Innovative Snarky Puppy breaks rules at SFJazz.
Many artists have attempted to bring jazz, kicking and screaming, into the modern age. Snarky Puppy, a loose collective from New York by way of Texas, makes it look effortless.
Opening a four-night, six-show residency at SFJazz Center on Thursday, March 1, the Grammy-winning band reveled in its sweeping range, accenting bright orchestral horns with sly Latin rhythms, psychedelic rock riffs and heady funk grooves. It’s not exactly fusion but a complete overhaul of the genre. Along with peers like Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, Snarky Puppy is reinterpreting jazz for a new audience.
That was certainly evident in the lobby of the venue on Thursday, where longtime SFJazz members mingled with fresh-faced twentysomethings in flannel shirts and knit caps who brought their own beers in brown paper bags and passed around edibles before the show.
The ever-evolving ensemble may regularly sell out rock clubs around the world, but the SFJazz Center remains a favorite destination. Thursday’s concert — where 10 members out of a revolving cast of 40 appeared — marked the group’s sixth visit to the glittering hall on Franklin Street in the five years since it opened.
Snarky Puppy’s founder, bassist and de facto leader Michael League said that the extended run gave the band, which typically plays more than 200 shows a year, the opportunity to stretch out and veer even further off course.
“We have the opportunity to do a lot of interesting stuff we would normally not do,” he told the standing-roomonly crowd.
Opening with three songs from its 11th studio album, last year’s “Culcha Vulcha,” which won the 2017 Grammy Award for best contemporary instrumental album, the group delivered on his promise — tearing open the melodies of “Beep Box,” “Go” and “Tarova” and stitching them back together with extended solos, duels and dynamic new harmonic twists at every turn.
League was a blur at the center of the stage, switching instruments and communicating with the other band members through smiles, raised eyebrows and quick nods of his head, constantly pushing the music forward.
The group’s 2014 release, “We Like It Here,” provided two of the show’s highlights: a meditative run through the ballad “Kite” and a heartily rocking version of “Sleeper.”
But the musicians’ proficiency and improvisational skills were on display throughout the 90-minute set.
While the songs typically sauntered, they were hemmed in with melodies so tight and bright that in another life they could have served as theme songs for 1980s game shows, fitting the band’s mission to make its music as accessible as possible.
The band formed in 2003, but it wasn’t until League started giving its music away with downloads and a series of performance clips posted to YouTube some five years later that Snarky Puppy found a substantial audience.
The band is now using its position to bring others up. It hosts the annual GroundUP Music Fest in Miami, and on Thursday, the band members did double duty as backing musicians for the night’s supporting act, Magda Giannikou, the vocalist and accordionist for Banda Magda. Signed to Snarky Puppy’s independent label of the same name, GroundUP Music, the charismatic singer led them through a lively set highlighted by Brazilian samba, French chanson and Greek folk tunes — all in less than 30 minutes.
Thursday’s concert marked the group’s sixth visit to the glittering hall on Franklin Street in five years.