crafty guitar solo worthy of We Want Miles-era Mike Stern; as Lettieri recalls, it was a first take. “We ran down the tune a few times, and when we were about to track it, Mike was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you blow on this one?’ He gave me a nod and when it came to the section, I stepped on two pedals and that was it. I don’t want to say it was a simple tune, because it’s not, but compared to something like ‘Xavi,’ where we really had to hammer it together, this one was a more breezy number for us to tackle.”

In large measure, Immigrance is a sleeker, leaner, more tightly packaged version of what Snarky Puppy can deliver and, while the album accentuates a groove-centric outlook, it also showcases a wealth of new influences. From the slow-building ambience of a song like “Coven” (another vehicle for Martin, whose synth solo adds a futuristic but gospel-infused lightness to the song, lifted further by McQueen’s jazzy, color-drenched licks) to the Turkish melodies and otherworldly horn lines that weave through the closer, “Even Us,” the band hews close to an overarching theme of creative evolution and constant movement.

League concedes that by embracing change and experimentation, he and his bandmates are also taking chances with their fanbase. But, in his mind, the rewards always outweigh the risks. And if the band’s current tour is any barometer, their fans continue to roll in strength right along with them.

“Sometimes the temptation is to do the things that you know work,” he says, “but the real risk in that is that you become pedestrian. I don’t think we’ve done that. We’re pushing, as individual composers, to be more creative while being more direct. But the other thing is: This band holds itself accountable. Individually, we hold each other accountable to not repeat things in a way that’s easy or cheap. With each record, we have to try to put something together that feels fresh to us. That’s the starting point for everything that the band does. We have to believe in it, and we have to feel like we’re moving forward and evolving.”

This article originally appears in the July/August 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.